Awks! Avoid accidental sexting: which emojis NOT to use

Emojis can be a dangerous business. Misuse one of the little devils and you could find yourself accidentally inviting Andrew from sales to send you a picture of his aubergine. Like words, emojis carry meanings and connotations that require a certain level of fluency to avoid awkwardness.

Take the eggplant emoji, for example. It is unlikely that there will ever be a particularly long list of situations that warrant your discussing your brinjal. As such, it should be fairly self-evident that the bulbous purple phallus that you send your teens when making eggplant stew will elicit awkward giggles. An eggplant, like the banana and the corn emoji, quite clearly refers to the seven throbbing centimetres of male inadequacy issues lurking beneath someone's zip.

Similarly, emojis like the peach and cake emojis represent parts of the female form that many a Trojan died for, while the splash emoji represents a bodily function that would have been explained during a sex education class.

These, however, are the more obvious ones. Some are devious enough to not look like an extra in an animated porn movie.

Surely they're just cute little yellow faces blowing heart-shaped kisses around the digital world like a platonic tornado? Labouring under this delusion is a lovely way to get into a fight with your spouse. Few things outside of cheating explain why you sent Denise from yoga six kissy heart-face emojis instead of the one without hearts. Unless you are looking at a picture of a baby rubbing cheeks with a puppy, then your emoji eyes should be heart-free.

If you are keen on living a life without strife, then the only rule of thumb you need to remember when using emojis is: "When in doubt, spell it out."

READ THIS BEFORE USING THESE EMOJIS: 

EGGPLANT: See Captain Obvious for more information.

TONGUE: Next time someone is talking to you, slowly and deliberately lick your lips in a sexual manner. Using this emoji is basically the same thing sans the stupid expressions the rest of your face makes when you do this in real life.

SPLASH: Legend has it that the presence of Jason Momoa elicits this reaction in women. If that is true, then he gets to send this emoji out all willy-nilly. The rest of us normals in the male population should use it sparingly because it just looks creepy when men talk about female splashy bits like that.

POO EMOJI: This one is just trash. No one wants their poo to look at them and smile. When swearing, one loses a bit of expletive gravitas when the word's digital representation is grinning like a confused Cheshire cat.