“Melting face,” “pregnant person,” and 35 other emoji approved for Unicode 14.0 | Hacker News Reader

“Melting face,” “pregnant person,” and 35 other emoji approved for Unicode 14.0

arstechnica.com

18 pointsTomte42 comments

> The Unicode Consortium is working to limit the number of new emoji added in each new version of the standard to stay "focused on what is useful" and reduce the amount of work that OS and app developers need to do to support new emoji every year.

That ship already sailed. I'll repeat my usual rant against emojis. The emojis to convey emotions are great and an useful addition to text-based communication, I like them. The emojis describing objects are useless at best and terrible at worse. The reality they describe is at best that of a few people living in something like San Francisco, at worse an imaginary world that's a grotesque approximation of our reality. Just look at the food emojis: https://emojipedia.org/food-drink/. It's like what people would eat in a TV series, not what most people actually eat most of the time in the real world.

What food to do you feel is missing from the food emojis?

There's nothing to represent a dish that went into the oven, there's no leek, no aspergus, no cooked meat outside of a poultry leg, some cartoonish meat on bone and bacon, only one type of cheese that's again a cartoonish cheese wedge, no cereal except for rice and an ear of corn, no zucchini, no nuts except the peanut, no round bread (not round flatbread, more like sourdough), no pasta except for spaghetti, no fish outside of very specific dishes, no soup. That's without thinking too much about it.

It's a very "I live in the city and mostly eat outside, often at ethnic food places" centric vision of food.

Edit: there's nothing wrong with living in the city and mostly eating outside, often at ethnic food places. But it's erasing a lot of people.

Emoji don't erase people. Erasing people is a very strong word and should be reserved for serious use.

There's bok choy though!

Of course there is, because it's on the menu of that nice asian place that's within walking distance of the offices of everyone working on the Unicode Standard. For all that talk about inclusion for the pregnant man/pregnant person, the exclusion on things as basic as food is baffling. It's very nice that you can express "pregnant man" with an emoji. It's very weird that you can't express "furnace".

I love how your reasoning for the inclusion of Bok Choy is because there are Asian restaurants in SF, rather than the fact that it's one of the most popular vegetables in the most populous country on Earth.

That's because there is no appearence of other fundamentals of Chinese cuisine. There's no pork meat!

https://emojipedia.org/bacon/

https://emojipedia.org/pig/

https://emojipedia.org/pig-nose/

Technically if you "search" your emojis for "bok" and then "lettuce" the same emoji appears. My first guess was that bok choy meant "leafy green" but it means "White Vegetable". I actually had this discussion yesterday, otherwise i wouldn't have known bok choy was an emoji at all.

If leek and asparagus are your biggest omissions, then I think they've done a pretty good job at representing food. The point isn't to have photo-realistic illustrations of every possible food. Instead, they're trying to create a useful set of pictographic primitives that can be used for communication for everyone person on Earth. Even if they had photo-realistic emojis of every cut of meat, it wouldn't be that useful.

> If leek and asparagus are your biggest omissions, then I think they've done a pretty good job at representing food.

That's a strawman, I've cited lots of other things. My point isn't that I can show a leek, my point is that with these emojis, you can maybe cover what 10% of the population on Earth eats, and most of that will be people living in big cities in developped countries .

> The point isn't to have photo-realistic illustrations of every possible food. Instead, they're trying to create a useful set of pictographic primitives that can be used for communication for everyone person on Earth.

They failed at that. How would you express food cooked in an oven? You can't. There's not even an oven emoji. The food emojis are showing that there is a huge biais for the kind of people that would contribute to the emoji standard, which is again, people living in big cities in developed countries. It's like if someone says "English is universal, everyone I know can understand it". No it's not, it's just the bubble of that person.

> Even if they had photo-realistic emojis of every cut of meat, it wouldn't be that useful.

I'm not advocating for adding even more emojis, I'm advocating for removing the objects emojis entirely because they will never be able to express what a language can unless they become themselves a language. I could also argue that they could have chosen better primitives, especially now that they make many combination emojis, but the goal here isn't to recreate Little Alchemy. We already have a great tool to communicate "objects" in written forms, and that's language. We lacked a great tool to communicate emotions/facial cues through written text, and "emotion" emojis solved that problem.

