Saying it with a timeless smile(y)

Whether it is what a 17th-century Slovakian lawyer scrawled at the end of his assessment of a set of municipal accounts, or a typographical licence by an English poet of the same era or indeed a 3,700-year-old ode on a Grecian-type sherbet urn in Turkey, the emoji appears to be timeless.

But this latest discovery (the most ancient so far) certainly calls into question the English dictionaries' ready adoption of the Japanese word for the pictograph, the provenance of the emoji, and at the very least the dating of its predecessor, the emoticon, to 1982, keeping in mind the subtle difference between the two. After all, the emoticon is just the rendition of a face using a keyboard — albeit with an elaborately documented, relatively recent history — while emojis are actual anthropomorphic images used on smartphones, descended from the 1970s' yellow-faced smiley.

Examples of colons and semicolons preceding closing parentheses abound in old books and journals. And long before keyboards and smartphones, the good old human hand was enough to dash off two dots and an assortment of dashes to convey punctuations that are seen today as emoti(c)ons instead. Whatever the buffs conclude about what came first, the fact that an ancient human painted a smiley face on a jug whose contents bring pleasure should make us all smile too.