Emoji have done something that emoticons never did: Emoji have become hieroglyphs.

:) :o :D XD This tells the story of a happy person being surprised and then starting to laugh. Emoticons were crude depictions of facial expressions and never took on abstract meanings beyond those.

Emoji, partially because a lot of them are Japanese, are badly designed. On most systems I’ve seen Emoji on, they’re too small and the details are too fine to really make them out. There’s 1,000 facial expression ones, all of them are mostly just yellow circles. Why does there have to be a slightly frowning and a frowning face? Why do we have “woozy” and “dizzy” as separate glyphs? 😵‍💫 Which of the two is that? Trick question, neither, that’s “face with spiral eyes.” Emoji are stage IV emoticon cancer. So teh youthz don’t actually use the facial expression ones, they use a skull for laughing, because that one is white and easy to tell apart. Apparently the etymology is “died/dying laughing.”

Trying it on Lemmy’s emoji selector, “skull” and “death” both return the skull emoji, but “laugh” or “funny” doesn’t. So the skull emoji, along with others, are like hieroglyphs. They’ve taken on abstract indirect meanings of their own independent of what the glyph literally means.