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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: 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.