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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: 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.
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