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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

This serves as a reminder that the Unicode standard is remarkable US centric at times. Where's the guy flipping the bottom of his chin? Where's whatever the equivalent in Bangladesh is? (I'm sure there is one...)

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Emoji is actually more Japan centric, hence the numerous sushi emoji, bento box emoji and various other Japanese items.

Yeah, that's the DoCoMo legacy shining through.

Interesting point. Why isn't the unicode standard just "obscene hand gesture" (or similar?) and then localisation can take care of the rest?

I pulled open the standard as linked by cnvogel and expected to see what is in a sense the exact opposite... a list of all vaguely practical hand gestures, with the middle-finger merely one in a sea of gestures. While it is in the middle of some other more generic gestures, some of which definitely have obscene connotations in some cultures [1], it's less exhaustive than I've come to expect from Unicode. See also [2] which lists some cultural middle-finger equivalents, some of which show up in the Unicode list, or in the case of 1F594 ("peace") easily can if the icon designer is not careful. (In fact I think the Unicode sheet shows the obscene-in-the-UK variant.)

I sort of expected to be able to make a crack about it being a bit culturally imperialist not to include the middle finger just because the US considers it obscene, but instead it stands out more than I expected, so I can't.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-ok#Negative_connotation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_finger#Similar_gestures

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