Is an emoji worth a thousand words?

Perhaps you remember when you saw your first smartphone and felt a tingle of amazement. It could access the world's libraries, play movies and music, text friends, take pictures — oh, and make phone calls.

Perhaps even then you had the foresight to ask the really tough questions:

Can I use the phone to send a cartoon picture of a smiling pile of poop? And is the cheese in the right place on the Android hamburger?

Let's back up a bit.

In the old days, you might have used emoticons on your phone to indicate mood.

:) for smiling

:0 for surprise

Those are so 20th century you might as well be using Morse code to communicate. Emojis are the preferred shorthand visual vocabulary of the era.

These small cute pictures originated in Japan, and made their official debut on the iPhone in 2011. They'd been available for years before that, buried in the code. But Apple made it hard to access the emoji keyboard, perhaps because Americans might not have been ready to send a smiling coil of digestive waste to a friend, or even a frenemy.

That, apparently, has changed.

Not only is the poop emoji one of the most popular, Poop became a character in "The Emoji Movie," voiced by no less of an actor than Sir Patrick Stewart.

Now, the poop emoji has become a well established part of our online vocabulary. So much so that the Unicode Technical Committee (the Supreme Court of emojis, if you will) proposed adding another poop emoji. Instead of an expression of eager cheer, this one would be frowning.

Typographer Andrew West wrote a letter to the committee about his disdain for the existence of the object.

"I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of Pile of Poo emoji with emotions, such as Crying Pile of Poo, Pile of Poo With Look of Triumph, Pile of Poo Screaming in Fear, etc.," West wrote.

Unicode withdrew the pooposal, but announced that it will revisit the matter sometime in the future.

This may seem like a total waste of time, but it's part of a larger, more important conversation about how we talk to one another: The more emojis replace words, the more they define which ideas can — and cannot — be expressed.

Like any pictographic language, emjois are limited in their ability to express complex ideas. Subtext and nuance are difficult to convey in tiny images. And these shorthand characters of the online world can carry loaded messages.

To add to the subjective nature of emojis, different platforms render emojis differently. Take the cheeseburger controversy. Last month, Google's CEO tweeted a promise that the company would "drop everything" and address an issue that had dismayed millions: Its new cheeseburger emoji put the cheese under the patty.

Apple and Microsoft have the cheese in the proper position. So if you use a Google cheeseburger to indicate, say, incompetence or bizarre priorities, you couldn't because Apple phones would render the emoji with the cheese where it should be.

Again, it sounds ridiculous. Who cares if your phone has a frowning poop or a hamburger with or without cheese?

But it forces us to think about where we've ended up: with powerful computers in our hands that can type and send the most elaborate, profound and intricate thoughts. And what do we use them for?

Flinging poo like monkeys.

And that's the one you use when you want to be polite.