My aubergine faux pas and other tales from 25 years of the emoji

Believe it or not, emojis are now 25 years old. And over that time, we’ve come to accept them as a type of everyday language.

Everything from the humble smiley to the laughing-with-crying face helps us to communicate more effectively over text. You could say, emojis are the body language of the digital age.

But new research, published earlier this year by scientists at the University of Ottawa, showed that while many older folk recognised the icons, they were unclear on the appropriate context for their use. They also found that emojis are used in very different ways by those of different ages.

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