There may be more on this list that I missed but I remember "Face Banging Against Wall", "Expressionless Face Half Covered by Hair", and "Face Covered with Black Mask with Eyes and Mouth Exposed" from Skype for Business. I think Microsoft even carried them forward into Teams, although they are all the way at the bottom of the emoji list.
I didn't know that. That said, considering that adopting Unicode was a decision in and of itself, would expanding that space really be such a burden?
I'm also now surprised to see that Wales and Scotland get a flag but Northern Ireland does not. Aren't they on the same standing? I always thought it followed UN membership but that Wales and Scotland got an exception. I know Palestine and Kosovo have emojis also.
Are there any UN full member states without an emoji?
>would expanding that space really be such a burden?
It would require dropping UTF-16, which is the limiting factor. That, or defining planes that aren't available to all encodings. Don't hold your breath.
I don't know who is using UTF-16 or UTF-32. It seems like most of the world has adopted UTF-8. So, maybe one day UTF-16 and UTF-32 will be dropped and more planes will be defined. That's a big maybe. If it happens at all, it's decades away. There are no conversations to do so that I'm aware of.
There are currently 10 planes that are completely unassigned, and there are no current proposals to put anything on them. The Unicode Consortium is very deliberate. Those planes will probably be empty for a long time. And while there are empty planes, they won't be talks about adding new ones. That's my impression. I keep up a bit, but I'm unaffiliated.
> The only official flag for Northern Ireland is the Union Flag, the flag of the United Kingdom; there is no official local flag that represents only Northern Ireland. The flying of various flags in Northern Ireland is a significant sectarian issue, with different communities identifying with different flags.
Which is exactly how the current system works. You can already interchange regional flags because it allows pretty much every ISO 3166-2 identifier. It's just that most of them won't be "recommended for general interchange" (RGI) and fonts won't be universally available.
I thought the period related ones were weird since they were proposed by Svenska Cellulosa AB. But on second thought, they probably wanted to use the emojis to market paper products
Although footnotes 4 and 5 say “This was replaced with [emoji] during the approval process.”, this shouldn’t be taken as that it was accepted in any way. Look at what it was replaced with:
MAN, ZERO WIDTH JOINER, BABY BOTTLE.
That is, bottle-feeding, which is a completely different thing and much more realistic.
So, now you have four relevant Recommended for General Interchange emoji: breast-feeding, and {person,woman,man} feeding baby.
Well, and variants with skin tone modifiers, if you count those distinctly. With the recommendation that the baby’s head be hidden, the skin tone only applying to the feeder (https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Multi_Person_Groupings).
My only mildly knowledgeable guess would be that those are more "pregnant person" and as part of the work to add gender modifiers to emojis they just added male/female versions of a whole block that happened to include those.
Would definitely love if the linked chart had a reason for rejection column
Uneducated guess--somewhere someone will have archived the discussion--but I wonder if the technical complexity was also a factor. If you've made the combining characters for gender, and you've designated which characters can combine with them, but you didn't plan for characters that must be combined only in certain ways, then you're looking at having to specify all that out, and then implementers will have do their thing, and it just... wasn't worth it.
But that's not the system. They should be sticking to consistently using the ZWJ + gender to modify a base emoji and they aren't. Consuming three codepoints when one will do is silly.
There's some evidence of support at the end of it, many of which were angry Twitter posts. Some of those posts seem like satire/shitposts, but it's hard to say without context.
Just like how eggplant and peach emoji are used for representing things other than fruit and vegetables, I'd expect pregnant man to find its own niche in time. It doesn't take a genius to guess that it will be used by a lot of guys who just ate an enormous burrito.
Why is it appropriate for you to suggest how guys will use that emoji, but it’d be wrong for me to suggest how girls may learn to use a different emoji?
This is not how the guys I know use this emoji, btw.
"It is time for the UTC to own up to their mistakes. This whole ordeal has gone on for way too long. I am not asking for much; the solution to this problem is laughably easy. The current gender situation in Unicode is discriminatory, end of discussion. It excludes transgender people by pretending that only women can get pregnant. It excludes non-binary people by treating the third gender option as secondary to male and female, and by neglecting it for virtually all current human- form emoji. It excludes gender non-conforming people by carefully avoiding gendered sequences for characters like BEARDED PERSON."
> it excludes gender-non-conforming people by carefully avoiding gendered sequences for characters like BEARDED PERSON.
I don't understand this part. Isn't it a good thing that those emojis lack gendered sequences? Or is it that they should have modifiers to make them appear the way that a person wants to present themselves?
