By Maura Judkis
Oct. 1, 2019 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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.

The singer Lizzo may not have known she was referencing 6,000 years of the evolution of human language last Tuesday when she tweeted a message that now has more than 120,000 likes — and helped take the peach from sexualized to politicized. So when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initiated impeachment proceedings against President Trump last week, pro-impeachment Twitter users began making the connection between peaches and article I, section 2, clause 5 of the Constitution.

Link to tweet

TEXT
|L I Z Z O|
✔
@lizzo

IM🍑MENT
120K
5:53 PM - Sep 24, 2019

In certain online circles, the peach is becoming a protest emoji — much like how some use the rose emoji to signify that they are supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America. Impeachment supporters put it in their Twitter bios. The 1995 song “Peaches” by the band Presidents of the United States of America has become suddenly relevant again. D.C. bars put punny peach-flavored drinks on the menu. Maureen Dowd reinforced the connection in her Sept. 27 column, “Impeaching the Peach One.”

Sales of Trump-themed peach emoji stickers and pins have picked up in the last week on illustrator Nick Lacke’s Etsy store. He first designed the impeachment pins a year after the election, as a follow-up to another successful pin of his, which featured the poop emoji with the president’s face. He appreciated the multiple layers of meaning in the peach emoji — the impeachment pun, the color of the fruit evoking the president’s tanned skin tone and the original slang meaning of the peach emoji.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-the-sexy-peach-emoji-joined-the-resistance/2019/09/30/4b0d292e-e142-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html