Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Based largely on a proposal from Unicode Consortium member Google, Unicode Consortium has announced plans to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality. There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both," writes Ars Technica. "The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar." What's unusual about the new emoji is that they're created using combinations of existing emoji to avoid waiting for Unicode version 10.0 to be finalized in June of 2017. By using a special "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character between two or more emoji, operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji. "The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job," reports Ars. "Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender." We may see these combined emoji before the end of the year as software companies begin to integrate them into their operating systems.

Comments

yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

that should fix all the gender issues.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

This and as long as that nasty rifle emoji stays out of the standard humanity will be saved.

Re: yay more emojis

[OrangeTide]

The pistol emoji shows up as a realistic handgun, with the exception of Microsoft who chose to display a toy ray gun

Re: yay more emojis

[sexconker]

The fact that these things don't display the same across platforms means they're useless trash.

Re:yay more emojis

[Z80a]

Don't worry, they have a backup plan that consists into letting people enact sharia laws over the whole planet.
This will surely fix the gender issues.

Re: yay more emojis

[ArmoredDragon]

I honestly have yet to figure out what the fuck the point in most of these emojis is. In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message, and I am still trying to figure out what the new emojis solve that that system didn't solve. I mean what the fuck kind of mood is a tomato or an ant supposed to represent?

And speak of all of the PC shit that's going into it now, I wonder how BLM would respond if you sent messages with a watermelon and a chicken?

Seriously, this shit got stupid a long time ago.

Re: yay more emojis

[Yaztromo]

I honestly have yet to figure out what the fuck the point in most of these emojis is. In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message, and I am still trying to figure out what the new emojis solve that that system didn't solve.

You need to understand a bit about where and why emoji's started showing up in the first place. And to do that, we go back to pre-millennium Japan.

Japanese is, to put it bluntly, an insanely crazy written language. Modern Japanese uses no less than four different scripts/alphabets, and in any given sentence different types of words may need to be in different alphabets!. They are:

• - Kanji: logographic elements taken from Chinese. These are symbols that stand for a word, phrase, or idea on their own. There are several thousand in modern use in Japan
• - Hiragana: a set of 46 symbols indicating syllables. These are typically used for native Japanese words that don't have a Kanji equivalent.
• - Katakana: a set of 48 symbols also indicating syllables. Indeed, many of these syllables are identical to those available in Hiragana, but with completely different symbols. These are used for loan-words, scientific terms, names of plants and animals, and for emphasis.
• - Romaji: as if all that isn't bad enough, some words (loanwords and trademarks) are written in the standard Latin script we use in English ([A-Za-z]).

And if all that wasn't bad enough, there is also hentaigana, which are obsolete kana sometimes used to give things like restaurants and such an old-timey feel (something akin to 'Ye Olde...' in English). And because the different scripts in Japanese are used for different types of words, you frequently have to switch between one and the others in a single sentence. In short, written Japanese is f'd up.

This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji? I'll admit I'm not a Japanese speaker (I've studied the symbology, but not the language itself), but I'd think even typing "Hey, let's meet up with Akira at the McDonalds" would take a week on a standard flip-phone keypad. Thus emoji was invented to provide visual shortcuts for writing things that would otherwise be a major PITA to type in Japanese.

So basically, because written Japanese is so incredibly f'd up with four simultaneous scripts in modern usage...the Japanese decided to get around it by adding another script system.

Early iOS releases implemented Emoji to satisfy the Japanese market, but in can you don't recall that far back, it was originally only available if you set your system language to Japanese. In those early days, someone figured out how to write an app to enable the emoji keyboard in other languages, and eventually due to demand (which I'm assuming was mostly 12 to 14 year-olds) Apple eventually opened it up to everyone. At which point, hundreds of millions of people with sane written languages that use compact alphabets decided they were cute, and that they had to use them as much as possible.

Like yourself, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about the whole Emoji thing. I can understand why the Japanese needed to invent it, as their writing system is horrendous. I don't tend to directly use it myself, preferring to use old-style emoticons in personal correspondence; however, at this point most e-mail and chat systems will "upgrade" typed emoticons to emoji.

So there you go. A brief history of emoji.

Yaz

Re: yay more emojis

[Ol Olsoc]

The fact that these things don't display the same across platforms means they're useless trash.

The fact that they exist means they are useless trash. I was permanently turned off the thing when some years back, teenagers used to collect the things, and they were a malware vector. I cleaned many a machine that teenagers used, and after admonition to stick with one set of emoji they knew and could be trusted, they proptly went out a bollixed their machines up again.

