emoji by WOMANZINE

the sun god (“Ra”) with a child (“Mes”) who holds a piece of sedge in his left hand (“Su”). All together, that produces “Ramessu,” or as we know him today, Ramses.

Even after we developed alphabets and no longer wrote solely in pictograms, the idea of doodling pictures as stand-ins for words never went away. Leonardo da Vinci scribbled plenty of rebus, and the sixteenth-century Italian writer Giulio Cesare Croce composed an entire poem out of rebus. Lewis Carroll wrote letters composed of rebus imagery, and the 1796 Heiroglyphick Bible presented the Christian text studded with pictures (“Designed Chiefly To familiarize tender Age, in a pleasing and diverting Manner, with early Ideas of the Holy Scriptures,” as its subtitle explained).

What was the allure of rebus? Well, they’re funny, which is why they were often used for comic effect. In 1778, King George sent a delegation to Philadelphia in the desperate hope that he could talk his way out of the American revolution; in turn, London printers mocked him with a gorgeous, full-color rebus political letter (they spelled the newfangled country’s name thusly: “Amer,” followed by an eye, followed by “k”). Rebus were also popular because they rewarded cunning: as the linguist David Crystal argues, they actually require a lot of cognitive effort, so they assume a level of playfulness on both the part of the writer and the reader. It’s an inside joke.

This shared exclusivity may also be why the uninitiated have always found rebus—and now emoji—so annoying.

As the English scholar Michael J. Preston wrote in 1982, “The rebus is often acknowledged by a statement of disdain, unless, of course, one knows a rebus or two and can respond in kind.” Other critics have complained that rebus are the product of a shallow, silly mind. Pictures are for kids; text is for adults. As William Camden sniffed in 1605, rebus writers “lackt wit to expresse their conceit in speech; did use to depaint it out (as it were) in pictures.”

Of course, after its heyday at the end of the European renaissance, the rebus became a rare beast, encountered mostly just in puzzle-books or cartoons, and modern