"Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji"

"“The fact that English alone is proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital communication is a huge shift,” says Grathwohl. When one of his dictionary colleagues suggested using an emoji instead of the word “emoji”, “lightbulbs went off”. (This hints that he also thinks in emoji.) Until recently, Grathwohl, who is 44, avoided using emojis altogether because he worried that he would look as if he “was trying to get in on teen culture. I felt inauthentic. But I think there was a tipping point this year. It’s now moved into the mainstream.” Not only does he use emojis – his favourite is the ghost, which he uses in place of “I”, sharing as he does a first name with Caspar the Friendly Ghost – but his mother sends him emoji-laden messages, too...

The “face with tears of joy” is themost used, representing 20% of all UK and 17% of all US emoji use. It has overtaken the standard smiley-face emoji in popularity, which may mean that emoji users are moving towards exaggeration or irony or fun, or that all this emoji use has brought everyone to a higher emotional plane."

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/17/crying-with-laughter-how-we-learned-how-to-speak-emoji

I love emoji but I am totally non-fluent.