And who's to say we're all reading them the same? At the highest level of abstraction, a good definition of the use of bracketing tildes might go no further than adds juju. Placing tildes around web words unquestionably does something to them, something destabilizing and a little uncanny, and while it's true that there are common deployments (I'll get to them), it's also true that no pair of tildes reacts the same with any word or words.

Their thing: Well, that's a bit of a problem. Without words, tildes can't do their thing. Words give tildes meaning, and vice versa. Emojis may be the belle of the input-prompt ball, but they only dance with one another, Eggplant-Peach pairs twirling gaily past unloved, old-fashioned text. With all due respect to Sternbergh, does he read the same ~internet~ I do? The tilde today is absolutely frickin' everywhere: In my Twitter and Facebook feeds, in my inbox, in my text messages - every space in which I correspond by writing with other humans - an army of tildes waves back at me, bracketing words wildly, like tiny inflatable car dealership tubemen.

'The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled Mustache.' Sternbergh pointed to the fact that Face With Tears of Joy has grown more popular on Twitter than the tilde as sufficient reason to offer tongue-in-cheek, if not Hearts in Eyes, advice to the ancient symbol: Last month in New York, Adam Sternbergh began his long cultural history of emojis by contrasting Face With Tears of Joy, the world's most popular emoji, with the tilde, the venerable squiggle that is surfed on QWERTY keyboards by the ESC key and in math means approximately.

Add a tilde in word