Native Chinese speaker here. I'm not sure I understand your point. Without keeping up with the new memes, IME still let people type them (it's simply not as ea

Native Chinese speaker here. I'm not sure I understand your point. Without keeping up with the new memes, IME still let people type them (it's simply not as easy when IME does not auto-suggest the new combination, users can manually select each Chinese character). Regarding "an informal ambiguous layer", are you implying there is something more fundamental/low-level than the Chinese characters used in communication? If so, what is that?