The Avocado Joins the Keyboard, Right on Schedule

Somewhere between the hieroglyphics and the semicolon, we invented emoji, and communication has been both easier and more exhausting ever since. The tiny pictures do things words keep fumbling—a red heart lands differently than "I love you," a crying-laughing face defuses things that "lol" never could—and the fact that they originated in Japan and then took over the entire world says something about the universality of the impulse to draw your feelings instead of spelling them out.

Apple’s iOS 10.2 added a new batch: cowboy hat face, avocado, fox, a bottle of something sparkling, owl, butterfly, kiwi, peanut. More food, more animals, more faces. The avocado especially felt long overdue—by December 2016 it had already become a cultural lightning rod, somehow carrying the entire discourse about millennial spending habits on its green shoulders. Now it could do that work directly from the keyboard. The cowboy brings a frontier irony I expect to see deployed heavily in sarcastic contexts. The owl I don’t fully understand but intend to find uses for.

What strikes me about each new emoji drop is how quickly they saturate—within days you start seeing the new ones everywhere, as if they’d always been there, as if the cowboy was always waiting in the corner of the keyboard for his moment. The update lives in Settings → General → Software Update. Two minutes, and the vocabulary expands.