Re: Just a beer?
The man who invented the word was not a kid.
Your source?
It has a nearly twenty year pedigree, while emoticon as a word only precedes it by a few years.
A trivial check shows emoji has been in use for at least 50 years. There's no substantive difference between emoji in the sense of "pictogram in a pictographic written language" and "Unicode character that's an icon of some sort", particularly since emoji has also been used to refer to other sorts of icons in computing contexts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
