Palm Tree

Holiday mood: beaches, warm weather and time off. People put 🌴 in trip captions, countdowns to a flight, out-of-office notes and summer posts. Sent on its own it is a status update: I am off, relaxing, slow to reply. It works even where no palm grows; a 🌴 under a photo of a Scottish beach means the sun came out and the day felt like a holiday.

In profiles it changes job. A 🌴 next to a name or city says where someone lives or comes from and that they are proud of it: Florida, California, Hawaii, the Caribbean, Pacific islands, the Mediterranean coast, Brazil's north-east. Nobody reads that as a vacation announcement.

The tone is light and nothing about it is risky. The worst 🌴 can do is rub it in: a palm sent at noon on a Tuesday to friends at work is a small, cheerful brag, and that is usually the point.

Why does a tree say 'holiday'?

Because the leaning coconut palm is the postcard image of the tropics. Palms are a family of more than two thousand species, almost all of warm climates. The coconut palm leans out over beaches because coconuts float and sprout where the sea drops them, so a curved trunk against sand and water became the picture of a tropical shore. Twentieth-century tourism to Hawaii, the Caribbean, Florida and the Riviera fixed that image, and the emoji inherited it.

The date palm of the Middle East and North Africa is a different palm: straight trunk, feathery crown, and dates that have fed the region for thousands of years. Readers there happily use 🌴 for it, even though the drawing shows the coconut kind.

Palms also carry older meanings. In ancient Greece and Rome a palm branch was the prize of victory. Christians wave palms on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, recalling the crowds that greeted Jesus entering Jerusalem, and in Jewish tradition a palm frond, the lulav, is held during the festival of Sukkot. Posts about those days often carry a 🌴 or 🌿.