The Emoji has become fashionable all over the world thanks to the emergence of apps like WhatsApp, but the truth is that it has been used for a long time in Japan to facilitate communication with a multitude of icons.
In Lion you can also use the Emoji icons, and for this you only have to press CMD + Alt + T in almost any app that supports text input, where a menu like the one you see in this post will be displayed.
Of course, keep in mind that not everyone may see what you write if you use Emoji, as I do here as a test in this post 😊.
I have tried it by dragging the icon and point? I did it like this