I guess I should feel relieved that I don't at least have my work discussions littered with these ones.
But they're not too different from the set of infantilizing pictograms that did make their way into the standard & that grown-ups are now expected to deal with.
Well, at least then you could think of the addons as local slang. It's still unnecessary, but limited to the social circle at your workplace.
I didn't have a huge beef with the proprietary emojis on old skool Skype and MSN, TBH - they were technically bound to those platforms, and the platforms mostly to private social spheres where they'd form part of the local slang. (And where Skype was used at work in the 00's, people actually refrained from them and acted in a businesslike manner).
Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.
> Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.
This just reads a bit like someone older ranting at the younger generation being glued to their smartphone all the time. Modern day emojis are part of our writing system. I use them all the time, from Slack to WhatsApp. They are universally understood, to a limit of course, but I see everybody else using them too and no "office drama" because Alice misunderstood the emoji Bob was using. They make it easier for me to express my emotions and they are as naturally as speaking. There's nothing extraordinarily horrifying really.
Fun fact: The Adobe enterprise slack workspace is not only open to everyone to add emojis, but (AFAIK) every slack-using company that Adobe has ever acquired has had their slack workspace subsumed into the Adobe one, which includes bringing in all of the acquiree's emojis. :-)
Wouldn’t it have been interesting to be a fly on the wall during the annual convening of the ancient Egyptian’s hieroglyphics committee?
“This year’s proposals for new entries into the standard hieroglyphic dictionary include: slave being whipped, bearded slave being whipped, woman being humped by a donkey, and bearded donkey being ridden by a pregnant cat.”
Yes, I have been missing Yogurt for a very long time. However, it's not until this moment I realized how often I say "Modern Pentathlon" and could use a emoji for it
Definitely click on the "Document" links for each emoji. I spent about a half hour reading through them and found them incredibly fascinating.
A lot advocate for why something is important (for example, it's easy to laugh at a PMS emoji, but it's hard to disagree with "Currently, although menstruation is a core part of being a woman, it is felt to impose significant limitations on women when influenced by negative societal beliefs and taboos.").
Others are longer docs where many included proposals are now valid emojis, and it's interesting to think how some were picked and others weren't.
The author of the PMS emoji proposal is Svenska Cellulosa AB, a forest industry company that's also in paper hygiene products. I see the SCA logo a lot in public bathrooms (e.g. paper towels).
I suspect their marketing team was brooding on something.
I like the bloated balloon one and a period/pre-period emojis would be good.
A few women in my life (managers/directors/executives) are terrified to talk about their periods because it could be used against them. I'm going to risk turning this into one of those "Normalize <XYZ>" tweets.. But cramps, bloating, irritability, pain, any number of other things. I want a status emoji for headaches and "didn't sleep well". Something that says lay off the knucklehead stuff today/for a few hours. Period and pre-period ones would be good too.
If I need to I don't hesitate to start meetings with: "I had 5 hours of sleep so let's see how this goes." Let people talk about why they feel they way they feel.
Three rejected period proposals. Just make one.
Let’s do one for prostates too. I have one uncle who died of prostate cancer and another one who won’t get a prostate exam. I don't even have a walnut emoji to throw at him in the meantime.
I would love a “Hi I’ve been in meetings for 5 hours and forgot to eat” emoji. But instead I have to be double extra cautious I don’t come off as short or mean when people have boneheaded ideas.
The problem with normalising things is that it tends to become an expectation. An environment where people are open about their personal well being is challenging for someone who needs privacy. The one who takes unexplained time off risks appearing insincere. I feel it's more inclusive to insist on not discussing personal situations in public. If you need time off, just take time off. Every person is different and will have their own needs and situations. I don't need to know why and even if I did, it is has zero bearing on the matter, unless we share a personal relationship.
We're saying the say thing but it appears that we're not because you're taking my argument to places I wouldn't.
I'm for professionals saying whatever they feel they need to say so that they can be understood and perceived in the way they want to be perceived and understood. If not talking about something causes stress, talking about it could help. If talking about it causes stress, don't talk about it.
I work with people around the globe so knowing my sleep schedule helps the people who work with me. For example, I don't like reviewing UX, visual design, or anything involving RxJS when I'm tired. I know this, they know this, so I review things when I'm rested. Similarly I want to know what the people around me need me to know.
Let professionals decide. "Culturally" the scales shouldn't be tilted too far in either direction.
Also talking about different types of people.. Moving from an expectation of an instant response to the expectation of a 24-ish-hour response does wonders for communication. Let people think and maybe sleep on it. Keeps the in the moment thinkers from steamrolling the nap and shower thinkers. Does wonders.
