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Emojis are just awful, because people assume that they convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible. You basically need a set of Rosetta Stones to decipher what the emojis in Twitter profiles are supposed to convey, and you have to first determine which culture you are looking at. Does the pine tree emoji mean weed, or does it mean perennial? Or the grandmother that sends around eggplant emojis when she is talking about parmigiana, completely oblivious to its other meanings...



> people assume that [emojis] convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible

The same thing could be said about words.




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