> ﷽, a single glyph occupying anywhere from one to who-knows (I've seen 9) cells, depending on font, font engine, and terminal emulator

That's a bug. Unicode standardises the width to one column, a compliant implementation must not exceed the width in columnar display. KDE Konsole compromises by obscuring/overlapping part of a glyph when it is too wide.

What does this particular glyph mean? It looks more like a whole word.