The idea that unicode proposals have to be submitted to the unicode consortium is trash. It's be better to declare parts of the unicode standard open access (like the 2.4GHz wifi band) and just let people exchange/trade emoji sets.
I’m pretty sure the core tenant of Unicode is to ensure universal document readability . Having a private use area is useful in theory, but will make communication difficult. I remember when iOS folks were complaining about their heart emoji showing up as a hairy heart on android phones!
“[Unicode] brings order to a chaotic state of affairs that has made it difficult to exchange text files internationally.“ [0]
Who is going to decide which emoji sets get assigned to which "open access" part? And that sets don't conflict?
If it's not the Unicode Consortium who decides, well somebody has to.
And what is my phone supposed to display when it gets an emoji from one of these sets? Is it supposed to have a URL that it downloads them from or something?
The whole point of Unicode is to be a standard of communication. So it's hard to see how a free-for-all of characters or emoji is still a standard at all.
Discord handles emojis better than any other chat platform I've used; I think this is one of the main reasons people like to use it. Telegram's up there with Skype for being one of the absolute worst at handling them. I type :flushed: and it gives me smiling blushing face instead of :flushed:. I type :o (which has always meant surprised pikachu face, since before the surprised pikachu face was even a meme) and it gives me fearful face emoji. WHY? I respond with just an emoji, and it puts a huge distracting gimmicky animated emoji into the chat. Sure I can just disable them on my end, but other users are still going to see them as the default, which can lead to miscommunication, and also, I just don't want to be seen like that. Discord simply never steps on my toes like that, it works as intended. So many chat clients over the years have died by failing to understand that less is more.
Telegram's custom emojis are fairly recent. They've not yet implemented super deep contextual recommendation, but I appreciate the little convenient things Telegram has. For example, writing 'stonks' on Telegram would recommend you the statistics chart emoji. Or typing 'haha' would suggest relevant emojis. I don't remember discord doing that (I stopped using it long ago).
Also, Telegram's sticker support is unmatched. Not a single app even comes close to it.
To be honest, I'm happy with the standardization of emoji. I remember cases where I sent an emoji, but the other person saw one that was expressing a different emotion or it was hard to understand what I was trying to convey.
Poke around on Google Maps in Kyoto, you'll see _lots_ of swastikas representing temples. It's definitely jarring at first for Western sensibilities, but from India east to the Pacific, people kept using the swastika for what it meant before the Nazis.
(And _since_ they use it -- especially symbolically to mean "temple"! -- it needs to be represented in Unicode.)
Indeed, anyone with an infant knows bowel movements run the entire emotional gamut. Everything from the sad face to the party hat, from the exploding head to the dollar sign eyes.
The US is far from the only country in which states/provinces/regions/etc have their own flags. Australia's six states (and its two self-governing mainland territories) each have their own flag. Canada's ten provinces and three territories have flags too. Mexico has 31 states, but only 7 have official flags. Germany has 16 states, all of which have a flag. Austria has 9 states, which all have flags. Switzerland has 26 cantons, all of which have flags too. The list goes on and on. Doing it for just one country is biased, but doing it for all is such a gigantic project, probably biting off more than anyone could chew.
England, Scotland, and Wales all have Unicode flags. So do British Overseas territories (e.g UK Virgin Islands) and crown dependencies (e.g. Jersey). As do US Territories (e.g. Puerto Rico).
America had a much stronger flag culture than, say, Jersey. We see local and state flags flown at private residences.
> England, Scotland, and Wales all have Unicode flags. So do British Overseas territories (e.g UK Virgin Islands) and crown dependencies (e.g. Jersey). As do US Territories (e.g. Puerto Rico).
With the exception of England, Scotland and Wales, all of that’s just due to following ISO 3166-1, which covers both countries and significant external territories; you might say that it treats the layer as if they were in some sense similar to the former. Sticking to 3166-1 excuses the Unicode Consortium from getting involved in the politically fraught question of which countries to recognise.
National subdivisions such as the countries of the UK or the states of the US are ISO 3166-2. 3166-2 flags, including US state ones, are in Unicode, but they are non-RGI-meaning vendors are permitted to implement them, but neither required nor recommended to do so, and users should not expect them to be supported except on specific platforms or configurations.
