Dear Dr. Boli: So many of my correspondents add little faces to the end of every sentence that I have to wonder what’s wrong with them. With the correspondents, I mean. I already know what’s wrong with the little faces. First of all, I’m over 35, and my vision, while good, is not perfect, and I can hardly distinguish one emoji from another. Second, even when I put on my reading glasses and magnify my email or text messages, the emojis are seldom more than tenuously connected to the sentences they follow. Nine out of ten of them are variants of a happy face, and the tenth is usually some expression of frustration. But shouldn’t I be able to tell by the words you write whether you’re happy or frustrated? Why the little picture? What information does it add? —Sincerely, E. A. Wallis Budge.

Dear Sir: The emoji does not add information. It is the written equivalent of a nervous chuckle at the end of every sentence. Its message is this: “Please take my unworthy expression in the spirit in which it was intended, and please don’t hurt me even though I’m weak and nervous and would blow away in a stiff breeze.” Now that you know the psychological source of these little faces, you will of course refrain from telling your correspondents, “If you send me one more happy face, I will crawl through the whole series of tubes from one end of the Internet to the other and throttle you.” That would be wrong.