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Emoji 12.0 brings us waffles, more diversity, suggestive "finger pinch" glyph
There's a push for more diversity with this new emoji release. We have emojis for deaf people in three genders (male, female, and genderless) and five skin tones, an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, prosthetic arms and legs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane. There are actually only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in five skin tones and three genders, which pumps up the numbers. You can really see this with the "People holding hands" emoji, which is completely configurable for a total of 70 possible combinations.
The emoji that's causing the most buzz is "pinching hand." Emojipedia's example shows a thumb and pointer finger with a small distance between them, which could also be interpreted as a hand signal for "small." People are already coming up with, uh, "suggestive" uses for such a glyph, and if the actual implementations follow Emojipedia's design, the glyph could end up on the naughty list next to peach and eggplant.
Thank you, Emojesus. ✝
By the way, what happened to calling it Unicode 12.0? Maybe they'll call it that in June.
Unicode Consortium blog post. Also at Emojipedia and 9to5Mac.
Previously: 38 New Emojis to be Introduced in 2016
Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Related: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Battle of the Bagel Emoji
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:26AM (10 children)
We now have three times as many useless pre-Sumerian iconographic glyphs as the ancient Egyptians had (about a thousand), and they're busy churning out more as fast as they can dream them up. In the meantime there's no Unicode codepoints for a large range of the historical glyphs because they're too busy masturbating over who can insert the silliest-looking finger symbol into Unicode without anyone noticing that it's all a joke. The Unicode Consortium should just rename itself the Emoji Consortium, and leave the proper character set work to a group that takes the work seriously.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:41AM (4 children)
Perhaps I missed this. What is an "emoji"?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:47AM
OP pretty much got it right - they're undefined ideographic symbols (hence "hieroglyphs" is someone accurate - but hieroglyphs at least had defined meanings,) freshly invented and smuggled into the unicode character set inappropriately while real languages are still lacking.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:51AM (2 children)
I wonder if this question is really a way of asking WTF is this crap meant to be used for.
Even supposing I'm a black transgender in an un-motorsed wheelchair, with prosthetic arms and legs, a cane, a guide dog and a hearing aid, why TF and in what circumstances would I want or need to use an emoji for it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:47AM
Wow <emoji:SuperUnluckyDude>
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:08PM
If there's not an emoji for you, then you're being marginalised.
By the ASCrIIarchy.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by SpockLogic on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:41PM
Ahhhh .... Will this replace the mushroom as the Trump penis emoji?
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:47PM (2 children)
Do you remember the early 90s, when this kind of shit was just called "clip art"?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:33PM (1 child)
Or Wingdings, and you could say ✈🗐🗐 and 🕱✡👍 and 💣✈ to your heart's content...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:57PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:31PM
That's because the "politicians" have taken over at Unicode. They can use the new emojis to grandstand, while the poor researcher waiting for Linear C to get added has no visibility, and is probably a (soon to be) dead white patriarch anyway.
(Score: 1) by progo on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:30AM (7 children)
Is the Unicode Consortium collecting fees for processing requests to add these emoji codepoints? Without looking into it right now, I'm guessing yes that's the only explanation for the huge number we have now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:47AM
No. It's every SJW wanting their own emoji for whatever gender they think they are.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:39PM (4 children)
Follow the money.
Or follow the logic. If possible.
Why is there a female terrorist emoji [emojipedia.org] but no male terrorist emoji?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:05PM (3 children)
Incidentally - check the facebook rendering of the woman with headscarf at your link, I personally find it hilarious!
Anyway, good dogwhistling, you bigot, it efficiently managed to draw the attention of someone who was swiftly able to prove you wrong.
But on the flipside, don't get me wrong, not all cultures are equal, and my views on headscarves are neatly summarised by these ex-wearers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVpZ0FZc8SY
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:30PM
Zero Justice Warrior?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:30AM
You make a good point. That emoji carries the meanings of "bigot" and "intolerance" around here. Based on how people who dress like that act.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:37PM
Man with headscarf looks kawaii.