What about England, Scotland and Wales? I think there is a justification for that inconsistency: they are considered to be “countries” (including by 3166-2), even if “countries-within-a-country”. This is not purely a linguistic thing-some international sporting competitions treat them as separate countries, and they have lengthy histories of independence. By contrast, almost nobody considers US states to be “countries”, most never have been independent countries, and even the few of those who have been independent have almost all been so briefly (a few decades at most) rather than for many centuries. Hawaii arguably comes closest to qualifying, but very few Americans would call its contemporary incarnation a “country”. And note that Northern Ireland’s flag is non-RGI, but 3166-2 does not officially classify it as a “country”, and calling it that is politically extremely controversial (it appeals to some Unionists/Loyalists, but offends Nationalists/Republicans.)
I think what’s actually important to the Unicode Consortium is this - “countries” get RGI, non-“countries” don’t. Too many of the latter. But we don’t want to decide what is a “country” - we don’t want to evaluate ourselves factors like those you mention (degree of independence), since that’s politically fraught and largely beyond our expertise. We just want to defer to some existing international standard and let them take all the heat - and such a standard exists, ISO 3166.
ISO 3166-1 lists “countries”; it also lists many (but not all) “dependent territories” and one or two “special areas”, but there is a well-established international precedent for treating the latter two as if they were “countries” (see e.g. ccTLDs). However, ISO 3166-2 also labels subdivisions as “countries”, but only in two cases - the UK and the Netherlands. The Netherlands case is irrelevant for flags, because all of its “countries” either have 3166-1 codes too, or else lack flags. But the UK has three “countries” which do have flags, so those flags get RGI. Denmark and France contain “countries” too, but not according to 3166-2; but even if 3166-2 was updated to include them, it still wouldn’t make a difference, since they all either have 3166-1 codes too or lack their own flag.
Maybe, someone will convince Hawaii to declare itself a “country within the United States”, and 3166-2 will then be updated to list Hawaii as a “country” - then the Hawaiian flag would get Unicode RGI status. I really doubt all the other 49 would ever do that though.
> The USSR had countries, some of which had 3166-1 codes, and some of which did not.
During the negotiations over the UN Charter, the Soviets claimed that the Union Republics which made up the USSR were sovereign states, with the right to secede, and hence should all be allowed to join the UN - along with the Soviet Union. The West refused - the claim of sovereignty was rather unbelievable (as if Stalin would really let anyone secede!), and it would have given the Soviet Union 16 (or more) votes in the General Assembly, which everyone else saw as unfair. Negotiations had reached an impasse, when a diplomatic compromise emerged - two of the Union Republics (Ukraine and Byelorussia) would become UN members, along with the Soviet Union as a whole; the others wouldn’t. Hence, the UN considered them to be “countries”, and since ISO 3166-1 gets its country list from the UN Statistical Division, it did too. It never made much sense from the perspective of reality, it was simply a historical diplomatic fudge.
> And ultimately why would the name country be that important?
I think it is important because (1) it is an exception to their general rule “countries/dependencies only, but not subdivisions thereof” which is defensible using the text of ISO 3166; (2) it is numerically a very limited exception-it doesn’t threaten to open the floodgates; (3) if someone claims “this is unfair bias in favour of the UK”, they can say “no, it is only because of the text of the standards, we are not engaging in any favouritism”; (4) in spite of all the above, there is a lot of political/popular pressure to give in to the demand, due to Scottish and Welsh nationalism; (5) no comparable political pressure exists for US state flags, because no US state has a mainstream nationalist movement
I feel like the entire emoji block should be made part of the supplementary/private use or similar. Leave what gets implemented up to Microsoft/ Apple/ Google to agree on.
It's fallen completely out of scope of unicode's purpose of documenting used symbols and into a sort of editorialized control of what can cannot be said.
I still don't understand how so many people are in favor of this whole emoji system being a part of unicode. Most people I interact with seem to end up using application specific emojis anyway.
Aren't people afraid that if there's too much stuff in a standard then people will stop using the standard?
I got one love emojis and think it was one of the best decisions to include them in Unicode.
I don't buy that you can have tens of thousands of weird human scripts but then a few icons representing non verbal communication is suddenly "too much". Sure a system might not support everything but the same is true for the regular text scripts. And then it means I can include emojis in my she'll script, slack messages, copy paste around, and it just works.
The problem is that the emojis appear different in different applications/devices. They're different enough that it can change the meaning of what you see, which means that people end up using it in an application-specific way.
But we already had application specific emoticons. They worked well, they work so well, that even with emojis in Unicode we still use application specific ones instead.
Also, the default ones seem to always be ugly.
Also also, the "weird human scripts" generally have a fairly long history of use.
