> I think you don't understand the meaning of "semantic", "literally", > or "the same". Which is a pity, because I'm all in sympathy with your > general attitude to emoji and Unicode.
> I'm not just being pedantic - I can't even work out what you're > attempting to say in this paragraph. A softball is just a slightly bigger baseball. There is no other difference between them. We now have two emoji that mean exactly the same thing: A small ball made from cork or rubber, wrapped in leather with a stitched seam, that is hit with a bat and caught with a glove. And if they had some metaphorical meaning (which I don’t think they do), they would also both represent the same concepts, because they are simply minute variations of the same object. Chipmunks and squirrels are clearly different species, but pretty much all characteristics they have that would be relevant to the average emoji user are identical. They are small, furry rodents living in forests that eat and bury nuts. Any meaning you could assign to a pictograph of a chipmunk in a textual conversation is also shared with squirrels and vice versa.
