How is it a mis-use of fonts if I'm using an appropriately semantic character?
I always linked "fonts" and "text" together.
Have you heard of the font "Symbol"?
Still seems like a hack to me
Do you mean Symbola, a Unicode 6.0 font? And yes, but it has elaborate characters that only look good at 40px+. I wanted a much more simplistic style, so I made my own U+1F50D.