Except... they're application specific. So, no ability to copy and paste, no way to send SMS to one person then iMessage to another then WhatsApp. Every app having a different keyboard with different icons in a different order. And what about websites? Multiple apps showing tweets? Emails?
My problem with emojis is finding them. No, I dont want to search hundrets of tiny images for making a point. No, I dont want to learn another alphabet with thousands of symbols. Just _write_ is so much easier. Or link it with a unicode name to be able to refer to it without searching
Spinach is one of the most consumed veggies globally (#8 or #9) and has no emoji. And WhatsApp at least has no emoji results for "chili"/"chilli" - you have to search for "pepper". But there's no emoji for ground pepper!
I noticed proposals use google/bing search results (in english) to show support for an emoji. If they used multiple languages to show popularity (at least english, spanish, french, and mandarin) it would look different.
In general emoji are very us-centric, for example the police car emoji doesn't look like a police car to many cultures.
One of the custom emoji I use the most is a picture of a judge’s gavel mid-swing. It’s useful to convey the finality of a decision that’s been made. There’s a judge emoji where the judge is holding a gavel, but it doesn’t quite work the same way. If I were going to ask the committee for one emoji, this would be it.
I like that they have stopped accepting flag proposals. They don't have any business trying to play geopolitics and they don't want to either, but as a result these legacy symbol must stay there for compatibility and new nations or those that didn't make the cut get no representation. We should use these flags a lot less anyhow—especially for language indicators.
To clarify, new national flags will still be added to the standard in line with changes to ISO 3166. So new countries will (as I understand it) still receive flags. This seems like a reasonable compromise, though it’s not without its risks either.
But I agree generally that the addition of flags was, in retrospect, an unfortunate outcome.
Not sure how this is a compromise by any means as it still means abiding by some arbiter to decide who gets to be a country and who doesn't. Outsourcing the arbitration to the ISO doesn't make much of a difference.
I have made a conscious commitment to stop all use of emojis. They seem innocent enough, but ultimately they're debasing language and limiting the range of free expression. For example, in 2018, most major platforms changed their revolver emojis to water gun icons, in an apparent attempt to "do something" about gun violence. This would be a laughable proposition if it didn't border on dystopian. We should not allow these corrupt companies and consortiums to dictate our capabilities of conveying ourselves based on their political ideologies. Orwell understood well vagueness and use of euphemisms as powerful tools of oppressing political opposition, and wrote beautifully of it in Politics and the English Language (1946).
Thinking emoji, shrugging person (genderless) emoji. Get used to it.
Emojis, emotes, gifs, reaction images, these all add extra complexity to the way we communicate. Not everyone needs to be a writer; what's this thing about respect? Obviously I am being facetious because I believe you to have quite a strong and antiquated view of how language works.
Written language always has had a visual component, languages like japanese have written words that comprise entire concepts and can be interpreted in many different ways (kind of like an image). But emojis also do something pretty remarkable in that they are very much universal, of course, people use certain emojis in different ways. But more often than not they can allow from context-based communication between people of different languages in a much simpler and straight forward way. Let me give you an example: You travel to Germany, you don't know German but you go into Grindr and you send hot face emoji, eggplant emoji, and a question mark to a guy. I assure you that, although crude, he will more or less get the message.
In fact, symbols are already used in everyday language. More often than not, if I'm confused about something just sending a question mark (?) will be enough to express it. Sending several question marks (????) will communicate stronger confusion.
Language is what we make of it, if you think reducing the need of using words to express complex ideas is bad then just send more emojis and you'll be communicating, in fewer space, more. How is that bad? On telegram, sometimes I communicate exclusively using stickers with certain friends. It seems to me like, maybe, you might be annoyed because communication has grown more complex than it used to be. People laugh at boomers not knowing how to use emojis.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadU+woman + U+mustache = U+woman-with-mustache
U+emo-kid + U+mustache = U+oh-noes
Surprised that sunglasses with frown was never submitted.
We only have ~1 million Unicode codepoints in total. Wasting one for ever local flag would be a mistake.
I'm also now surprised to see that Wales and Scotland get a flag but Northern Ireland does not. Aren't they on the same standing? I always thought it followed UN membership but that Wales and Scotland got an exception. I know Palestine and Kosovo have emojis also.
Are there any UN full member states without an emoji?
It would require dropping UTF-16, which is the limiting factor. That, or defining planes that aren't available to all encodings. Don't hold your breath.
I don't know who is using UTF-16 or UTF-32. It seems like most of the world has adopted UTF-8. So, maybe one day UTF-16 and UTF-32 will be dropped and more planes will be defined. That's a big maybe. If it happens at all, it's decades away. There are no conversations to do so that I'm aware of.
