If someone were to be smiling and shrugging while giving you the finger, would you be smiling too?
Heck, I'd probably be laughing out loud while running for my life! So, poor example. OK. A smiling creep is still a creep. Suppose for a moment that you and I are pals in the same room having a face-to-face conversation. I advise you that, due to unforeseen events, I'm a bit financially strapped and could use a spot of cash to sort of tide me over until my ship comes into orbit. You smile and nod your head while saying "no". Which response applies? Words suffice. We go by what people actually say rather than whatever they might have meant. When we read text, we go by what's written. An inability to communicate any essential feelings and overtones using words is not a gross failure of either language or writing. It's more about the skill levels of the speaker, listener, author, and reader. As for the thread title question, perhaps the exchanges within the thread offer insight. Emoji exist and are interchanged. Unicode enables them to be interchanged in a standard fashion. Even if they're just for fun, frivolous, silly, and ephemeral. Even if some people consider them beyond the scope of The Unicode Standard. The best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be 2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel. Trust me.
