You may have seen it in text messages. You may have seen it on the snap chats. You may have seen it in your dreams. You may have gazed adoringly at it. You may have puked in your mouth.

I am referring of course to the eggplant emoji.

Inquisitive, tenacious, bitter. The eggplant emoji is none of these. Yet in just a few months the eggplant emoji has been the source of intense controversy and social partisanship, such that I felt I would be doing a disservice as a pretend journalist if I did not investigate this vegetative emoticon.

In this exposé, I will be giving you all the full story of the eggplant emoji: where it came from, what it is used for, and what it means for the future of international relations. I will leave no questions left unanswered, until I get bored of writing about an emoji.

First, it’s origin. The unsuspecting teenage tweeter might presume that the eggplant emoji was conceived by a team of artists hired by Apple Inc., as one of several vegetable emojis. This could not be further from the truth. The brainchild of President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the eggplant emoji was a piece of Cold War propaganda to sway unstable Eastern European nation-states toward capitalism, rather than the communist sphere of influence of the Soviet Union.

This wordless allure of the west helped balance the scales in the most tense time of the Cold War, when people still ate eggplant. But all of that you could look up on Yahoo! Answers. I want to get into the core of my investigation: the contemporary uses of the eggplant emoji.

There are two widely accepted proper uses of the eggplant emoji. It is found used by emoji-capable individuals in two main contexts: business negotiations, and offers of condolences. Incoming Harvard MBA students are taught in their first week that the eggplant emoji should be used at the climax of a high-stakes business negotiation.

When things get tough in a board room, you might not have time to blast off some fire tweets to your homies. In order to let them know that you are okay and that you are about to “crush jawn” after your lunch break, you can quickly send out the elusive and sensual eggplant before proceeding to ruthlessly acquire a small and defenseless start-up.

Hopefully this article has served as a guiding light in the foggy uncertainty that is humanity. If just one person reads this, internalizes it, and creates an overzealous cult based on what he or she has read, then we at the Harriton Banner have done our eggplant.