Emoji, Emoji, EMOJI!

It seems that Emojis have become their own language, and now people seems to use it to agree to business contracts.

Adam Engst of TidBITS: The Unbearable Ambiguity of Emoji.

A court case in Canada 🇨🇦 where a contract was agreed upon with 👍 emojis, but one of the party failed to deliver.

The facts of the case aren’t in question; the nut of the issue is whether the farmer’s 👍 response had the legal meaning of “I accept the contract that you just texted me” or merely implied “I’m acknowledging receipt of the contract.”

Note that it could have been a “yes”, “yup” or “ok”, but it was a 👍, and everyone seems to agree on the meaning. This is a sign of times, where emoji are not just “the young generation chatting on WhatApp”, but where they get into serious business too. 💵

The TidBITS article mention that sometime across cultures, emojis have different meanings, which in any visual language (yes, emojis are a visual language) could lead to ambiguity, when it’s not used as code. Would you put peaches 🍑 and eggplant 🍆 together in a fruit 🥭🍊🍍 salad :salad:? It’s important to note that the emoji names are descriptive of what they represent not carrying any other meaning.