How the hell do they work?

Type "/em (Message here)" and it will appear ingame

Emote is not like it is in other games (a move your character does for ex. A dance).
Toribash emote is a text that appears on top of your tori when you this
You can get different colours of emotes as well.

and you can do /sh [message here] to do it when youre not playing

for different colors just to ^02 for red, ^04 for blue etc in front of the thing youre typing so
/em ^02 red
the color numbers go all the way up to 99