Facebook woman with headscarf looks like a cartoon fish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:02PM
Women finally get a menstruation emoji [fastcompany.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:44AM (17 children)
Clearly the Unicode consortium has lost their mind. Maybe it is time to start over with a new standard? It would also be the opportunity to fix the very few errors the Unicode consortium made in their early times, which cannot be fixed without introducing incompatibilities. A new standard would be free to do those things right, right from the start.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:55AM
That is an excellent idea!!!
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:01AM (9 children)
There is only one worthy standard: ASCII
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:31AM (7 children)
So in your mind, the only worthy standard is one in which you cannot write properly the majority of languages?
ASCII is great if all you want to do is write programs (and even then, originally Pascal's “:=” assignment operator was only a digraph to be used on machines whose character set lacks the “←” character—one of those lacking character sets is ASCII). ASCII is utterly lacking if you want to write text.
Also remember that Unicode support was a much-wanted feature early on on this very site (and before on the Green Site, except there nobody listened to user demand). And it certainly wasn't because of emojis.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:37PM (6 children)
FTFY. I even offered to show them how to do it after they got new ownership who said they wanted to make it happen.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:42PM (1 child)
Well, I stopped visiting the Green Site shortly after this one was launched, so I wouldn't have been able to tell the current status there.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:17PM
I scroll through the stories (not the comments) while I'm on the shitter. Seems appropriate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:56PM (3 children)
Their singular advantage over this place is the "no-unicode" policy. Unicode is the systemd (emacs?) of text input. It tries to do everything. Shoulda stayed with good old ISO-8859-n:
"The ISO/IEC 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography" [wikipedia.org]
Unicode hardly fits that standard. It's to make your twitter posts more catchy.
Though I have to admit, our very own rDT makes good use of it
We could have gone with UCS-4, unicode is the compromise to save space, but at what cost? You start bumping into this [mitre.org]. Who needs these kinds of headaches?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:02PM (1 child)
You are confusing Unicode (the complete standard describing everything related to the font, including UCS-4) with UTF8 (the variable-length multi-byte encoding of Unicode characters).
The page you linked to is about a decoder for UTF-16, which is again a different encoding.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:03PM
Noticed only after posting: Where I wrote "font", I of course meant "character set".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:19PM
It's not really much of an annoyance from a coding perspective and, aside from everyone's totally understandable initial impulse to do some amateur debugging of my code, we haven't had any abuse of it here worth speaking about. That it allows copy-pasta of text that includes emdashes, non-ascii quotes, and such more than makes up for any headache it's caused.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:52PM
Yep. I'll stick to ISO 8859-15, thanks.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:37PM
"Clearly the Unicode consortium has lost their mind."
Randall apparently agrees with you: https://xkcd.com/1953/ [xkcd.com]
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:34PM (3 children)
For example, the English language is evidently not suffix-free. You cannot infer "I love you" after you've seen the "I love you" part of "I love you, but not as much as I used to, and I've found someone else, and I've also changed the locks. Don't try and contact me again, or I'll get a restraining order from the courts".
However, consider the composition of accented characters in TeX (which are based on the old DEC 'compose character' sequences on VT terminals, which I'm familiar with, I'm not familiar with TeX, so might fuck up these examples, however, details don't matter, only principles). E.g.:
In ``H\^otel'', you read the ``H'', that's a known character, you stash that away and continue.
Then you get a ``\'' and know that you've got an escaped sequence for composition.
Then you read the ``^'', and you know that ``\^'' isn't an encoding of anything, so you continue.
Next you read the ``o'', and you know that ``\^o'' is the encoding of an o-circumflex ô, which you stash.
blah, blah, blah, you've parsed ``Hôtel''.
You unambiguously know that you've arrived at the end of an encoding of a character because the modifiers are placed *before* the base character.
