[Photo provided to China Daily]

I still remember my father's sheepish expression at breakfast the morning after he'd been invited to have dinner at a colleague's house. Freshly arrived in Brazil, back in the dark ages, before the ease of being able to look things up on the internet, he'd offended his hosts, who had prepared a lavish spread of Brazilian delicacies, by making a hand gesture that he'd always used－a circle with the thumb and index finger. He had always understood it to mean "OK", but in Brazil, it meant something quite different.

To make matters worse, he'd raised his fingers to his lips and made a kissing sound, which again, he meant as a way of indicating that something－in this case the meal he'd just been asked to comment on－was delicious.

Not only did this compound his earlier outrage－the meaning of the gesture in Brazil suggests the performance of a lewd act on (or to) the recipient－and with the kiss, he'd added (to Brazilian sensibilities) insult to injury. Especially given that it was directed at his host's wife.

The faux pas was swiftly forgotten. My father's colleague and his wife understood that he probably wasn't yet aware of the local meaning of the gesture, and after gently explaining why it was something best not repeated unless you planned to start a fight, the episode was filed away under "things not to be done in Rio".

I was reminded of this moment myself a few months into my stay in China. After replying to a colleague's WeChat message with a Van Gogh sticker that I thought meant "keep fighting", a second colleague intervened.

"Warren, is there a problem?" she asked, after some small talk that was clearly a preamble.

As I had no idea what she could mean, I said that no, everything was fine, why was she asking?

"It's just that sticker you sent on WeChat to (the other colleague)? Are you angry at her?"

I was flabbergasted.

"No, not at all," I stammered. "Why, does she think I am?"

My colleague smiled.

"The WeChat sticker you sent in your chat. Do you know what it means?"

"Keep fighting?" I pulled up the set the offending Van Gogh belonged to on my phone. "See, it says 'strong'. We worked really hard on that last script, so I sent it as encouragement."

She smiled again, this time more broadly.

"The Chinese version is a bit different," she said, taking out her phone. "See these characters?"

I squinted myopically at the screen.

"They mean 'I will hit you'."

Needless to say, I didn't use that particular Van Gogh again. Or indeed, any of the other Van Gogh stickers, for I later discovered that this wasn't the only one of them whose Chinese meaning had become lost in (bad) translation.

Life is full of crossed meanings. The reverse peace symbol popularized by hip-hop has a very different meaning in the United Kingdom. In India, you beckon to a person palm down, not up. And in the Middle East, you never use your left hand for, well, anything public.

As adults, we (generally) understand that even if it stings, a mistake is only an insult when it is deliberate. Intention, much like possession, is nine-tenths of this law. Yet as we look around us, so much friction stems from misunderstanding, and history is full of the unfortunate outcomes of crossed communication.

To my point, then. My father's pre-internet Brazilian faux pas was forgiven because of context－he had just arrived, he could not know, it didn't make sense that he'd be deliberately offensive. But when context is absent or simply differently understood－especially in the nuance-free echo chamber that is social media－perhaps it is time we all think thrice before typing or talking, especially when the ramifications can be much more severe than the misuse of a WeChat sticker.