It's 2017, which means the amount of fluent emoji users in the world may now actually outnumber English speakers. Whether you feel angry-face emoji or heart-eyes emoji about this, it's getting harder to deny emojis have irreversibly changed our day-to-day communication.Just look at the new set of emoji—approved by Unicode this past March and pending approval by Apple later this year. Among the newcomers are gender neutral people (for a fun experiment, try explaining this concept to your parents!), a woman in a hijab, and a breastfeeding woman. More people are getting to see themselves represented in the technology they use everyday.
But increased specificity doesn't bar the possibility of getting our signals crossed. I mean, there's really no excuse anymore for thinking the eggplant emoji means your date is about to cook you a fantastic vegetarian dinner, but what about symbols that are less obvious?
Collected below are stories of emoji that sabotaged friendships, ended relationships, and convinced total strangers they are possibly being stalked.
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