Unicode's all "chef female", "vampire male black", presently, rather than "female chef" or "black male vampire", which would be suffix-free. (Because "female" and "black" are not nouns, they're adjectives - if you think that "female" can only mean "female person", then you're speciesist, and a bad person - and as such "female"/"black"/etc. should only ever be used as a modifier.) Not that this infantile communicate-with-images bullshit should be in a revamped unicode anyway, of course.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
Exactly; that's one of the errors I was thinking of. The irony is that they went to great lengths to make UTF8 suffix-free, and then they spoiled it with the combining characters.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:10PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:20PM
Damnit, now I'm going to have to watch Blackula again.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:15PM
I stand corrected, UCS-4 might be acceptable, if not exactly "efficient".
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Funny) by pipedwho on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:53AM (1 child)
🖕
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:43PM
Cool, you think I'm number one! Groovy!
Hey, it's all about the interpretation....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rigrig on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:48AM (5 children)
While this is true, the Unicode people were smart enough to not assign them all codepoints:
There are only 23 emoji considered to have explicit gender appearance [unicode.org].
All the other cruft is just a neutral emoji followed by a modifier, and there are some rules for glueing them together with the "Zero Width Joiner" character.
After that it's up to the implementer to decide if they really want to add a gazillion icons, or just fall back to smiley-yellow-icon + square-of-skin-tone +gender-symbol.
And let's face it: if this wasn't possible, the standard wouldn't be usable by all the big companies that need to keep their SJW chatters happy.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:33AM (1 child)
If those are modifiers, can I also have a female brown question mark? :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:27AM
Sure
I'd like an intersex rainbow colored 3/4 height question mark that truly represents the inner me
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:49PM
Mmm. The emoji skin-tone modifiers [wikipedia.org] are based on the Fitzpatrick scale [wikipedia.org], but don't implement it exactly. Albinos and other people who 'always burn, never tan' are not represented and are, instead, lumped in with the next level on the scale "usually burns, tans minimally". They certainly do not have yellow skin. At the other end of the scale, people with Dinkaid [humanphenotypes.net], Sudanid [humanphenotypes.net], Senegalid [humanphenotypes.net], and Nilotid [humanphenotypes.net] phenotypes are also not represented: they can have skin described as 'ebony'; 'blue-black' [4tololo.ru]; 'charcoal-black' - such as the models Khoudia Diop [wordpress.com], Nyakim Gatwech [vagabomb.com], and others.
It might actually have been better to have allowed an RGB modifier so people can choose whatever hue they want. I'd probably choose Medium Purple [w3schools.com], as no-one has that skin-colour, and it has never been used as a racial slur.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:36PM (1 child)
'"People holding hands" in all 70 gender and skin color combinations.'
If one person has X possibilities, then 2 people have X^2 possibilities. 70 isn't a square.
Unless they're not providing symmetry, so AB is the same as BA. HOwever, that necessarily forces one party to be positioned before the other. Which imposes an ordering, which would be triggeringly bad (unless it's the female always before the male, which is just peachy, no problems there). (They do have precedent - c.f. U+1F46D, U+1F46C, U+1F46B, in particular that final one varaiously described as both "woman and man holding hands" and "MAN AND WOMAN HOLDING HANDS" in the same section of the standard) However, in that case the number of glyphs should be a multiple of 3. 70 is not a multiple of 3.
Wanna know a unicode fact? The original pile of poo was stinky and had flies flying around it. It was not polished and happy, like it is nowadays. Which is ironic, because unicode used to be polished and made lots of people happy, but now it stinks.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:55PM
TFA is wrong, there are 70 new combinations, "women holding hands", "woman and man holding hands" and "men holding hands" already exist.
And to complicate things:
* You get "persons holding hands", or "[woman/man] and [woman/man] holding hands", bot not "person and woman..." or "person and man..."
* You only get "woman and man...", not "man and woman..."
* You get either no skin colors at all (i.e. smiley-yellow), or a color for both persons
* For "[persons/women/men] holding hands" you only get one variant of every skin color combination, but for "woman and man..." you get both light-dark and dark-light
Presumably vendors will implement the missing mirror variants anyway by flipping the image.
So it might make sense if your software just works for any case of [person/man/woman]{color}[handshake][person/man/woman]{color}
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:52PM (2 children)
i.e. SMALL PENIS
And to add to the "NSFW" content... they are also adding a emoji for a period [usatoday.com]. (And it does not refer to a punctuation mark.)
