The fingers began drumming the table. The pangs of hunger were getting unbearable and the conversation was trickling down to a pathetic dribble where we resorted to doing Julie Bishop emoji faces.

Emoji presented a new and unique dilemma to Unicode. “With most text, you don’t have things being invented left, right, and center,” says Peter Constable, the vice-president of Unicode.

Emoji users respect linear time and action. If you want to point a gun at something, it has to go to the left of the barrel, he says. It is this: Not this: ...