If you want to understand how the peach emoji has come to represent both the potential impeachment of President Trump and a butt, you must first look to the ancient Sumerians.
Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts. But it could be “tricky to represent something in the abstract,” said Vyvyan Evans, a British linguistics professor and author of “The Emoji Code.” So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept. A modern-day equivalent would be using a picture of an eye to represent “I” — a linguistic concept called the rebus principle.