Re:yay more emojis

[Ol Olsoc]

Don't worry, they have a backup plan that consists into letting people enact sharia laws over the whole planet. This will surely fix the gender issues.

ahh, sharia and sharia alike, as the old saying goes.

Re: yay more emojis

[SuricouRaven]

Some of those emotiocons also served as subcultural identifiers.

The 'bird ones' are only ever seen within the furry community.
:> Maps to :-)
/:> Headtilt, indicating questioning or examination
:>- Tongue out, indicating silly

Re: yay more emojis

[coaxial]

This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols?

T9.

Don't try and be an amateur linguistic historian, when people are alive today that sent SMS messages in the mid 1990s. Also, the history of emoji is in Wikipedia.

So what's the real story? Someone at NTT Docomo wanted prettier emoticons. Then once they had that, they decided to shove all their icons into this new dingbat font for ease of use. Softbank wanted feature parity, so they did the same. Then later the two fonts were shoved together, and so we have the unholy union that gives us ðY"' and ðY--, âoe'ï and ðY-, and my favorite ðY" and ðY"Z.

Re: yay more emojis

[VernonNemitz]

Thanks for the info. I was kind-of wondering why we needed to re-invent ideograms, when Chinese is right there ready to be learned by anyone who wants to represent various concepts with a single symbol.

Re: yay more emojis

[Pfhorrest]

No.

Your summary of Japanese writing systems is pretty accurate, but that has little to nothing to do with where emoji come from.

Japanese did not have a single unified text encoding scheme used by all technology manufacturers, but because all of them needed the ability to essentially select from a bunch of different pictures in order to write kanji, many of the different proprietary text encodings included code points (and font support) for actual pictures of things too -- emoji.

Then Unicode came along and said we're going to make One Text Encoding To Unite Them All, a single text encoding into which all text could be converted without any loss of data, which meant that they had to be able to encode all of those emoji code points in all of those different proprietary Japanese text encodings.

As you say, Apple included font and input support for this in iOS, mainly intending to service the Japanese market, but then it was discovered by Westerners as well, and exploded in popularity -- yeah, probably due to teenagers who found them cutesy.

All of this gender and race stuff nowadays is not because anyone is pushing some kind of social justice agenda, but because the original emoji were extremely haphazard -- it's just whatever these handful of Japanese companies felt like including in their proprietary text encodings, that then also had to be supported in Unicode. Because of that haphazard origin, things are weirdly non-diverse, for no good reason; it just so happened to end up that way. And then the people overusing these things that were really just legacy support for old proprietary foreign features started asking why is there only e.g. a dancing woman, not a dancing man? "I'm a man and I want to indicate dancing, why is there only a woman dancing, and no man?"

The answer is "haphazard history", but also "sure, why not", and so we get new combining characters to indicate the sex and gender of your dancer or runner or construction worker or whatever, because if we're going to have this crap in there, which we have to to fulfill the basic purpose of Unicode to support all text encodings from everywhere ever, then we may as well be fair and neutral about it all while we're at it.

Re: yay more emojis

[AmiMoJo]

It's not as bad as you make out. Consider that English has 26 letters, but actually there are another 26 that have the same meaning but are uppercase versions of the lowercase 26. The logographic ones (kanji) are more complex but each is made up of a few simpler ones, so once you know the basics it's not too bad.

Typing on phone pads isn't bad either. In fact, many Japanese are so good at it that they prefer it over a QWERTY keyboard. Both Google's and Apple's mobile Japanese keyboards support phone keypad input modes.

Basically each key is assigned to a vowel sound, and you hold it down to select the consonant. On top of that you have something like the western predictive text system where each key can be one of three or four characters, and the phone suggests the most likely combinations. In Japanese though, there are more suggests on screen and not just words, but whole sentences. The prediction is much more advanced and Japanese people can type incredibly fast on it.

I can in fact speak Japanese and I can assure you that the writing system is not horrendous, it's actually quite efficient. Kanji can be some work to learn, but on the other hand there is no spelling or odd grammar rules or character combinations making different sounds you need to master. The language is also highly regular, there being only two irregular verbs.

I think it's actually a common misconception that having difficult writing system caused the adoption of emoji. They were really just invented by phone companies as a way to personalize and decorate messages. Anyone familiar with Japanese culture will know that they like to decorate things with little symbols and pictures.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols?

