When I look up
semic at
OneLook, I see that it has entries in
Hutchinson's Dictionary of Difficult Words,
The Phrontistery - A Dictionary of Obscure Words and
Luciferous Logolepsy (Dragging obscure words into the light of day). This tends to hoist some warning flags, Manks.
However, the word is also listed in the Shorter Oxford, which makes me inclined to accept it.
The Hutchinson dictionary defines it as "pertaining to a sign", but the Oxford has a more technical definition: "
Ling. Of or pertaining to a seme."
Seme is defined: "
Ling. A sign. Also, a unit of meaning;
spec. a sememe."
Sememe, in its turn, is defined: "
Ling. A unit of meaning; the unit of meaning carried by a morpheme."
The first definition might lead us to expect to see it used in all sorts of mundane contexts - at the Highway Department, in connection with smilies, as you suggest, etc. However, in practice it seems to be found in fairly abstruse writings from linguistics or literary criticism.
As far as I can make out, the difference between
semic and
semiotic is that the latter, properly speaking, pertains to the study of signs, rather than the signs themselves. All these words of course, are related to
semantic.
As the word is in the Shorter Oxford, and is evidently in use, albeit in specialist writings, I will accept it. In case anybody is wondering, our word list already contains
seme,
sememe and even
sememic.