There's no steak or beef emoji for one. I think a lot more people eat that than do Sushi (although I do love sushi).

Edit: there’s no steak on that page but my phone has it…

I stand corrected

https://emojipedia.org/cut-of-meat/

Should probably include all types of cuts too... Maybe some type of modifier so we could have examples from all cuisines around the world from poultry to dog and so on.

Bigos, borsch and żurek to be sure. But seriously, the list is very limited. Very much agree with Zababa's point of view.

There's a sweet potato but no ordinary potato. That seems like an obvious and bizarre oversight.

It stems from the fact that Japan invented emojis (it is in fact a very Japanese sounding word) and they eat sweet potatoes much more often than the other kind you're mentioning. Just wanted to make the oversight a little less bizarre for you.

https://emojipedia.org/potato/

Weird. I must be mistaken; the last time I searched for a potato emoji, it only brought up sweet potato. Perhaps that app was using an older version of the standard; I don't remember for sure.

You are not kidding? That list has only fast food items on it. Where is the home cooked meals with veggies and meats in different sauces etc? Today I had meat sauce. Yesterday I made a fish soup.

If you want them changed, then you should make good use of your time and spend it lobbying the Unicode committee to get these in. Society will much appreciate you for spending time on worthy endeavors like this.

What do people eat in the real world then? A quick glance and most of those many times in my life. I’ve never even been to SF or been on TV. In fact the only items I can say I’ve never consumed out of that list is Mate.

The thing is people consume lots of different things. It's hard to imagine emojis could cover a substantial part of them. So, why choose this and not that? To give an example, frutti di mare are underrepresented although they are very popular in many countries. OTOH there is a pregnant black man emoji, which likely represents something that has not materialized yet.

Non-fast-food, non-takeout cooked meals of the local cuisine

To pick on your example, what's wrong with people using food emojis for prurient reasons, like eggplant and peach?

It would have taken an overabundance of bravery to label that "pregnant woman".

There already is a pregnant woman codepoint (U+1F930) that was added in 2016. The pregnant person emoji can be used to reflect a non-gendered reference to pregnancy or in reference to specifically non-binary pregnant people.

I’m a tad shocked there is a “pregnant woman” emoji and it hasn’t been removed yet.

Feels strange they added pregnant person version with a mustache in addition. While I guess it's possible I'm assuming that implies male hormone treatment that would complicate pregnancy, and a bio-male could not become pregnant.

People will go off testosterone and other treatments to get pregnant, but keep the beard they grew beforehand. It's not strange at all.

Any idea how many of them? I know of a few, the kind that make the newspapers, but I have no idea if it happens privately or not. I don't know any personally.

I had the impression that it was pretty rare. Nothing wrong with it; it appears to work perfectly well. But nonetheless I would have expected it to not occur all that often, since the transition is so much trouble and so important to their well-being.

True but the person getting treatment doesn't become a man. She's still a woman, no? The moustaches are usually reminiscent of faint early teenager 'staches and not gruff looking.

You're correct that they don't become a man. They always were a man, and are now undergoing treatments to bring their bodies in line with their gender.

Testosterone is testosterone, and it makes facial hair regardless of your genitals. I know several trans men who have significantly better beards than I have. They don't need beards to be men, though I think many appreciate the visible confirmation that their bodies now match what they understand themselves to be.

That makes sense but that must be a very small percentage of all people who can potentially become pregnant.

That's correct. It has happened, but not many times.

It wasn't really the most pressing thing for the Unicode consortium to do. It's just that they had the asymmetry, and it was easy to fix, so they did.

https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1438224069036498944

Face emoji are just an inferior, corporatized replacement for emoticons. And I notice they have finally caught up to the o7 emoticon.

I still think emojis in Unicode were a mistake.

Pregnant man. 2021, we have arrived.

Could have just kept using text emojis and stop wasting so much time and energy on the dumbest things.

ehh... emojis add a little fun and whimsy to our lives. They're silly, of course. But even my 81 year old mother gets a kick out of selecting and sending them. She's probably not gonna like "@>‑‑>‑‑" but she can select the flower emoji just fine.

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