Pretty much the same way as you'd type on a standard 106-key computer keyboard: Type it phonetically (there are only 46 syllables available [1]), and press the space bar to let the IME suggest you kanji combinations. It's quite painless on a computer if you ask me.

How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji?

Rômaji. No 'n' there.

[1] Well, some syllables consist of two kana. And I'm not counting dakuten and handakuten (voicing). But under 100 in any case.

Re: yay more emojis

[Hognoxious]

Modern Japanese uses no less than four different scripts/alphabets, and in any given sentence different types of words may need to be in different alphabets!.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: yay more emojis

[Hognoxious]

the different proprietary text encodings included code points (and font support) for actual pictures of things too -- emoji.

Then Unicode came along and said we're going to make One Text Encoding To Unite Them All

See the mismatch? That's the problem.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

> "How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji?

Remarkably easily. Even 90s Japanese cellphones (which only had limited messaging capabilities) had predictive text entry. Use the buttons to enter text phonetically (up to five phonetic characters per button). The phone then offers you suggestions as to the correct way you want it rendered. People could very efficiently enter complex sentences into their phones one handed while carrying on a conversation about something else.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

But the symbols for a dog and a meal ar awfully close. Too close for comfort.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, most kanji as used nowadays are not about representing a concept at all, but purely phonetic. Kanji used as actual ideograms (the symbol kindaaa of looks like the concept) are in the minority.

Nevertheless, other people have already stated that the origin of emojis have nothing to do with kanji.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, ðY" is my favourite too.

Re: yay more emojis

[AmiMoJo]

Even now, Unicode is not universally used in Japan. TRON encoding is pretty common in embedded systems, and many PC and mobile apps have hacks to fix issues in Unicode. Unicode can't support mixing Japanese, Chinese, Korean and mathematical symbols without extra hacked in metadata, for example, where as TRON encoding can.

A lot of apps still use the older Shift-JIS encoding too. Open any random readme.txt file from Japan and 99% of the time it will be Shift-JIS, as well as most of the strings coded into the app itself.

I'm not sure Unicode can ever really be fixed now. The problems are fairly fundamental - it uses variable length characters, with different languages mixed in together in each page and plane. Apps can't even tell what language they are dealing with or what font they should use for rendering, and universal fonts that support all languages are impossible. The best option now would be to make the next version of Unicode adopt the TRON system and just begin transferring everything over. The longer we leave it the worse it will get.

Re: yay more emojis

[AmiMoJo]

In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message

Which is why emoji are needed. Not everyone uses ASCII, for a start, because it only supports Latin characters.

If the rule was that when we can use a string of ASCII instead of a character we should use a string, there would be no plus/minus character either. Mathematicians might have something to say about that.

Re: yay more emojis

[LWATCDR]

No the fact that they are emojis makes them useless.

Re: yay more emojis

[Merk42]

...because if we're going to have this crap in there, which we have to to fulfill the basic purpose of Unicode to support all text encodings from everywhere ever, then we may as well be fair and neutral about it all while we're at it.

So then shouldn't the push be to make emoji genderless/raceless/etc that way there can be one 'dancer' instead of every single combination of sex/race/width/wealth?

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

- Hiragana: a set of 46 symbols indicating syllables.[...]
- Katakana: a set of 48 symbols also indicating syllables.[...]

I'm not aware that there were more katakana than hiragana, unless you are talking about 'extended katakana' which are sometimes used to more accurately depict foreign sounds. There are a lot more of those than two.

Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji

As a matter of fact, late 1990s cell phones had text messaging with katakana only text. That is, 46 symbols needed, plus eight for the small kana, plus two to make voiced characters. The halfwidth katakana set is still today found in the 8-bit portion of the shift-JIS encoding.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, 46 symbols needed, plus eight for the small kana, plus two to make voiced characters.

...I should've looked at the table I linked to before I wrote that. Nine for the small kana (I forgot the small 'tsu'), and one for the chouonpu (vowel-lengthening mark). Total 58 symbols.

Add full stop, opening quotation mark, closing quotation mark, comma, and middle dot, and a space (for readability) and that's plenty and it still fits in under 64 codepoints.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm holding out for ðY++.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

That sort of went away once someone had the brillant idea to make color emoji. (where the font rendering subsystem gets hijacked in favor of a bunch of color bitmaps) Emoji that were previously line art of a face now had to have a skin color. Yellow may not have been a bad choice as a default, but even The Simpsons has black people.

Re: yay more emojis

[narcc]

No the fact that they are emojis makes them useless.

