IIRC hieroglyphs are in a weird space between pictographs and an alphabet. So you can use a symbol that looks, for instance, like a reed by itself to mean ‘reed’, or in combination to phonetically spell a word that doesn’t have its own glyph.

So what I’m saying is this needs more rebus.

Mediocre. They didn’t use ❓

Once upon a time a colleague messaged me about some minutia regarding the assignment I was currently attending. I wanted to reply to her with that thumbs up emoji I had seen people using. But I couldn’t find it and eventually gave up, and instead responded with a cow emoji, concluding that it’d show that I’d read the message.

I have since found the thumbs up, but due to usage history the cow is placed higher up, so I keep using it whenever a message needs a response where the actual contents doesn’t matter.

🐄

💩📮