Oh, Gosh, I lost the plot.
I said Dinos were cool, put below another cool thing from ages ago… but now is not funny…
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Looking at that page I can only think that it’s a good thing that the display of these emojis is not device-dependent, because the confusion would have been even worse.
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I sent my partner a sad face 
the other day and, thanks to her old Samsung phone, she was confused why I’d sent her this ghastly apparition:
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I must say that in my teens, in the 1960s, I wasn’t especially attuned to the fashions, either. So I don’t think my position can validly be described as one of “lagging.” It’s partly that I live a lot in my own mind and don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around me. But it’s also, in this case, that I’m really, really bad at things that require visual intelligence.
I became aware of emoji back when they were emoticons and were represented by typographic signs such as colon hyphen right parenthesis for a smile. As they proliferated, I found myself unable to figure out what any of them were supposed to represent; they assumed that people could read facial expessions, which I’m crap at. So I learned to tune them out long before there was any offer of actual little pictures to insert into a message. And I can’t really use them, even should I want to, because the sequence of typographic signs you have to type to get a given emoji is not a natural thing for me to remember; it’s an abstract and arbitrary code.
I had the same problem when C was asking me to adjust the air conditioning in our car; all the controls were labelled with icons, and I couldn’t figure out what patterns of air circulation they were meant to represent.
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Speaking of ghastly apparitions, I see that the Openmoji implementation of the “kangaroo” emoji has compromised between the supporters of the Australian coat of arms, presenting an animal that is half kangaroo and half emu:
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I think they fulfill their mission. For example:
I’m dying here 
is not the same as I’m dying here 
On a platform as easily misunderstood as black and white on paper, they do help with the context. Like the “likes” save some typing and give some unwritten feedback.
That is the problem with languages, they are are alive. They change. They are made by people (gasp!)
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I would point out that written and spoken language are similar constructs; the implied difference then is that written and spoken English are arbitrary codes that you have chosen (or were forced to at an early age) internalize.
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True, don’t get me started with the pronunciation rules in English. How arbitrary is that!
The Chaos poem comes to mind.
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Funny enough, I just earned the “Out of Love” badge. No more likey likes from me today!
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I would just like to say that since we are on this derail, I get irrationally irked by the conversion in pronunciation and meaning from the Japanese “emoji” /emodʑi/ (picture character) to the western “imowji” /ɪˈmoʊdʒiː/.
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The difference is, first, that I don’t find English hard, and second, that I can very often figure out what a new word is likely to mean from its roots, or how a sentence should be construed from its syntax. Indeed I spend my working day reading sentences that are poorly constructed and words that are incorrectly chosen, and replacing them with what ought to be there: I am a professional prescriptive linguist. I have no such intuition for emoticons. I have low visual/pictorial intelligence and high verbal intelligence.
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I would never in a million years have guessed that either of those had that meaning. Such things really don’t help me grasp the intent of a sentence.
I can’t disagree, since I don’t know what the mission is for four different icons of US-style mailboxes in different states of doors and flags. 
Vienna! Similarly, I have no idea at all what is conveyed by the difference between these two newspapers: 
. I wouldn’t get a single thing out of the difference between red, orange, green, and blue notebook emojis, that between calendar, tear-off calendar, and spiral calendar.
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You seem to be saying you don’t understand pictures.
Perhaps I don’t. I understand that all these are pictures of books: 
But I don’t understand them. They convey no information to me.
This was the point I made earlier (or was trying to): the palette of emojis available is too broad and any given emoji is not meaningful enough.
Yes they do, you just don’t need to look any deeper.
conveys the same amount of information to me as “red book”. Simple as that.
There certainly are more inventive and confusing ways people use emojis, but I generally take everything quite “literally”. FWIW, I’m also in the camp of not using emojis, and I default to the original meaning of “picture character” rather than the common western interpretation of “emotion-character”.
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I don’t think that that is what @Chewy77 meant when he referred to emojis fulfilling their mission and gave the example of two supposedly disambiguating the sentence “I’m dying out here!”.
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“I’m dying here” “laughing face” and “I’m dying here” “sweat(?) dripping off face” are quite clearly different to me.
I agree that “mission” is not really accurate. There is no “mission” beyond supplying a ton of images as text character conversions.
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