It’s a banner day to be an emoji. Monday marks the tenth annual World Emoji Day 🗺️🤩📆, and there’s never been a better time to be a cute and colorful little communication character.

Instead of worrying that emoji is replacing competent language use, we can celebrate that emoji are creating a richer form of online communication that returns the features of gesture to language.

Complexity, when emoji are involved, will always find its way back. The Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee—a “crack team of emoji wranglers,” in Houston’s words—had its hands full.

Emoji, the colorful and clever symbols used to replace or augment the written and spoken word on smart phones and other digital devices, could be a valuable tool in the field of medicine, allowing ...