Shortly after Wired’s global editorial director began in 2023, she sent me a message on Slack. I accidentally kept it wholeheartedly. A message from me very serious, very new boss. It haunts me to this day.

I don’t remember what the message said, just a long -lasting, heart -shaped shame. When I realized my mistake a few hours after the act, I panicked. Do I remove it? Make a joke? Stop my work? In the end, I exchanged it with a time after working hours and prayed that she would not register exactly none of this.

The reason for my mistake is that the ❤️ has become a good response to Slack, showing the top three most commonly used emojis if you hang over a comment. That is, hearing the message from my boss was part of a bigger problem: I heard messages from colleagues all the time. The more I looked, the more I realized it was happening everywhere. Slack, of course, but also in one-to-one texts, group conversations-wherever I could respond with an ❤️, I would.

It wasn’t just me. A literal war reporter on the front lines in Ukraine put my signal message heartily and said that I would come back over a pitch. My main friends group chat is full of cordial messages of all kinds. Of course, my wife and I keep each other’s texts constantly, to the point that the failure to do so has become a subtle tip that one of us is very busy or cranky. The Heart -Eoji has clearly become a standard way to communicate subtly with each other. The question is: Communicate what? It seems that its meaning with the context shifts to the point that it no longer has a fixed meaning – unless you use it incorrectly.

Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist who focuses on visual communication and an associate professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, tells Wired in ‘Ne -Post that it is essential to the context -and thus, meaning -of a heart -emoji to understand before using it.

“Otherwise you get in trouble if you send the wrong person a red heart instead of a white heart!” Cohn says. “It has become a serious matter, as lawsuits even depend on whether sending an emoji to colleagues is sexual harassment.”

Yikes.

Broadly, the heart form has been used as a symbol for hundreds of years, and it has also shifted over time. “A prominent theory is that the silfium seed from Africa was formed in ancient times like a heart and used as a aphrodisiacum,” Cohn says. “So it was associated with sex, and only later, by Christians, it associated with love.”

Those Christians took the idea of ​​the holy heart and became millennia wildly and made the heart popular as a symbol of worship in Western culture to the point that it now provokes the characteristic and shit chocolates more than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Hearts was one of the first Unicode symbols created on the early internet of the 1990s, which would later become the emoji of today, according to Emojipedia. ‘❤️’, released in 1993 as part of Unicode 1.1, initially shared the name of his pre -colored predecessor, ‘Heavy Black Heart’. In 2014, ❤️ is cited as the most popular “word” in the world. It is now a standard emoji almost everywhere you can tap – and this is where the problems come in.