Beware the aubergine emoji, it’s fraught with miscommunication potential

Beware the peach and the aubergine emoji, friends, for they are fraught with miscommunication potential.

The online work collaboration platform Slack and language app Duolingo generated plenty of smirkage and media coverage this month with a silly-season survey that found – brace yourself – that emoji are not the cutesy messaging and email frivolity you’d thought.

No. They’re an until-now largely overlooked minefield of accidental work faux pas.

There are 3,633 emoji in the Unicode Standard, an emoticon multitude that offers “a lot of potential to communicate – and miscommunicate – with an emoji”, according to Slack. So if you are prone to cheerfully adding a bit of colourful emoji punctuation to your messages, especially at work, then more fool you for courting communication disaster.

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The survey initially surprised me because it once was a definitive work no-no to use emoji, but I am clearly far, far behind the times. On work collaboration platforms now, where it’s a cinch to add emoji to posts, banning them seems a hopeless task anyway.

The survey says more than half (53 per cent) of people surveyed across North America, Asia and Europe use emoji at work, while about two-thirds use them with friends and family. That work number is startling, especially when 58 per cent said they weren’t aware emoji can have multiple meanings.

Therefore, Duolingo’s comment that employees “need emoji to help convey subtle meanings in real-time, often high-stakes, situations” left me wanting to insert the exploding head emoji in response. They do? Hopefully not if they work at nuclear reactors or the Pentagon.

Yet, the survey casts doubt on what may seem the most unambiguous emoji of all – the plain old smiley face, which has been doing the email and messaging rounds since the pre-web internet days, when it was just a lowly typographical :) or :-).

Maybe you thought you were being friendly or supportive with your smiley face but, no. Many people use it to show “deep exasperation and/or distrust” (14 per cent). One in five Americans intends this meaning, says the survey. I thought the upside-down smiley face did this job, but now I feel cast adrift in a secretly malicious emoji world, though I’ve been using them since the 1980s.

However, I do get the issue with some destabilisation of emoji meaning, and the gap between the signifier and the signified. Emoji can carry unexpected subtlety and, says the survey, are often dependent on context, culture or age (as with slang, older folks are sometimes not emoji-aligned with youth).

I once wrote a column about the so-called “tears of joy” emoji, which absolutely no one I’ve ever ever met thinks has anything to do with tears of joy, as opposed to laughing so hard that you cry. Maybe something did get lost in translation somewhere, and “joy” was a not-quite-right word chosen for, what, happy laughter? Though crying with laughter at a comedian’s gig isn’t really the same as laughing through tears at a joyful family reunion.

Then again, context: I just remembered that the seemingly benign “tears of joy” emoji is sometimes offered as a snarky sneer. It’s seen in trollish tweets as a way of belittling someone’s point of view, to mark what someone has said as hysterically stupid.

Those varied yellow-face emoji aren’t the worst offenders when it comes to being misconstrued, though. That honour – according to this Slack/Duolingo’s survey of 9,400 workers apparently eager to waste work time on an emoji survey – goes to innocent fruits and vegetables.

Especially the peach and the aubergine. With Victorian primness, they describe the peach emoji as “historically flirty”. Well, okay – and I suppose that will do for the aubergine as well. And yet... in Korea, 71 per cent think, a la Freud, that a peach is just a peach, and 56 per cent of Chinese respondents think aubergine when they see aubergine. This is presented as a major reveal, which only made me wonder how we have come to this, when part of the world marvels that another part just sees peaches or aubergines, and not a sexual metaphor (there’s a PhD topic).

We’ve had this form of potential peach miscommunication for less than a decade. That emoji was only accepted into Unicode in 2015, but the perky orange globe swiftly became a troublemaker. Within a year, Apple brought in changes to its depiction “that made it look more fruit-like and less butt-like”, says Emojipedia.com.

Buzzfeed was indignant: “What’s happening to emojis represents the worst kind of gentrification of the internet.” Maybe it’s just me, but communication issues on the internet even then seemed far more fraught and worrying than peach-cleft depiction. However, Apple backed down, and the double-curves remained.

Still, maybe don’t send the peach to your boss. Nor, suggests Slack, the aubergine, or the smiling pile of crap. The survey is unhelpfully silent regarding carrots, cucumbers, and melons. I’m afraid you’re mostly on your own in the perilous emoji garden of temptation.