Maybe I’m just irked that the emoji set doesn’t include a useful range of military branch-of-service insignia, rank badges, and NATO standard JMS unit symbols.
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Things like the book emojis aren’t meant to be the modern hieroglyphics. They’re used as decorations, like this: ‘study time! 
!!!’ Usually only teenagers use them for that, though. And my mother.
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And to me. But I don’t know what the difference is. “I’m dying here” could be a plea for rescue, with the sweat dripping off it. But with a laughing face? I wouldn’t expect a defiant refusal to retreat from a superior foe to be marked with laughter.
Sounds to me like a problem with English, rather than emojis. “I’m dying here” has been commonly used to express laughing a lot for many years.
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Is that what that sentence was trying to say? I’m afraid I thought it was saying that both those icons represented the statement “I’m dying here!” I was really perplexed by why what looked like a smiley was used to convey distress.
If you are willing to satisfy my curiosity, what does a “professional prescriptive linguist” do?
(I mean to earn money, as a profession)
As a very new poster and, to be honest, something of a fraud who has little to contribute to most of the discourse, I feel the likelihood of excessive me-tooing hereabouts is remote. Yes-buttery, well now…
< inserts random small picture > 
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Possible meanings of ‘I’m dying here’ include a lot of figurative dying, depending on the context. For example “Take over my handhold on this heavy couch, I’m dying here!”
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It has? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard that usage and I don’t think I’ve ever read it until now. And I earn my living by my skills with English, both as a copy editor and as a writer.
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I copy edit articles for scientific and scholarly journals. That involves both imposing house styles for the various journals, and suggesting to authors that when they said x it appeared to mean X, but they seem likely to have meant Y and that would be better expressed by saying y.
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When I hit “quote” I saw that it was defined as a train, but really it looks like an extraterrestrial lifeform to me.
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Copy-editing.
He is given texts supplied by authors, and he makes alterations to them so that they comply with the style required by a publisher, while still conveying or better conveying the meaning, meanings, or lack of meaning that the author wished them to convey.
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Yes, it has. Pop culture, I suppose. I would try and find video clips, but I don’t really have the time.
I also earn my living by my skills with English and Japanese, as a translator and writer of patent applications, which of course means very precise technical writing and a good understanding of both languages, and formerly as an English teacher to Japanese students, which probably expanded my knowledge of pop culture and such uses of English quite a bit.
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I hear “You’re killing me,” in response to something funny more often than, “I’m dying here,” but I have heard it.
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Possibly. Ambiguity and differences between dialects are known problems with English¹. Chewy77 suggested that emojis fulfil their mission to ease those difficulties, and I don’t think they do so either efficiently or very effectively.
¹ As with other widely-spoken languages, of course.
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Me too
When I said ‘random’ I was fibbing. Selected on the basis of looking slightly lifeformy and extraterrestrial, in fact.
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I don’t agree with you. “I’m dying here” is more of an anguished exclamation, along the lines of this clip from As Good As It Gets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2eKJNK00so.
Now “I’m dying” is something I could see someone say as meaning they’re dying from laughter. Adding the “here” definitely conjures up the emotion shown in that clip.
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Which suggests that knowledge of that usage is not a matter of “knowledge of English,” but of familiarity with certain subcultures.
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Whereas “I’m dying out here!” means that the audience isn’t laughing at my jokes.
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That’s fine, perhaps “commonly” was an exaggeration. Claiming authority in a subject in order to reject a (correct) interpretation of an English phrase seems like an odd thing to do though. As I said, if there is a fault with Chewy77’s choice of expression, the fault lies not with the emoji. I would say the addition of the emoji does a lot to overcome the ambiguity of that particular “subculture” use of English, even if some readers still wouldn’t get it. Less ambiguity for more people is a worthwhile result, even if it doesn’t meet the standards of (for example) a patent application.
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