You knew this was coming: courts must now contend with emojis
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer. The full lesson is available to you at PlainEnglish.com/608.
Coming up today: Emojis are part of daily life. They’re in our texts, in our e-mails, they’re increasingly in our documents—and now, they are in our court cases. We’ll talk today about how emojis are playing a part in legal cases—and why that’s complicated for judges.
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you another way to use the word “figure.” And we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going.
Newest courtroom battle: emojis
People argue. People fight. People disagree. And the basis of these disagreements is often communication—contracts or informal agreements.
But many agreements are not carefully written; there are disputes about what they mean. So to settle those disputes, people often turn to the court system. And now, modern technology has further complicated the age-old tradition of arguing over words: what happens if an agreement includes an emoji?
Don’t laugh. Courts around the world are now interpreting the meaning of emojis in their cases. Here’s one example from Canada. Chris Achter is a farmer in the western province of Saskatchewan. He frequently worked with a dealer who would buy his grain in bulk.
Well one day, the grain dealer sent a proposed contract, stating that he, the dealer, would buy 87 metric tons of flax. Flax is a type of grain. The contract specified the price. Achter, the farmer, responded with a thumbs-up emoji (👍).
The grain dealer saw the thumbs up and assumed that this meant that Achter had agreed to the contract; he assumed that the thumbs-up emoji meant that Achter had agreed to provide the grain at the price in the contract.
Achter, however, didn’t see it that way. He says that the thumbs-up emoji only meant that he had received the contract—not that he had agreed to it. Achter didn’t deliver the grain. The dealer sued him.
And so a Canadian court had to decide: in this case, did a thumbs-up emoji mean “I agree to the terms of the contract” or did a thumbs-up emoji mean, “I have received the contract and will respond later”?
In the end , the court ruled that the emoji meant the farmer had agreed to the terms—and the farmer lost the case. The official ruling , hilariously, uses an actual thumbs-up emoji repeatedly in the text—of the official ruling. The judge said that emojis are a “new reality in Canadian society”: people use emojis to express themselves, so courts will have to get used to interpreting emojis.
This is not the only case. An emoji now figures prominently in a securities-fraud case in Washington, D.C. Securities are like stocks and bonds—what could emojis possibly have to do with securities fraud? Just wait.
Ryan Cohen is a high-profile investor; he is active on Twitter. He bought shares in Bed, Bath & Beyond, a struggling (and now bankrupt) retailer.
CNBC, a news site, published an article saying that Bed, Bath and Beyond’s business was failing. To accompany the story, CNBC used an archive photo of a woman pushing a cart at a Bed & Bath store—the photo could have been years old.
Ryan Cohen, the prominent investor in Bed & Bath, sarcastically tweeted, “At least her cart is full.” This made no sense, since this was a years-old photo of a single customer. And now the company was going out of business. The photo was irrelevant. But Cohen tweeted “At least her cart is full” and then—listen to this—and then he added an emoji: it was the full moon with face emoji (🌝).
Some investors—I hesitate to call them investors, should we just call them speculators? gamblers?—anyway, some investors interpreted the full moon with face emoji to mean: “High-profile investor Ryan Cohen believes this stock is going to the moon!” Meaning, “this stock is going to go up.” I guess this emoji is popular on Reddit investing forums? I don’t know.
What I do know is that on the basis of this emoji—listen to this—on the basis of this tweet with an emoji, some online investors bought the stock. Never mind that the article Cohen was commenting on was full of negative information—these investors figured that Ryan Cohen must have known something they didn’t know: they thought he was saying, in secret emoji code, that the stock was “going to the moon,” so they bought the stock.
Alas, the stock then collapsed, it went down, and those full moon emoji investors lost a lot of money. They are now suing Ryan Cohen for securities fraud —essentially they are suing him for saying that the stock was going to go up (“to the moon”) when in fact it was about to go down—to the basement.
This case has not yet gone to trial. But soon a court will have to interpret whether a full moon with face emoji was investing advice, when appended to a sarcastic tweet.
Court dockets are full of other examples. Courts have had to decide if a knife emoji (🔪) is an actual threat of violence. They’ve had to decide if a heart emoji (♥️) is sexual harassment. And they’ve had to decide whether a high-heels emoji combined with a bag of money emoji (👠💰) implies prostitution. (That one seems pretty clear, at least to me.)
Emojis cause confusion for a few reasons. First, there is no accepted definition of what each emoji means. People use them differently. Some emojis even have different meanings in different cultures, and even among different generations. The thumbs-up emoji is generally considered positive. But it’s offensive in Iran, and some younger generations think it’s passive-aggressive .
The other problem is that every device displays emojis slightly differently. Emoji designs are not the same on iPhones as on Androids; Windows shows a different set of designs. Individual web sites can show them differently, too.
This is important because when the designs change, people’s interpretation of their meaning can change too. A 2016 study showed that the “grinning face with smiling eyes” (😄) emoji looked “happy” in Android’s design but “ready to fight” in Apple’s iOS design.
So be careful: the next time you send a text with an emoji, ask yourself whether the other person—or a judge!—would interpret the emoji the same way.
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Quote of the Week
Every Monday, I select a quote for us to think about. It’s often from an English-speaking person, but not always. Today it’s from a French poet from the 1600s, Jean la Fontaine. He said, “From the work, one knows the workman.”
There are multiple ways to interpret that, but I would say, you can judge a person from his results. “From the work, one knows the workman,” says the French poet Jean la Fontaine.
Next up: I’ll show you how to use the word “figure.”
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