But honestly, doesn't that prove the point how far off we are from the original intent of emoji right now? The idea was to be able to quickly convey an idea, thought or feeling without having to spell it out. Simple things like 'this was meant as a joke' or 'this makes me sad'. To be able to find the damn things I now have to.... spell them out, then tap them, then select the emoji from a list. If my significant other wants to let me know
Oh, I totally agree. I started out with emoticons on Usenet ( :-/ and such - most of the common ones get forcibly converted to emoji by the forum), long before the Internet was a thing. Half a dozen or so were great for conveying tone in text-only conversations between people who'd never met and didn't know each other's manners of speech - a wink could let someone know you were carrying forth in a sarcastic manner and help prevent a flamewar about, "how dare you espouse such a viewpoint?!?"
When they later became non-human circular yellow "faces", that was amusing. But then we had to make them look human. And then we had to make them look like every human. And then we had to represent every occupation and every pastime and every food and every animal. And we've got 30 or so different circular yellow ones intended to show various emotions and feelings and it's hard to tell the exact difference in meaning between half of them (thus, what are they really conveying, if there isn't universal agreement and understanding about what they mean). (I read an explanation once, that Japanese culture has many subtle variants on shame, and since emoji originated with Japanese phone carriers, that's why there are so many indecipherably different variants of slightly red-cheeked and/or downwards-looking emoji - I don't know if thisis actually true.)
Emoji have become a mixture of poorly thought out modern hieroglyphics (a wildly random collection of nouns with few verbs), and random stickers a child would plaster all over everything (don't get me wrong, I think modern life could use more whimsey, and I love when I get messages from my niece filled with rainbow and unicorn and princess emoji, but ... yeah, for most uses, emoji got out of hand a long time ago). It used to be that messages filled with many different fonts and colors were often an indication of someone who wasn't capable of properly expressing their ideas with actual words, now emoji have taken over that role.
(There's an old joke about, "the modern word processor has made it possible to full-justify ideas that previously could not be justified in any other way.")