There are currently 10 planes that are completely unassigned, and there are no current proposals to put anything on them. The Unicode Consortium is very deliberate. Those planes will probably be empty for a long time. And while there are empty planes, they won't be talks about adding new ones. That's my impression. I keep up a bit, but I'm unaffiliated.
Java, JavaScript, Win32's "wide" API, C#, and many more. As for actual file storage, UTF-8 is indeed the most common, but UTF-16 still lingers on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Northern_Ireland
Like US+33 for Oregon.
https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/
https://emojiguide.com/people-body/man-with-veil/
MAN, ZERO WIDTH JOINER, BABY BOTTLE.
That is, bottle-feeding, which is a completely different thing and much more realistic.
So, now you have four relevant Recommended for General Interchange emoji: breast-feeding, and {person,woman,man} feeding baby.
Well, and variants with skin tone modifiers, if you count those distinctly. With the recommendation that the baby’s head be hidden, the skin tone only applying to the feeder (https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Multi_Person_Groupings).
Would definitely love if the linked chart had a reason for rejection column
https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-person/
https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/
https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-woman/
Their guideline: https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors_i...
For instance, they suggest using "elephant" to evaluate the usage:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&gprop...
Uneducated guess, though.
EDIT: Googled. Here is a person who knows what was up: https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/did-someone-say-new-em...
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20190r-swollen-belly-emoji....
Most (if not all) gender neutral emojis were proposed by the same person.
There's some evidence of support at the end of it, many of which were angry Twitter posts. Some of those posts seem like satire/shitposts, but it's hard to say without context.
I feel like they are missing emojis representing amputees of different types.
But there is a bearded women.
https://emojipedia.org/woman-beard/
Their governance seems to lack leadership and just goes with whatever pressure they feel.
https://emojipedia.org/man-bald/
https://emojipedia.org/woman-bald/
https://emojipedia.org/person-bald/
- It avoids gender stereotyping of men in Parenthood.
- couples say "we are pregnant". The term pregnant is culturally used for men too as their search shows.
- the emoji is not just for pregnancy, it is also for feeling bloated, full, and hungry.
I sometimes used this emoji for saying that I'm expecting something. My partner didn't like it.
So using it for anything other than that defeats accessibility for visually impaired people.
Also, 'we are pregnant' is weird, being pregnant is the act of developing offspring within the body.
This is not how the guys I know use this emoji, btw.
P.S. To get the joke, you have to be familiar with this specific tweet from almost year ago https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1503921387484114944?l... I guess you had to be there.
Source: Analysis of Gender Proposals, https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17439-gender-analysis.pdf
I don't understand this part. Isn't it a good thing that those emojis lack gendered sequences? Or is it that they should have modifiers to make them appear the way that a person wants to present themselves?
Only women can be impregnated. Stating otherwise does not make it so.
But they're not too different from the set of infantilizing pictograms that did make their way into the standard & that grown-ups are now expected to deal with.
I didn't have a huge beef with the proprietary emojis on old skool Skype and MSN, TBH - they were technically bound to those platforms, and the platforms mostly to private social spheres where they'd form part of the local slang. (And where Skype was used at work in the 00's, people actually refrained from them and acted in a businesslike manner).
Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.
This just reads a bit like someone older ranting at the younger generation being glued to their smartphone all the time. Modern day emojis are part of our writing system. I use them all the time, from Slack to WhatsApp. They are universally understood, to a limit of course, but I see everybody else using them too and no "office drama" because Alice misunderstood the emoji Bob was using. They make it easier for me to express my emotions and they are as naturally as speaking. There's nothing extraordinarily horrifying really.
The world is better because the director of my billion dollar project is able to heart react in the chat, not worse.
“This year’s proposals for new entries into the standard hieroglyphic dictionary include: slave being whipped, bearded slave being whipped, woman being humped by a donkey, and bearded donkey being ridden by a pregnant cat.”
A lot advocate for why something is important (for example, it's easy to laugh at a PMS emoji, but it's hard to disagree with "Currently, although menstruation is a core part of being a woman, it is felt to impose significant limitations on women when influenced by negative societal beliefs and taboos.").
Others are longer docs where many included proposals are now valid emojis, and it's interesting to think how some were picked and others weren't.
I suspect their marketing team was brooding on something.
