At a family barbecue last summer, my octogenarian grandmother watched quietly as my cousin Sarah and I, both in our mid-twenties, both hopelessly, tragically attached to our iPhones, carried them faithfully from the screened-in porch to the kitchen to the backyard, idly checking social media apps and, in my case, taking photos of my parents’ dog and of my mother, who looked endearingly absurd sunbathing on the grass with her face wrapped in a scarf.

“When you’re typing on the phone,” my grandma finally said, with great, curious intent, “do you spell out ‘are’ and ‘you’ or do you just use the letters ‘r’ and ‘u’?” We thought for a second, before telling her we tended to spell them out. “Then what,” she said, looking frustrated, “is texting?” It’s a fair question, and not easily answered. In theory, it’s a practical way to communicate quickly, or silently, or both. Don’t have time for a phone conversation? In a noisy, crowded place? Send a text. If you’re really in a rush, resort to shorthand: “running l8 will b there n 10.” But, as with so many technological tools, texting has far surpassed its original, utilitarian purpose, to become, for many, not only the primary form of pragmatic communication (I have friends who refuse to speak on the phone, and become angered at the prospect of voice-mail messages), but also an art form. Like poetry, texting is a medium whose power can come from its limitations. Good texts are snappy and witty—careful and considered, but not overly so.

Over the past few years, the definition of texting has further evolved with the introduction of something that has both loosened the medium’s restrictions and presented new ones. Down at the bottom of the list of new features promised by iOS5, the iPhone operating system that débuted last year, was something at which only a true text-artist would rejoice: the iPhone keyboard would now come automatically equipped with Emoji, a line of tiny Japanese pictographs that can be deployed like letters. Anyone using an older model iPhone or Android already had the option of texting with Emojis, but to do so required downloading an app, and then manually adding the “language” to the keyboard. Now access was effortless. Last month, with the introduction of the iPhone 5 and iOS6, texters got another treat: a set of brand new Emojis, hundreds of them. As one aficionado recently put it, via text: “It’s like you’re a speaker of some primitive Japanese picture language with only three hundred some odd words and your vocabulary just DOUBLED.”

It’s hard to explain the appeal of this primitive language, but perhaps just as hard not to succumb to it. Emoji (the word is an anglicization of Japanese characters that translate literally to “picture letter”) takes the idea of the emoticon—the smiley face :), the sad face :(, the winking face ;), the heart