On Slashdot, perhaps. The rest of the world wants to convey more than just bitter cynicism in their messages...

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

So then shouldn't the push be to make emoji genderless/raceless/etc that way there can be one 'dancer' instead of every single combination of sex/race/width/wealth?

That's exactly what the SJWs don't want.

Re: yay more emojis

[Dcnjoe60]

Still, if I want to send a smile face, :) requires two key strokes. On an iPhone, it is the emoji button, scroll, scroll, scroll, smile face, five keystrokes. Besides, the text version forced one to use their imagination. Same with other ascii drawings, such as ;) for wink, or even (o\_|_/o) for a classic VW. And of course, back then, all of these were gender neutral.

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

But the info was rubbish. You should take what he said with a grain of salt.

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the subject. Notice it does not contain supposition and wild ideas about limitations of the Japanese writing system.

Emoji were initially used by Japanese mobile operators, NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone). These companies each defined their own variants of emoji using proprietary standards. The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita, who was part of the team working on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet platform. Kurita took inspiration from weather forecasts that used symbols to show weather, Chinese characters and street signs, and from manga that used stock symbols to express emotions, such as lightbulbs signifying inspiration. The first set of 172 12×12 pixel emoji was created as part of i-mode's messaging features to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services.[1] Kurita created the first 180 emoji based on the expressions that he observed people making and other things in the city.

(AC because I don't deserve karma for pasting wikipedia)

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe they're sort of heading in this direction with the use of combing characters/ZWJ. Supposedly you'll have a generic "dance/dancer" code followed by a "male/female/gender identity/skin color/whatever else/blergh" code, and the group will be rendered as a single symbol. I've no idea what the level of OS/renderer support for this is though.

Re: yay more emojis

[Pfhorrest]

You are aware that, for example, the letter A, is a highly derived and abstracted version of a picture of an ox's head?

Text characters and pictures are not that far apart, and in East Asian languages (where emoji originate) even less so.

Re: yay more emojis

[LWATCDR]

Funny but I think that people have been managing to do that with words for a very long time. I don't think Shakespeare ever used an emoji.

Re: yay more emojis

[narcc]

Considering he was writing plays, I'm not surprised...

Communication is about more than just words -- and most people aren't very skilled writers. You can't expect the average person to express themselves, without ambiguity, using words alone. Emoji are very helpful there.

There's a lot of controversy around emoji right now, which has lead some people to deny that they have any useful role in modern communication. That's foolish, of course, as we've used them effectively for decades. The smile, wink, and frown emoticons have been a staple of online communication for over 30 years. I can't think of any way to deny their efficacy and utility. You can argue against them on other grounds, I'm sure, but you can't say that they haven't been useful or effective.

Extra typographic symbols seem to date back as far as the mid 19th century, though with a healthy bit of cynicism. They're not exactly a new idea. Puck magazine (in the mid-1800's) even published a set of typographic symbols we'd recognize as modern emoticons, reinvented by Ambrose Bierce, Vladimir Nabokov, and who knows how many others. There's even one instance I found (though couldn't verify) of a message exchanged entirely in symbols, between Victor Hugo and his publisher, though they used extant typographic symbols. Scott Fahlman seems to be the one who's re-re-re-invention caught-on, having found a need to disambiguate between jokes and serious messages on some CMU message board in the early 80's. If professional writers and well-educated academics find a need for extra typographic symbols to facilitate written communication, can you justify denying the average person such a useful tool?

The written word is more important to daily life than at any point in recorded history. Far too quickly, as it happens, for the world to adequately prepare for it. Hence, the emoticon rose to prominence .

  A similar thing happened with the telephone. The word "hello" rose from obscurity as it filled a need created by a radical new technology: the telephone. There is some backlash we're seeing with the absurd abundance of emoticons, not dissimilar from the explosion we saw in the mid-90's in message boards and chat rooms. Interestingly enough, the word "hello" as countless variations in common use in the early 20th century, before settling down to a few of the more popular variants.

tl;dr We've seen this before. Technology changes language for a reason.

Re: yay more emojis

[Hognoxious]

They totally are far apart. This is why a text file isn't the same thing as a directory full of gifs.

As for the East Asians, if they'd produced Turing, Mandelbrot, Shannon & Von Neumann then maybe computers would have natively supported their scrawlabets from the outset.

But they didn't. One must pay the ball from where it lands.

Re: yay more emojis

[LWATCDR]

" The word "hello" rose from obscurity as it filled a need created by a radical new technology: the telephone."
The word and it came about organically it did not happen with a committee. The fact that they are trying to cover every variation to be politically correct.

