I remember wingdings. In fact, used them to decorate the invite to my 21st birthday, back in the dark ages of last century!
And before thatâŚWell I have a symbols element for a Selectric in my desk drawer at work, and the little card overlay to remind you of the key-mapping.
And before that we had crappy calculators that we could make say âOBOE SHOESâ.
Before there were Wingdings, there was the IBM graphics character set. Before that there was PETSCII on the Commodore PETs.
And of course before that there were hieroglyphs. A warning for us all: The Egyptians started with a written language, then started using emojis, and soon thatâs all that was left.
I always thought those made much more sense because they were fixed-width fonts and you could align everything up nicely, with no gaps.
Donât forget the Apple II Mousetext!
I thought it was âemoji,â not âemoji s.â Like itâs just âkanji.â
the people have spoken
I tried to use Wingdings just the other day to decorate my babyâs bâday party invite. Then I remembered what century I was in and googled clipart like a rational person. Wingdings doesnât have a birthday cake icon anyway.
Wingdings are also responsible for so many Outlook-produced corporate e-mails ending with a mystery âJâ for non-Outlook users. Wingdings J is 
âŚ
JJJJJ!
Â
There donât seem to be hard and fast rules on loan words in American. âOtakusâ has lots of use in print but matches the case you cite.
NYC forever! No, waitâŚ
Wingdings predicted 9-11 too.
Oh goodness, those damned Js. L.
(For the unaware, L is a frowny face)
Did not realize thatâŚ
