Hacker News Reader

Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.

View on HN

I would extend "the same thing everywhere" through time as well, i.e. it's a bad thing to ever change the meaning of an emoji after it's been published, for the obvious reason that this messes with old texts and all other locations where the emoji has been used with the old meaning.

This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back to the original meaning now is just as bad - it will just disrupt in the same way lots of newer texts that assume the glyph is a water pistol.

It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture.

Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.

No, I don't think that applies here. Languages evolve and new terminology enters the lexicon all of the time, but that absolutely does not retrospectively change the rendering of pre-existing expressions of language.

That absolutely happens.

Meanings change, jump from one word to another, words take the opposite meaning all the time. Pronunciations change too, letters that are supposed to sound differently suddenly don’t and other way around too.

There are different ways how languages can change. A language changes organically, if individual people simply talk differently than their predecessors, out of convenience, without any specific intent or plan behind it. That's the way languages have always changed throughout history and keep changing.

Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power.

Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think.

But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.

>pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.

Chairman Mao enters the chat

The question isn't whether it was OK to turn the gun emoji into a water pistol in the first place.

It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent.

The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this.

Having X "go back" because the original change was "unjust" doesn't fix the underlying problem. It creates a new one.

Literally perfect application of the concept of "two wrongs don't make a right"

A bunch of busy bodies decided to change the meaning of a unicode character: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f52b/index.ht...

This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.

Exactly, so then it would be wise not to add to the damage already done by changing it again.

I'm not sure that's necessarily wise, since the underlying takeaway is that it's fine to attempt to change the meaning or rendering of pre-existing symbols as long as you get away with it. The threat of having the change you are attempting to force be contested over a long period of time should, hopefully, act as a deterrent to such behavior.

It's a potential deterrent to future attempts to change the meaning/rendering of existing characters.

The unicode spec has always, and will always, have it as a pistol.

Stop destroying standards because they hurt your feelings.

You have to stand for something and Musk is someone who continually shoots his foot for his beliefs. Probably does not matter to him if no one follows (although now that I know the history, everyone should have pushed back in 2016 but the second best time is to push back now)

The bizarre state of this emoji was that it already faced this change. One vendor (Apple I believe) decided to make it a water gun, slowly the rest of the industry followed, officially changing its name to "water pistol". Now the old battles are new again.

The official name still is just "pistol" (and even more the latest Unicode standard specifies it as handgun, revolver). Not sure how Emojipedia decides on used name (seems to follow Apple) but (in this case at least) isn't using the standard one.

This would still happen with or without the platforms doing it. Like any other piece of language, emoji will change meaning over time or between groups, and make it hard to read other group's texts. For a current example, if you see a text saying "I loved your <eggplant emoji>", it can have at least two very different, but quite common meanings (either liking some eggplant based food, or a sexual allusion).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com