Re: yay more emojis

[ganjadude]

....wouldnt learning English be easier???

Re: yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we should be asking ourselves why we need a "dancer" emoji in the first place, since you can communicate the same thing with good old words (stick a hashtag on there if you feel you must).

Hieroglyphics have been a dumb writing system since the time of the Egyptians. No need to resurrect them.

50th Google related article today...

[ls671]

This must be the 50th Google related article today. Anything else happening in the world today?

Re:50th Google related article today...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this site is bought and paid for by Google. It's Google this, Google that. All hail Google.... Google is saving the world from itself.

Re:50th Google related article today...

[Anonymous Coward]

Googol must pay for articles on Slashdot

Re:50th Google related article today...

[jimbob6]

Sure pokemon GO.

I'm a little disappointed in the professions

[93 Escort Wagon]

I was hoping for rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

Re:I'm a little disappointed in the professions

[alvinrod]

If you're going to go with Indian chief you obviously want to pair it with cowboy, cop, biker, soldier, and construction worker.

Re:I'm a little disappointed in the professions

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if you're going to the YMCA.

Great!

[friesofdoom]

I'm glad to see that google is taking impressive steps at forwarding humanity!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I can't tell you how many crimes against humanity that have been committed by sex-specific Emojiis and people influenced by sex-specific Emojiis. A titan of inhumanity has been felled once and for all! Felled by the great humanitarian company that promotes hedonism over virtue, abortion over abstinence, laws over ethics, and deviation over normalcy.

Let's hear it for the moral subjectivists determined to dictate their ass-pulled morals as objective! Hooray!

Gender equality doesn't mean anything

[axewolf]

It's an excuse for tyrannical social doctrine. You would think it would lose steam after men and women clearly have equal opportunities in general, but some people become addicted to beating the horse and keep doing so long after its dead.

You would think more people would stand up and call as it is, but I guess the kind of people who think for themselves are insecure about their love lives or something and fear for the possible consequences of being labelled a "close-minded misogynist bigot".

Re:Gender equality doesn't mean anything

[labnet]

I have to agree with you.
As Hylandr says below.

Gender is not a social construct. Mental illness on the other hand is.

The trouble is, disagreement is now seen as hate?

A better way to promote gender equality

[DrXym]

Stop releasing fucking emojis for either sex. And Unicode Consortium, stop thinking it's your job to assign characters to arbitrary and ephemeral emojis because it isn't.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[cowwoc2001]

Dear god. If I had any karma points left I would up-vote you a million times. I'm all for gender-equality but this emoji shit is utter bullshit.

Unicode should contain letters, period.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Ol Olsoc]

Dear god. If I had any karma points left I would up-vote you a million times. I'm all for gender-equality but this emoji shit is utter bullshit.

Unicode should contain letters, period.

Do they have a dickbutt emoji? That would be kewl.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Pfhorrest]

Unicode has to support some emoji, because Unicode has to be able to interconvert with text from old proprietary Japanese text encodings that included emoji, because that's what Unicode does, it interconverts with every text encoding from everywhere ever. That's the whole point of it.

And if it's going to be encoding some emoji, it may as well support and fair and neutral selection of races and sexes etc, rather than just whatever random haphazard cross-section of them happened to be included on the whims of the designers of those old proprietary Japanese text encodings.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[AmiMoJo]

No, this is precisely what the Unicode Consortium should be doing. You may personally dislike them, but emoji are a popular form of human communication and it benefits everyone to have a common standard for them. If Unicode didn't support them then we would need hacks. Unicode is already broken enough as it is, no need to make it worse by trying to incorporate some hacks a few years down the line when it comes unavoidable.

Why try to censor other people's attempts to communicate? What is it you find so upsetting about codepoints you will probably never use? Does adding Egyptian hieroglyphs annoy you too?

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[tgv]

On the other hand, a bunch of whiny idiots seem to think that changing language and other symbolic depictions is the most important struggle, so they get symbolic shit in return. It won't change a thing in the world, except make the whiny idiots feel better.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Anonymous Coward]

The Unicode Consortium doesn't "has" to do fucking shit. They could have told the phone companies to stick their silly pictures up their asses. They already fucked up Chinese and Japanese encodings with their retarded Unification efforts.

They could have as well unified emojis with Hebrew glyphs.

They included all the garbage from Japanese encodings(emojis, non-existing kanjis, wide latin alphabet) while removing the actual Japanese characters.