Sure. Or, perhaps, they were simply well positioned to understand why that emoji was impactful
A few women in my life (managers/directors/executives) are terrified to talk about their periods because it could be used against them. I'm going to risk turning this into one of those "Normalize <XYZ>" tweets.. But cramps, bloating, irritability, pain, any number of other things. I want a status emoji for headaches and "didn't sleep well". Something that says lay off the knucklehead stuff today/for a few hours. Period and pre-period ones would be good too.
If I need to I don't hesitate to start meetings with: "I had 5 hours of sleep so let's see how this goes." Let people talk about why they feel they way they feel.
Three rejected period proposals. Just make one.
Let’s do one for prostates too. I have one uncle who died of prostate cancer and another one who won’t get a prostate exam. I don't even have a walnut emoji to throw at him in the meantime.
https://emojipedia.org/drop-of-blood/
I'm for professionals saying whatever they feel they need to say so that they can be understood and perceived in the way they want to be perceived and understood. If not talking about something causes stress, talking about it could help. If talking about it causes stress, don't talk about it.
I work with people around the globe so knowing my sleep schedule helps the people who work with me. For example, I don't like reviewing UX, visual design, or anything involving RxJS when I'm tired. I know this, they know this, so I review things when I'm rested. Similarly I want to know what the people around me need me to know.
Let professionals decide. "Culturally" the scales shouldn't be tilted too far in either direction.
Also talking about different types of people.. Moving from an expectation of an instant response to the expectation of a 24-ish-hour response does wonders for communication. Let people think and maybe sleep on it. Keeps the in the moment thinkers from steamrolling the nap and shower thinkers. Does wonders.
“[Unicode] brings order to a chaotic state of affairs that has made it difficult to exchange text files internationally.“ [0]
[0] https://unicode.org/standard/principles.html
If it's not the Unicode Consortium who decides, well somebody has to.
And what is my phone supposed to display when it gets an emoji from one of these sets? Is it supposed to have a URL that it downloads them from or something?
The whole point of Unicode is to be a standard of communication. So it's hard to see how a free-for-all of characters or emoji is still a standard at all.
Also, Telegram's sticker support is unmatched. Not a single app even comes close to it.
(And _since_ they use it -- especially symbolically to mean "temple"! -- it needs to be represented in Unicode.)
pile of poo ZWJ party hat
America had a much stronger flag culture than, say, Jersey. We see local and state flags flown at private residences.
I’d certainly use my state if it was in Unicode.
With the exception of England, Scotland and Wales, all of that’s just due to following ISO 3166-1, which covers both countries and significant external territories; you might say that it treats the layer as if they were in some sense similar to the former. Sticking to 3166-1 excuses the Unicode Consortium from getting involved in the politically fraught question of which countries to recognise.
National subdivisions such as the countries of the UK or the states of the US are ISO 3166-2. 3166-2 flags, including US state ones, are in Unicode, but they are non-RGI-meaning vendors are permitted to implement them, but neither required nor recommended to do so, and users should not expect them to be supported except on specific platforms or configurations.
What about England, Scotland and Wales? I think there is a justification for that inconsistency: they are considered to be “countries” (including by 3166-2), even if “countries-within-a-country”. This is not purely a linguistic thing-some international sporting competitions treat them as separate countries, and they have lengthy histories of independence. By contrast, almost nobody considers US states to be “countries”, most never have been independent countries, and even the few of those who have been independent have almost all been so briefly (a few decades at most) rather than for many centuries. Hawaii arguably comes closest to qualifying, but very few Americans would call its contemporary incarnation a “country”. And note that Northern Ireland’s flag is non-RGI, but 3166-2 does not officially classify it as a “country”, and calling it that is politically extremely controversial (it appeals to some Unionists/Loyalists, but offends Nationalists/Republicans.)
In some ways US states are even more independent. England doesn’t have its own government or Capitol, nor does it want one.
Sure Scotland was independent, about 500 years ago, but I don’t think that’s very important to the Unicode consortium.
I suspect the concern is simply upkeep. There 50 state flags, and they are changed pretty frequently.
ISO 3166-1 lists “countries”; it also lists many (but not all) “dependent territories” and one or two “special areas”, but there is a well-established international precedent for treating the latter two as if they were “countries” (see e.g. ccTLDs). However, ISO 3166-2 also labels subdivisions as “countries”, but only in two cases - the UK and the Netherlands. The Netherlands case is irrelevant for flags, because all of its “countries” either have 3166-1 codes too, or else lack flags. But the UK has three “countries” which do have flags, so those flags get RGI. Denmark and France contain “countries” too, but not according to 3166-2; but even if 3166-2 was updated to include them, it still wouldn’t make a difference, since they all either have 3166-1 codes too or lack their own flag.
