Happy hot air balloon

© Leonsbox/Getty Images Plu

Let's face it: It's World Emoji Day

If you still type :-D instead of 😀 to express joy, you're certainly old-school, but maybe less so than your (grand)kids think. Even Harvey Ball—who designed the iconic yellow-pated smiley (a prototype for 🙂) way back in 1963—was late to the emoji party: A clay pot discovered in Turkey bears the oldest known cartoon of a smiling face, which dates back about 4,000 years. These days, emoji are a virtual second language for the whole 🌎 under the Unicode Standard for text encoding, which ensures that text characters from A to Z to Æ to ‽ to 💯 display similarly across communication platforms and languages. The underlying code is overseen by the Unicode Consortium, a humble nonprofit despite its vaguely dystopian name. Actually, it's quite the democracy: Anyone anywhere can make a case to create an emoji, so if you've got an idea for a 🔥 new one, get over to unicode.org and fill out a proposal. 😎