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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is just…weird. That would be like asking for a used toilet paper emoji–it's super specific and not all that pleasant.

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This isn't "every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about". This is something that half of the world population experiences roughly monthly for some number of years. Certainly it's more frequently experienced than the emojis - though I appreciate those. So it's clearly something that should exist. The underwear might seem odd but it's no weirder than the smiling poop emoji...

> This isn't "every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about". This is something that half of the world population experiences roughly monthly for some number of years.

Morning wood emoji when?

smiling poop:blood::used toilet paper:underwear. Emojis generally common nouns, and generally come with associated context to further specify what the exact meaning is. And, just to be sure, you're comparing two demographics of similar size (women vs. people who use toilet paper); I think that neither group should be given specific emojis in this case.

And 100% of the world's population has an ass, but we're still stuck with the peach emoji.

"than the emojis" was really "than the [Christmas] emojis"

In the first place it is sad that "emojis", "emoticons", etc. are so broadly used. It only shows how writing skills are deteriorating. Mark Twain or Hemingway didn't need emojis to express sadness or humor.

Here's a page from one of Twain's manuscripts. I think he'd have made good use of Emoji.

https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/twain_ma881-...

Drawing a picture on a manuscript is not the same as copying a picture drawn by someone else.

Are you kidding? Pictures and "emojis" are far more informationally dense than words are. If anything this shows how quickly language is evolving when facilitated by instantaneous information transfer of near unlimited amounts of data.

Don't be fooled by the pretty images.

While painting/photos can express multiple, deep emotions, they are unique. The value added by a copy it's none.

Moreover emojis are for 99%+ simple nouns ("hand", "pig", "dog", "smile"). And for thing that are not nouns, you still need to understand that they are logograms, with a "fixed" meaning. Kanjis are not better than Romans - they are just different alphabets.

And if you think about it long enough you will find that there is already a 1-to-1 mapping behind the "emojis" and the words (by definition, the unicode is the mapping of numbers - the code point, to meanings - the name, and to images - the pictogram, so you can have U+1F436 associated to 'DOG FACE' and ) , so they are "informationally dense equals" between each others.

The real advantage of emojis (and the reason I suspect most people use them) is to compensate for the loss of body language in texting. I use them so much when talking to one friend in particular that she can tell something is wrong when I stop using them for a little while.

That was the original intent, right there in the name, back when they were still emoticons.

But well, you don't need ice cream cones and airplanes to compensate for loss of body language, unless you routinely pantomime those things.

Which is why we have standards for conveying any conceivable image in raster or vector form.

Instead of selecting an easily compressible format for embedding any small image inline with text, we're trying to force a writing system into a kind of general-purpose icon library.

We could've had a world where carriers and phone manufacturers each had their own "common" images easily entered from some list like now, but still allowing cross-platform transmission without information loss, and enabling users to easily add their own custom images.

Now Unicode is stuck trying to define a finite set of popular words which every platform renders slightly differently, and will always leave something out or offend someone.

Are you really comparing regular people to Twain and Hemingway?

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