Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless TongueConsider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to indicate “approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x ~ y) in mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a breakdown of the website emojitracker by Lu
