Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural frequency for emoji | Hacker News Reader

Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural frequency for emoji

unicode.org

75 pointsthunderbong52 comments

As much as it is meant to be a serious document for proposals I started cracking up at:

The commercial petitions for taco played no part in its selection; the taco was approved based on evidence in its proposal, not the petitions.

They say this as the committee shovels thousands of “free chalupa” coupons from Taco Bell into suitcases.

Turns out Big Taco's (/s) fingers were in the guac:

https://www.change.org/p/unicode-consortium-the-taco-emoji-n...

Elephants are fine animals, but the Unicode standard features a distinct and disturbing lack of guinea pigs — as well as capybaras — severely limiting the range of my digital expression.

(I mean, if we can have 'taco'…)

2nd

you should start a petition!

(/s because from TFA "Petitions are not considered as evidence since they are too easily skewed")

Boat owner: "We have a new boat and we need a name, let's have the internet vote! It can be the people's boat!"

Internet: "Boaty McBoatface."

Boat owner: "Democracy is a mistake."

"Democracy is fine. You tried to cheap out on marketing and you got what you paid for."

Reminds me of the Priiiiillll debacle: https://heideblog.com/2011/05/12/eine-abstimmung-fur-raserei... (the title is in German and is unconnected)

TL; DR: washing-up-detergent maker Pril does online competition and promised to put the winning design on shelves, the design that got most votes: https://heideblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/screen-shot...

Somewhere online there's a pic of these things on the shelves/they did make them as collectibles.

I’d buy it. I love stuff like that.

Boaty McBoatface is the most famous boat behind the Titanic, so it definitely worked.

If I saw that Peil design on store shelves I’d likely buy it, so it likely worked quite well as a limited edition. Really click the line and ask yourself if you’d do the same. https://heideblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/screen-shot...

The inherent issue with these campaigns is the select for initial response not how long you’re going to like some design.

That is awesome.

If marketers found that any vote spontaneously creates the invested interest a democratic process needs then we all would have starved during the subsequent storm of pointless elections.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=elephant...

capybara and guinea pig are both far less popular than taco or emoji

interestingly, the spike of taco in google trends seems like it might be correlated to it's addition to emoji - that spike would be about a year after iOS got the Taco emoji.

Capybaras are a rising trend in the last few years. There's a ton of fan pages with cute capybaras pictures and videos. You need to invest early.

Capybaras don't have shit on hyraxes. I'm trying to be an early adopter, but like all hot new products that seem to be out of stock everywhere.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrax

They're disadvantaged in the cute-animal stakes by their name, I think. The name implies something large, dangerous, and possibly mythical; it really doesn't fit with "round fuzzy thing somewhat smaller than a cat".

Solid market analysis. I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Capybara are being artificially held down because there isn’t a confident and convenient emoji for them!

I suppose you could start a popular open source project and name it the word you want to become an emoji.

Without any relative scale, can you even tell the difference between a capybara and a guinea pig?

Certainly. Capybaras are semi-aquatic mammals, and their head as a consequence is positioned significantly higher than their bodies, resulting in a general pose which can only be described as 'regally aloof'.

Cavies on the other hand look like adorable furry idiots with a much less angular — in fact, rotund — outline.

Aside from both being rodents and (apparently) delicious, these are quite different animals.

The head shape is also quite different, as are the ears and eyes. I’m struggling to understand how someone could mix them up.

My implication was "at the resolution of an emoji" - you can clearly tell the difference in real life, but what about when you only have 18x18 pixels to work with?

If you can't tell the difference between a capybara and a guinea pig, you won't be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog either. The former pair differs more in terms of their silhouette than the latter. 18×18 probably means you won't be able to tell quite a lot of emoji apart, but don't blame these rodents for that.

They also feel extremely different to the touch. Capybaras have really rough coats! They're not soft at all.

You could tell a guinea-pig-sized capybara apart from a guinea pig, or a capybara-sized guinea pig apart from a capybara, blindfolded. Probably anyone who expects guinea pigs to be soft but has never met a capybara would get it right on the first try.

This annoys me so much - squirrel on iPhone offers you an emoji that is clearly a chipmunk.

Chipmunks are squirrels though. 'Squirrel' is the family name for a bunch of these rodents.

> Any of the rodents of the family Sciuridae distinguished by their large bushy tail.

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/squirrel)

I don't care who they send, prairie dogs and squirrels are different and deserve different emojis!

Maybe after Han unification we also need a squirrel unification and leave this distinction to the font which is picked based on the region you're in ...

That being said, I already cannot parse many emoji and would love tooltips what they are supposed to represent in all places.

Yep, that's how I learned you can directly google an emoji and find the emojipedia page for it.

Chipmunks don't have a a large bushy tail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipmunk

> There is already an emoji for frog, which can be used to represent all amphibians.

I'm not a big fan of this example. Does "lizard" represent all reptiles? "dog" all mammals? I suppose salamanders are taxonomically similar enough to lizards that specific amphibian emoji aren't necessary for them, but that's not the reason given.

Lyra Belacqua would have been a master emoji texter.

We already have combining characters (for example you can make emojis with various skin shades) and they should enable “alternates” for other emojis.

Let there be ten thousand cat breed emojis via combining characters!

This is, IIRC, how the lime works; according to the Unicode consortium, a lime is a green lemon.

(It would be much more fun if they'd just represented them as citrus hybrids with ZWJs.)

To be fair, the genetics of all the various citrus species are pretty wild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy).

Once they open the door to other amphibians, they will end up getting drawn into the whole "do toads exist" debate, and it frankly just isn't worth it.

These guidelines note that emoji proposals for "specific people, whether fictional, historic, living, or dead" will be rejected outright, but most versions of the rockstar emoji are an obvious Bowie homage!

David Bowie transcends history and fiction, life and death.

He was an archetype, and therefore not a specific person.

Aladdin Sane persona, to be precise: https://david-bowie.fandom.com/wiki/Aladdin_Sane_(persona)

Unicode Consortium definitely jumped the :shark: with emojis. It's such a bad system for actually doing beyond poor humor, yet they pretend it is doing useful things.

> Other examples of fixed complete sets are blood types {A B AB O},

Meanwhile, that's such a simplification that nobody actually uses just that information:

> As of 31 December 2023, a total of 45[2] human blood group systems are recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT).[3] The two most important blood group systems are ABO and Rh; they determine someone's blood type (A, B, AB, and O, with + or − denoting RhD status) for suitability in blood transfusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type

While a perfectly reasonable request on its own terms, it also definitely reminds me of the brown M&M story, which if you are one of today's 10,000 [1], is https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ .

No elephant -> toss immediately. Save time.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

I'm one of them! It's a great read, thanks

It is actually something more of reducing the number of faulty submissions, because the popularity alone doesn't get emoji registered. Everyone should look at the L2 register to see a (very tiny) portion of emoji proposals that clearly motivate this section and others. (Most proposals are directly sent to the Emoji subcommittee, so the L2 submission is relatively rare.)

Google has a lot of power over emojis, huh.

Taco is my zsh prompt, but I’m now tempted to switch to elephant.

It's a clever idea to use another search term as the baseline as long as Google refuses to give any indicator of absolute search usage in the Trends graph.

...until the Great Elephant Incident of 2025 comes along and messes up the search trends...

Yet we have an emoji for pregnant dude.

That's a subset of a larger emoji family, not a standalone.

Direct to criteria: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#frequency-evide...

I put that URL above. Thanks!

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