Once sneered at, it seems emojis are having the last laugh | Hannah Jane Parkinson

From World Emoji Day to being cited in court cases, the language of symbols has come of age

There have been plenty of, shall we say, unusual or eye-raising legal decisions around technology. Such is the way when a massive industry, if one can reduce technology" to the singular, which we can't, utterly changes the way we live (or the way we die, which, according to former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, may not actually happen).

In recent times we've had, rather gloriously, the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme debated by a judge in Florida, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) recognised as legal property in the UK. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is, in addition to challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight and a literal penis-measuring competition, threatening to sue the head of Meta over the company's Twitter clone, Threads. But the thing that caught my eye last week was a Canadian court decision that ruled a thumbs-up emoji is legally permissible as contract assent. There are more examples of emojis finding their way before the bench. In 2014, a Michigan court tried a defamation case involving a stuck-out tongue emoticon (rendered as :-p). In Ohio, a judgment in a harassment case queried what, exactly, the rat emoji meant in that context.