Maybe, someone will convince Hawaii to declare itself a “country within the United States”, and 3166-2 will then be updated to list Hawaii as a “country” - then the Hawaiian flag would get Unicode RGI status. I really doubt all the other 49 would ever do that though.
I understand the importance of standards, but I think the importance of the word “country” is a bit overblown.
The USSR had countries, some of which had 3166-1 codes, and some of which did not.
And ultimately why would the name country be that important?
During the negotiations over the UN Charter, the Soviets claimed that the Union Republics which made up the USSR were sovereign states, with the right to secede, and hence should all be allowed to join the UN - along with the Soviet Union. The West refused - the claim of sovereignty was rather unbelievable (as if Stalin would really let anyone secede!), and it would have given the Soviet Union 16 (or more) votes in the General Assembly, which everyone else saw as unfair. Negotiations had reached an impasse, when a diplomatic compromise emerged - two of the Union Republics (Ukraine and Byelorussia) would become UN members, along with the Soviet Union as a whole; the others wouldn’t. Hence, the UN considered them to be “countries”, and since ISO 3166-1 gets its country list from the UN Statistical Division, it did too. It never made much sense from the perspective of reality, it was simply a historical diplomatic fudge.
> And ultimately why would the name country be that important?
I think it is important because (1) it is an exception to their general rule “countries/dependencies only, but not subdivisions thereof” which is defensible using the text of ISO 3166; (2) it is numerically a very limited exception-it doesn’t threaten to open the floodgates; (3) if someone claims “this is unfair bias in favour of the UK”, they can say “no, it is only because of the text of the standards, we are not engaging in any favouritism”; (4) in spite of all the above, there is a lot of political/popular pressure to give in to the demand, due to Scottish and Welsh nationalism; (5) no comparable political pressure exists for US state flags, because no US state has a mainstream nationalist movement
Quebec is funny because it has two abbreviations: the Canadian one and the American one.
One abbreviation is QE, the other QC. Forgot which is which.
Apparently Quebec residents can get a “Quebec” drivers license issue by NY state.
It's fallen completely out of scope of unicode's purpose of documenting used symbols and into a sort of editorialized control of what can cannot be said.
Aren't people afraid that if there's too much stuff in a standard then people will stop using the standard?
I don't buy that you can have tens of thousands of weird human scripts but then a few icons representing non verbal communication is suddenly "too much". Sure a system might not support everything but the same is true for the regular text scripts. And then it means I can include emojis in my she'll script, slack messages, copy paste around, and it just works.
I love it!
But we already had application specific emoticons. They worked well, they work so well, that even with emojis in Unicode we still use application specific ones instead.
Also, the default ones seem to always be ugly.
Also also, the "weird human scripts" generally have a fairly long history of use.
Windows+. On windows
OSX was something like ctrl-space or something. I rarely chat on Mac so I don't recall.
In general emoji are very us-centric, for example the police car emoji doesn't look like a police car to many cultures.
But I agree generally that the addition of flags was, in retrospect, an unfortunate outcome.
Whatever they do, it’s not that. Emojis allow for multivalence and useful ambiguity in ways that few words still have left in them.
From the perspectives of both communication and poetry, they’re a major boon to what’s now possible in written form.
Rage all you want, though. Talking about them like this helps sharpen our understanding of what they actually do.
Emojis, emotes, gifs, reaction images, these all add extra complexity to the way we communicate. Not everyone needs to be a writer; what's this thing about respect? Obviously I am being facetious because I believe you to have quite a strong and antiquated view of how language works.
Written language always has had a visual component, languages like japanese have written words that comprise entire concepts and can be interpreted in many different ways (kind of like an image). But emojis also do something pretty remarkable in that they are very much universal, of course, people use certain emojis in different ways. But more often than not they can allow from context-based communication between people of different languages in a much simpler and straight forward way. Let me give you an example: You travel to Germany, you don't know German but you go into Grindr and you send hot face emoji, eggplant emoji, and a question mark to a guy. I assure you that, although crude, he will more or less get the message.
In fact, symbols are already used in everyday language. More often than not, if I'm confused about something just sending a question mark (?) will be enough to express it. Sending several question marks (????) will communicate stronger confusion.
Language is what we make of it, if you think reducing the need of using words to express complex ideas is bad then just send more emojis and you'll be communicating, in fewer space, more. How is that bad? On telegram, sometimes I communicate exclusively using stickers with certain friends. It seems to me like, maybe, you might be annoyed because communication has grown more complex than it used to be. People laugh at boomers not knowing how to use emojis.