An ICT expert on Thursday confirmed that two of the emojis frequently sent by Eastern Cape judge president Selby Mbenenge to Makhanda high court secretary Andiswe Mengo had sexual connotations.
Dr Vincent Mello said that Emojipedia attributed to the peach and eggplant emoji the meaning of a “bum” and a “male part”, respectively.
The tribunal is investigating a complaint of sexual harassment by Mengo against Mbenenge.
Included in that alleged harassment was hundreds of sexually explicit WhatsApp messages he sent to her.
Mbenenge claims they constituted a mutual and consensual exchange while she says they were unwanted and harassing.
Included in many of the lewd requests and conversations are numerous emojis which a forensic and legal linguist and researcher, Dr Zakeera Docrat, in May testified had sexual connotations and formed part of the harassment.
She had emphasised that these emojis had, through use, been sexualised and no longer held the standard purpose for which they were created.
In other words, if a peeled banana, an eggplant and a peach formed part of a shopping list they would hold exactly the meaning of the fruit they depicted.
But in a flirtatious or lewd text they could hold the meaning of a penis and a buttocks, she had told the commission.
While Mello seemed to confirm this, he also gave lengthy evidence on the standardised meaning given to emojis which was to “ensure consistent usage”.
He went into great detail about the role the Unicode Consortium played in attributing standardised meanings to emojis used on applications such as WhatsApp, Wechat,
He said that 92% of people now used emojis to substitute verbal and text language.
“There are to date 3,600 emojis and it is expanding on a daily basis. Emojis are an emerging space.”
He said as far as he was concerned, about 99% of the emojis used in the WhatsApp conversations between Mbenenge and Mengo carried the standardised meaning ascribed to them by the Unicode consortium.
But he singled out the peach and the eggplant which he said might carry the meaning attributed to them by Emojipedia: That of a “bum” and a “male private part”.
Mello conceded under cross-examination by evidence leader Salome Scheepers that his area of expertise was in ICT rather than in semiotics.
Daily Dispatch
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