Where debates over the future of language intertwine with poo emoji pillows

The high and low collided at the world's first emoji convention in San Francisco on Saturday, and the result was.

Linguists, emoji designers from tech powerhouses like Google and officials from the Unicode Consortium—the "overlords" who standardize emoji—mingled with vendors hawking eggplant-shaped vibrators, smiley-face Chia pets and a multitude still struggling to cope with the fact that Apple's update of the peach emoji is simply not as butt-like as it used to be .

The inaugural event, taking place over three days, was the brainchild of Jennifer 8. Lee, a writer and producer who became enthralled with emoji-creation process last year after discovering that a dumpling symbol did not exist. "Dumplings are a universal food," says Lee. "There's pierogis and empanadas and momos. So to me it just meant that whatever system is in place was broken."

On Saturday, Emojicon attendees were walked through that process by Unicode's Mark Davis, who explained that his organization is dedicated to making sure that everyone—no matter which of the world's 7,000 languages they speak—can communicate using those languages on their smartphones and computers. And emoji, he explained, are a small, if wildly popular, part of that work. "Every single time you're hitting an 'A' on your smartphone," he says, "that's Unicode underneath." Out of about 120,000 characters Unicode deals with, roughly 0.015% are emoji.