As we saw last time round, emoji is young and still changing. And while punctuation may be much older, it, too, is still very much subject to change. Here are a few recent links to bear that out.
Google’s Gboard keyboard, as of May 2026, with comma and full stop keys still in place. (Keith Houston)
If you use an Android phone, there’s a decent chance you’re also using Google’s “Gboard” keyboard app.* And, to be fair, Gboard is a decent choice. It predicts text well, and it makes it easy to access other features such as emoji, the clipboard, translations, and so on. It’s also customisable, which brings us neatly to the news that, as reported by 9to5Google and many other outlets, Google now lets Gboard users hide the comma and full stop keys.
A bumper emoji miscellany this week to celebrate Shady Characters’ new platform! I’ll be publishing miscellany on other subjects in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s get started.
First, Finnish readers might be interested in this article about emoji by Oskari Onninen. Oskari looks into the meaning and use of ‘🤠’, along with emoji in general; I talked to him as part of his research, and he was a thoughtful and thorough interviewer.
I’ve been telegraphing this for a while now, but the new Shady Characters is out of its beta phase. What you see now at shadycharacters.co.uk is, I hope, faster and more accessible version of the site that preserves the appearance and content of the old one.
It pains me to admit that I’ve been working on this for almost four years (!), and things have changed a bit since then. My wife and I had our second son. I published two more books. Wordpress went from being an occasionally cumbersome web hosting tool to a occasionally cumbersome, morally compromised web hosting tool. The replacement I chose for Wordpress, called Eleventy, has changed sponsors a number of times, undergone three major releases, and recently changed its name to Build Awesome. It’s been a bumpy road.
As I wrote last month, I’ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters. Specifically, I will be replacing the current version on or around Friday 17th April. You can preview the new site at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk; with luck, it should look more or less identical to the current version. That said, a few things will change:
Comments will be handled by email. When you submit a comment at the new site, it will pop open an email template for you to fill in. I’ll review and moderate all comment emails before adding them to the site, which means there may be a delay before your comment is posted. Drop me a line if you have any problems.
Email subscriptions will change (but you shouldn’t notice). I’m retiring the existing email subscription system in favour of a new one but will carry over all existing subscriptions. If you don’t want to receive email notifications any longer, you can unsubscribe over at the newsletter page.
This will be the last post on WordPress. If you currently follow Shady Characters via the WordPress app, you won’t see any new posts after today. If you’d still like to follow the blog, sign up for the email newsletter or follow the RSS feed in your favourite feed reader.
This February my family and I visited Egypt for the first time. We were fortunate to be able to go; it was an amazing trip to a fascinating country, and, of course, there was more than a little of interest for Shady Characters readers. Here are a few words and pictures about the trip.
Cairo
We arrived at Cairo airport after dark, with two tired but wakeful kids in tow, and, eventually, found our taxi among a hundred others. (The driver sent us a series of photographs of the view through his windscreen as he crept along outside the terminal so we could tell him where to stop. A creative, functional, and only mildly creepy solution to the problem at hand.)
Empire of the Sum hardcover. (W. W. Norton, 2023.)
An entertaining, informative story about a technology that defined an era.
To describe a calculator as “a symphony of solenoids and switches” (that would be an early,
discarded
model of what would become the Casio 14-A, which went on the market in 1975 for $1,347) may not be erotica, but it
is good writing — and these days, the latter is rather more rare.
Shady Characters hardcover (W. W. Norton, 2014). (Keith Houston)
Punctuation is not a mere ornament or a curiosity — it is essential, and we need to know about it. Keith
Houston’s history is entertaining and readable.
