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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: 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.