Consider that when you read something with dialogue, e.g. a novel, the author will frequently utilize descriptive words to indicate the tone of the dialogue. E.g. '"You're not going anywhere," he snarled.' As such, a way to indicate tone using just words exists - it's just clumsy to do that for your own statements.
By all means use them in your day to day conversations, but if you expect your messages to ever require interpretation in a court of law, and you don't want a jury to decide what you meant by eggplant, kissy face, don't use emoji.
Or, conversely, if you want to be ambiguous, like say you're a pimp communicating to his prostitutes, emoji usage might work in your favor.
No, the fact that she conversation appears in a court record does not mean it was involved in a violation of any law (and you probably meant civil or criminal law; not all civil cases involve even alleged violations of agreememts—contracts isn't the whole civil law universe.)
Courts may exist to determine if a violation of law occurred, but sometimes the answer is “no”. (And even if it is yes, the specific conversation at issue may not have.)
> By all means use them in your day to day conversations, but if you expect your messages to ever require interpretation in a court of law, and you don't want a jury to decide what you meant by eggplant, kissy face, don't use emoji.
Sure, if that's a major concern, but I doubt that it reasonably is for the sender in most communication that actually ends up in court.
In a divorce proceeding for example many so called “day to day” conversations will suddenly be open to legal interpretation.
I can scarcely imagine a faster way to look socially inept in text, than writing out so explicitly what are supposed to be nuanced and subtle actions. Eye roll.
That said, I also don't usually associate the wink emoji with flirting, but more with tongue-in-cheek fun. Context matters I guess.
Most people actually are very precise in their texts and speech. It's just that the message-carrying layer isn't in the denotations or even the connotation, but the way in which connotations are used. (Humans are amazing things at times.)
(I'm practicing. I have two high-functioning still-pre-teen autist children that I fully expect to have to convey to them an explicit model of human social interactions as they get older. I'm already having to start; the younger really, really wants to be funny. We're actually making some progress. Not, I mean, necessarily a lot of progress... but there is some progress. I'm not saying everyone below is autistic; I have no ability to judge that from here. I'm saying I need practice trying to explain this stuff because I personally definitely do have some autists in my life who will have this problem in the future.)
Now, always send safety signals ahead, first build trust and pay attention to how others perceive danger. Make a hypothesis of what signals would work, and test them. Laughter is a great teacher.
I wonder if there is a pre-existing manual for this sort of thing already published? A quick Amazon search didn't produce anything I was looking for.