Not that many people outside of teens and pre-teens actually care about emojis. 💩
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 11 2019, @09:22PM (1 child)
Too bad we didn't have that one 2 years ago.
"This was the largest audience to ever witness an Inauguration -- PERIOD -- in person and around the globe." Sean Spicer.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Monday February 11 2019, @10:41PM
Well the other emoji works even better for you on account of your small "hands"
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:23PM (6 children)
Is there any way to block this retarded mis-use of font rendering?
I find this symbol offensive as it represents lies, bullshit, and mental child molestation.
Too busy to look it up, but there had better be something to represent atheism in there somewhere. Not that atheists really have or need need some logo.
What they need now is an emoji with an animated "under construction" sign and "best viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3" button. Back when they were just graphics, it was not so hard to block things.
Probably the next step to do is start accepting corporate logos. Religious logos are close enough to that anyway. Golden arches character? Who wouldn't want to get payed every time they post a Twitter(R)(TM) or Facebook(R)(TM) logo? Here is a Carl's Jr and Brawndo logo! It has electrolytes! It's what Unicode craves!
Oh, how about an emoji for "consumetard"? Oh, wait, that is pretty much the entire Unicode these days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:46PM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:53PM (4 children)
On your sig:
Most vaccinations only work when injected, not when ingested. ;-)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:46PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:03PM
Don't let the joke go unmolested!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:40PM (1 child)
Arguably, one of any number greater than one is not most of them, no matter how significant that one might be..
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:12PM
Next!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:17PM (3 children)
These idiots are ruining Unicode with all these emojis. Emojis don't belong in the standard!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:04PM (2 children)
Are they ruining it? There are many, many empty code points just waiting to be filled. You don't have to use these code points either.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:25PM (1 child)
Yes, because this affects how language evolves (or devolves as the case seems to be). My anecdotal experience suggests that people have grown much less proficient with using actual words and instead substitute emoji with ill-defined semantics (Twitter is also complicit). Why write a well thought out sentence when you can string together five elementary school level words and tag on a dozen of some icon. For example I often see things like
New thing announced [party popper] x 20
When it could just be
New thing announced
or
We are pleased to announce [some actually useful description]
I can't help but feel like everyone is an elementary schooler on the Internet nowadays. SN is one of the few places I can feel like I'm conversing with adults.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:39PM
That's a "get off my lawn" or "damn kids and their rock music" tier of criticism. It's not Unicode's fault and AOL instant messages, texts, etc. were already vapid, abbreviated nonsense long before emoji-filled tweets hit the scene.
Idiocracy can be a good thing if it puts your skill set in demand.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
Good. So how come the standard alphabets are always rendered as black-on-white? Surely that's as segregating and implicitly racist as all the yellow-and-red round faces? I want to be able write in every color of the RGBow!
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:25PM
Frankly, adding a possible RGB modifier to every glyph would be useful. Glyphs representing multicoloured items would need to be broken down into individual combining glyphs, each of which could have its own colour. It would provide maximum flexibility, so you could have a green-skinned person with purple hair and white lips. So the people who like to decorate their text could do so, leaving standard, unmodified black and white for people who chose to not use the (optional) RGB modifier. It would solve a lot of problems.
Obviously, this is far too sensible to be accepted into Unicode.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:27PM
goes the triggered techie
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:03PM (1 child)
Seriously, I don't understand why we need emoji as anything more than separate font, especially not formalized in the freaking Unicode standard! What's wrong with plain old smileys, kaomoji, monaa glyphs, and so on?
I can't help but be reminded of the hospital scene in Idiocracy every time this comes up. Ishtar save us from the smartphone zeitgeist...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Friday February 08 2019, @05:47AM
Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
And yet, with each passing year....
(I always loved the vapid, slack jawed look on the nurse receptionists face...now reflected in every teenager and young adult as they stare at the cell phone. I wonder, did she realize how prophetic her performance was..?)
Damn, now I want some Carl's Jr..BIG ASS FRIES!!!
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.