Daniel Lanois Goodbye To Language

You're rushing to send a text, but the words don't quite fit the message. So you flip over to the emoji menu, and within seconds you find a tiny character that encapsulates your thought. Hitting "send" brings a momentary sense of accomplishment, and perhaps along with it, a twinge of vague disquiet: That shorthand cartoon face was somehow more precise, more communicative, than your words.

In that moment, you become part of an ongoing global shift — away from word-based communication, toward a communication based on symbols. Linguists marvel at the adoption rate and evolutionary speed of emoji, which a professor at the U.K.'s Bangor University called "the fastest-growing form of language in history."

Novelists and English professors, meanwhile, worry about this new shorthand. They anguish over the loss of subtlety, the decline in nuances of expression, the eventual erosion in the craft of sentence-making. To them, communication efficiency is not the same as communication richness.

1. Low Sudden
2. Time On
3. Falling Stanley
4. Deconstruction
5. Satie
6. Three Hills
7. Heavy Sun
8. The Cave
9. East Side
10. Later That Night
11. Suspended
12. Blue Diamond