Fuck the Unifaggot Consortion.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[DrXym]

Okay, so what's the unicode character for a tank? Oh meant a Pershing tank. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left in its Belgian configuration. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left in its Belgian configuration with a guy's head poking out the driver's hatch.

There are an infinite and arbitrary number of "emojis" that someone could think of. Unicode is not the place to put them.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[DrXym]

Fine, so you grandfather crap like wing dings and some other stuff in and you draw a line under it. End of story. If phone operators want to produce a standard to represent emojis they can go off and do it any way they please without bloating unicode any further than it is.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Anonymous Coward]

It should include other punctuation marks, too!

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Anonymous Coward]

> They already fucked up Chinese and Japanese encodings with their retarded Unification efforts.

They had to do the Unified Han thing if they wanted to stick with 16-bit encodings, which they did at the time.

There just aren't enough code points to include all Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters separately.

Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is a fucking search company.

Emoji's are emoticons and existed in complete form in icq 20 years ago.

And I'm all for gender equality, but this shit is seriously turning to some Jim Jones level shit and people need to get some fucking perspective. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.

That would actually take work. Screaming about things on Twitter and Facebook is much easier.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

This.
What the hell was wrong with yellow-faced genderless emoticons? Make it a doctor, a lawyer, a stripper, a truck driver, or even a village people, but please don't create this mess.
Next thing, we'll have to create emoticons for girls with short hair, boys with a mullet, transgender, then transsexual people, then "I'm identifying myself as a dog", and the rest.

But hey, I work in tech, so how would I have a clue about what people really need to feel included in the society...

Re:Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

> a search company.

that's what they want you to think. you should check them out sometime.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is a fucking AD company. Why is this simple fact so hard for so many nominally intelligent people to accept?

Re:Fucking Search Company

[khallow]

Nobody goes to Google to watch the ads.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[gweihir]

It is just another case of SJW's hijacking existing stuff that works well and then breaking it. The only thing these people care about is themselves.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[AmiMoJo]

Google is an advertising, phone, OS, search, self-driving car, ISP, mobile network, R&D, app developer, browser developer and internet standard writing company. Particularly in east Asia where emoji started (the word itself is actually Japanese for "drawing character") there were multiple standards before Unicode unified them.

You are upset about this because you are extremely short sighted. You suggest volunteering at a homeless shelter. This is Google, one of the richest companies in the world. Is it more effective for them to send a few volunteers to soup kitchens or to try to effect more universal change that reduces poverty by increasing equality?

Get over it.

Re:Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

How in the flying fuck does adding "gender neutral emoji", whatever that is, reduce poverty and increase equality? o_O

But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

...depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both

Gender is a spectrum and limiting it to the traditional and repressive binary model only reinforces patriarchal normative modus ponens.

Re: But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

Gender equality is a social construct.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

Thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are digging up our remains and examining the bone-structure, they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

Gender is not a social construct. Mental illness on the other hand is.

http://anthropology.si.edu/wri...

http://forensicoutreach.com/li...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

That is great satire. The retarded perpetually offended class will always find something to be offended about. Love the stupid I sound smart language that those idiots always use "patriarchal normative modus ponens"

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

It really isn't though.

The whole tans and nonbinary gender thing is a kludge to patch the issue where a lot of behaviors and artifacts are ascribed to one gender for no reason or for now obsolete reasons. If society coordinated itself rationally at a high level we'd just stop caring about the "social constrict of gender" not spend all this trouble inventing new labels for people.

The other cases of actual body dysphasia a re a mental illness, treatment with medication and possibly surgery in some cases are a separate matter. Similarly the anomalous cases where the several useful definitions of biological gender don't line up are a medical matter and largely juts need to be noted for the rare cases where it actually matters for your treatment of otehr illness kind of like allergies to medications.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

Deciding whether blue or pink is manly is a social construct.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

You are conflating the concepts of sex and gender. Bone structure can only tell you what sex somebody is.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[sexconker]

Red is manly, all other colors suck.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

You are conflating the concepts of sex and gender. Bone structure can only tell you what sex somebody is.

We've always been at war with East Asia...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Cyberax]

Thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are digging up our remains and examining the bone-structure, they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

And sometimes they misattribute the gender, since it's not always possible to tell the difference.

Gender is not a social construct. Mental illness on the other hand is.

As exemplified by you.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Pfhorrest]

Future archaeologists aren't going to be able to tell who was a geek or a goth or a hippy from looking at our bones, because those categories are social constructs.

