The house painted with 'spiteful' smileys, and other emoji rows

A neighbourly dispute in the laid-back Californian comminuty of Manhattan Beach has deteriorated into pulling faces. Giant, grotesque faces, on the side of a hot-pink house. As first reported by Mark McDermott for Easy Reader News, homeowner Kathryn Kidd says her intent in covering the walls of her two-level duplex with two gurning yellow emojis was to bring her neighbours joy, and definitely not to get back at them for reporting her for illegally renting it out on Airbnb. Kidd said: “Instead of everybody being so gloomy, always so depressed, always in other people’s business, I just wanted to send a message to be happy.”

Her neighbour, Susan Wieland, strongly believes the opposite. She was among those to report Kidd to the city over the illegal short-term rental earlier this year, resulting in a fine of $4,000, and her house looks out at Kidd’s from a few streets away. Both emojis have exaggerated eyelashes – Wieland had got eyelash extensions just before they were painted – and seem to look directly at her home, while one has a zipped mouth: as McDermott soberly notes, “common parlance, in emoji communication, for ‘shut up’.” Wieland has not opened her curtains since seeing the emojis for the first time. Kidd’s definitely non-targeted or taunting paintjob has been hailed as “remarkably spiteful” and “a weird flex of garish artwork” – but it is not the first row over emojis and their ambiguous meanings.

Politicians versus parliamentary rules

On Boris Johnson’s first day as prime minister, the Conservative MP James Cleverly got around rules forbidding photographs within the chamber by tweeting “an artist’s impression of the Labour benches” facing him: a screed of sad, shocked and two angry faces.

Labour’s Angela Rayner responded by picturing the Tory front bench with a row of clowns. And Jack Mendel of the Jewish News contributed a man and a woman face-palming: “And here is the country watching two grownup politicians battling it out through emojis on Twitter”.

Geoffrey Rush’s winking tongue-out text message

As emojis become established as digital communication, they are increasingly making appearances in court, mostly in sexual harassment and criminal cases. Although the Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking them in the US, told Wired that they are rarely a factor in deciding a case, questions of their interpretation could be an ongoing issue for courts to contend with.

Employment lawyers, too, have suggested that employers review their guidance for rules governing emojis in office communications given the potential for misunderstanding and HR disputes.

In Geoffrey Rush’s defamation trial against Australia’s Daily Telegraph (in which he was later awarded AU $2.9m in damages), it was revealed that he had sent a woman acting alongside him in King Lear a winking emoji with its tongue hanging out, with the message that he had been thinking of her “more than is socially appropriate”.

Under cross-examination, Rush said it was a throwaway joke “in the style of Groucho Marx”, and denied that the emoji was flirtatious or “panting” – it was simply “the looniest” he could find. To quote Perth Now: “He said he would have used a Groucho Marx emoji, but the range of emojis was limited. However, he ‘was able to send the entire story of King Lear in 45 emojis’.”

Associated Press struggles with quotes

Last year, Associated Press updated its stylebook to include guidance for quoting emojis in news reports, advising reporters to “treat the visual material as context or gestures when important to include”. It gave the example of “describing by paraphrasing” as an airline tweeting “an emoji string of a worried smiley, a ring, an hourglass and an umbrella propped on a beach”. Reporters should not describe an emoji in brackets within a quote, “to avoid confusing readers”.

Tiny food pictures not not good enough to eat

It seems that people care very deeply about accuracy in emoji representations of food. Apple’s paella emoji was updated in early 2017 to replace shrimp and peas with chicken, lima beans and green beans to reflect the traditional dish from Valencia. Later that year it was pointed out that Google’s burger emoji placed the cheese underneath the burger patty, instead of on top of it – and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he would “drop everything” to fix it. Last year Apple’s bagel design was made doughier in texture and given a cream cheese filling following criticism that it did not look like it would be delicious to eat.

A notable exception was when Apple proposed making the peach emoji look more like a peach and less like a bum, which prompted outcry – revealing that the symbol was far more widely used for its sexual connotations than it was to communicate stone fruit.

Kim Kardashian blocks Swifties’ snakes

When Taylor Swift released Look What You Made Me Do in 2017, it was widely perceived to be a spite-filled shot at Kim Kardashian for their convoluted run-in the previous year. Swift’s many fans gleefully swamped Kardashian’s social media accounts with snake emoji, but Instagram allowed her to block them in a test of a new feature allowing users to “hide inappropriate comments”.

Emoji no soft landing

Last year, Dallas-Fort Worth international airport complained that the emoji for an incoming airplane looked like it was crashing, to the widespread agreement from other airports’ Twitter presences. Memphis international airport fretted the existing emoji was a “a little too crash-y”. One hopes that the pilots are going by larger-scale instructions.