The international language of basketball isn’t exactly English. To be a fan of today’s NBA is to be fluent in an emerging dialect of video clips, tweets with unique punctuation and, now more than ever, emojis.

Emojis, the picture icons available on smartphone keyboards, allow anyone to express themselves without enduring the arduous process of typing whole words. One carefully chosen hieroglyphic is all you need. This is both the future and the ancient past.

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