Gender is a social construct like that. Gender is not sex. Sex is biological. You can tell sex (to some degree) from bones. You cannot tell gender from bones, any more than you can tell social cliques from bones, because those things are entirely made-up social constructs.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[AmiMoJo]

Ugh... Slashdot's transphobic brigade are absolutely the worst aspect of this site, and they seem pretty organized with their mod-points.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

Bone structure can only tell you what sex somebody is.

Not even that. There are a number of "diseases" (mutations) that make determining sex between the 2 classic choices impossible.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

And even then, sex itself isn't binary - even on a chromosome level you usually have XX / XY, but occasionally you get XXY / X- etc.
And expressed phenotype can be different from genotype (eg. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), where someone who is genetically male is physiologically female

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe already solved that problem years ago.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

If we're trying to say something that makes sense, I'm going to claim that you're conflating the concepts of the number 1, and the integer that comes between zero and two, because they're two totally different things.

Sex = Gender.

Sex/Gender != Personality.

One of them is entirely physical, one is entirely mental.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

As exemplified by you.

Ad-hominem attacks are how Liberals signal their acceptance of defeat.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

False.

http://www.etymonline.com/inde...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

Trans people have roughly the same suicide rate as people with serious mental issues like schizophrenia, but that's normal, right? I'm a woman because I say I am, right?

Phobic? Hardly, understanding something != being afraid of it.

Slachdot != tumbler. You a long way from your echo chamber/hugbox zir...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

And sometimes they misattribute the gender, since it's not always possible to tell the difference.

Male/Female is not "gender"? Do you not understand english?

But who knows what the future holds. Perhaps science will know that I'm a radial-tire-kin and my turn ons include freshly paved roads and armour all.

(the joke being you probably can't tell if I'm kidding but won't say anything regardless as your credo dictates you accept every dumb "identity" imaginable)

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Cyberax]

I knew that you'd have no objections to the fact that bone-based gender determination is often faulty.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

Gender determination is so reliable that it's entered as legal forensic evidence in a court of law.

Nice try but there are so many differences between a man and a woman's skeletal structures that your entire remains don't need to be found to determine whether or not you are male or female.

Learn to logic and do some real research.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Cyberax]

No, it's not. Male and female skeletons form partially overlapping continua, so there are plenty of ambiguous cases. Especially when chromosomic gender (i.e. XY vs XX) is different from hormonal gender (i.e. what the body actually LOOKS like). That caused quite a few problems in sport, when it turned out that some "females" actually expressed male hormones ( http://www.bbc.com/sport/athle... ) and as a result had significantly different body structure.

And never mind that there are people with hermaphroditism, XX-males, women with male genitalia and so on.

So yeah, let me repeat for you: "You are mentally ill if you think that you can pigeonhole everybody into a nice two-valued selection box".

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

Several Millennia of the 'binary' gender/sex of Male / Female physiology is not whimsy to the deliberate cognitive dissonance of a microscopic representation of humanities edge cases as measured along the same time frame.

You can deny the reality all you want. Nobody can wish away the gender they were born with. You may be able to find pools of individuals to participate in an echo chamber where you can imagine your reality is real but as sure as the Sun rises and the river flows if you desire to continue your genetic imprint on this Earth you will need to choose. Just as a hint, there's no surgery that will enable you to produce sperm if you're a woman, and no surgery to enable you to bear a child to term is you're a man. *NONE* And even you know why.

I hate to be so blunt about the truth but this is really getting ridiculous. Gender fluidity is magical thinking at it's most noxious.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

False.

http://www.etymonline.com/inde...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Cyberax]

Several Millennia of the 'binary' gender/sex of Male / Female physiology is not whimsy to the deliberate cognitive dissonance of a microscopic representation of humanities edge cases as measured along the same time frame.

Several millennia are also whimsy to democracy, rule of law, vaccination, MRI, X-Rays, internal surgery and computers. And I've noticed that you're not even defending your position that there are only two "genders" anymore.

Now you've moved goalpoasts now.

Just as a hint, there's no surgery that will enable you to produce sperm if you're a woman, and no surgery to enable you to bear a child to term is you're a man. *NONE* And even you know why.

The key word here is "yet". There are attempts at uterus transplants already and there are *NO* reasons why sufficiently advanced surgery won't be able to get trans-females to bear children. It'll take some time, though.

Oh, and not every woman can bear children and not every man can produce sperm. So do we have four genders now?

