Because the fleshy pinky orange peach emoji has a cleft, it is commonly used to symbolize buttocks. A few days ago it became the symbol for Impeachment.
So has the booty emoji now become political like everything else?
Sex or Politics
Well I don’t know of any other emoji that symbolizes something because of the way it sounds, rather than the way it looks. This poses a dilemma. I mean if someone texts you a peach emoji, are they admiring your butt or trying to recruit you in pursuit of democracy?
According Slate “…as impeachment buzz has built, there has been a rise in a different use of the peach emoji altogether, one that has nothing to do with butts: People—including such luminaries as Lizzo—are using the peach emoji as shorthand for “impeach” and “impeachment.” (Some add an im or an M before the peach, but such trimmings are optional.)
Last week Lizzo tweeted a message that got more than 120 likes – forever politicizing the peach.
Secret Meanings of Emojis
WE know the secret meanings of emojis are part of the cultural dance, but from what I gather the peach with its cleft, emerged on iPhones in 2010 and immediately became a symbol for the derriere.
Peach was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Although Apple tried to change it in 2016 , it soon had to abandon the design and offer an updated peach that looks even more like butt.
Washington Post quotes Benjamin Weissman, a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who has studied the way that our brains interpret emoji, “Many of the findings that we’re looking at within the realm of the emoji language is that they’re kind of following the same patterns that words do. So they’ll pick up new meanings the same way that words will.”
Impeachment
So what are emoji aficionados going to do now? Will they allow the sexy peach to ascend to a higher calling- namely Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 of the US Constitution?
I guess this all depends on how the impeachment investigation goes and “ All the Presidents Men” in the Trump administration manage to cover their … well, butts.
