Is that its real name?

Anyone can propose a new emoji. The proposal is a document — what the picture is, who would use it, how often people already search for the thing — and it goes to a committee that meets, discusses it and votes. Most proposals are rejected.

The name is part of what gets approved, and it is argued over separately from the drawing. By the time an emoji reaches a phone, its name has been through the same room as the picture.

The name is not a label, it is a description read out loud. It is what a phone says when it reads a message to someone who cannot see the screen, which means it has to describe the picture completely and flatly — face with tears of joy, not "laughing".

It also has to fit every phone's version of the drawing, and they are not the same drawing. One company's is a paella, another's is a stew, another's is a wok. So the name goes up a level until it covers all of them, and you get shallow pan of food.

That is the whole reason the funny ones are funny. Nobody was being funny.

Names are used to identify an emoji, so once one is published it effectively cannot be changed — anything already referring to it would stop matching. The drawing has no such problem.

Which is how you end up with an emoji whose picture every major phone quietly redrew, one after another, until nothing was left of the original object — and whose official name still says what it used to be.