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

The key word here is "yet". There are attempts at uterus transplants already and there are *NO* reasons why sufficiently advanced surgery won't be able to get trans-females to bear children. It'll take some time, though.

Oh, and not every woman can bear children and not every man can produce sperm. So do we have four genders now?

What you're failing to grasp is X Y.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

I am not afraid of LGBT, I am afraid of the collateral damage caused by the more overzealous of the group.

If you really want real change that will stick then people *must* discuss it openly and without fear of reprisal. If just debating the topic gets someone in trouble you will be ( and are ) seen as a threat to be eliminated or controlled rather than someone that want's to be open about the dual nature of their gender.

tl;dr
If you don't want people to be afraid of you don't be a threat to their freedom or lively-hood. You will become the enemy like the lesbians that targeted that cake shop.

Hard fact.
Google this:
cake shop closed because of lesbians
http://www.christianpost.com/n...

Not because of inequality, but because of lesbians/LGBT. My opinion on how this went down is that the lesbians targeted the bakery as part of the 'war on inequality'. I could be wrong but in this world 'perception is reality'. I don't care who you want to bugger or how you do it. I really don't. I care more about the threat the LGBT community represents to civilized society, my children and own freedoms.

Think about your actions. You are responsible for how people look at your cause.

But where are the Trans emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we aren't truly inclusive, someone might feel left out. We need emojis of Caitlyn Jenner as a doctor or lawyer to help out.

(In these demands/discussions of diversity, no one ever brings up really small groups like Eskimos/Inuits. They get the shaft.)

Word verification: unbiased

Re:But where are the Trans emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a trans reader, I feel obligated to say that not all of us are SJWs. A lot of us go about our lives not telling anyone in person about it, except for the people we are dating. Please try not to be influenced by celebrities that are only famous for being related to famous people while being trans. Not long ago, transsexuality was mainly covered as a tabloid Jerry Springer topic, like little people, so they and the media are playing it up for all it's worth.

Transsexuals make up less than 0.3% of the population and get so much more media attention than more deserving causes with that proportion or more: Down syndrome. Hemochromatosis. IBD, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Parkinson's disease. Type I diabetes.

Before I graduated, at my university's Student Union Building there was a family bathroom I usually used first, not because of anything to do with being trans, but because it's usually used less often so it's cleaner, and I like my privacy. Before the NC bathroom headlines, they put a sign to the left of it explicitly saying that anyone could use it, regardless of gender identity. It's more likely the Gay-Straight Alliance lobbied for that, but sometimes I think that bureaucrats are going out of their way to antagonize social conservatives so they can tick off some boxes, and it just counterproductively raised awareness of transsexuals --- as a target for social conservative politicians on the right.

I hope that these words help get across that it's not transsexuals' fault that the media has disproportionate coverage, and a lot of transsexuals would prefer it if there were /less/ awareness and inclusion (when it negatively affects other people, like M2Fs in the Olympics), but you can't exactly raise an awareness campaign about that. I don't usually reply to people, so...please let me know if it did.

Re:But where are the Trans emoji?

[Shados]

Transsexuals make up less than 0.3%

Thank you, finally someone noticed that it was a little weird the medias and wacko SJW made it seem like its freagin 90% of the population.

Re:But where are the Trans emoji?

[SuricouRaven]

Transsexuals are an excellent target class for people to hate upon. They are few in number, and violate social norms in a somewhat creepy way. People need an Other to oppress: Right now, it's your turn. If trans acceptance ever becomes universal within a culture, someone else shall take that place.

Re:But where are the Trans emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, let's stop pretending the word "dwarf" is offensive.

Second, use whatever fucking bathroom you see fit to use. Nobody carries a birth certificate around, just so they can take a fucking piss.

Do you really think those conservative fucktards are really going to notice?

Re:What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's SJWs pissing themselves with glee. They aren't very bright, they think this means something.

Willie and Lilly

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for the others, but I have it one good authority that the last three all dig that Diddley beat.

Re:What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine that some SJW's won't be so happy with Google limiting the gender count to only two.

Chloe says

[jargonburn]

"NO EMOJI!"

More seriously, though, I'm torn on whether I support this or not (like my opinion on the subject matters, haha). If they're going to turn Unicode into AOL Instant Messaging or w/e, I guess they may as well strive to be politically correct about it?

Meh.

Re: What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

SJW are never happy

Make Them Androgenous

[mentil]

[emoji] can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender

AKA the SJW character.

Seriously though, why not just modify the emoji to be androgenous? They're abstract symbols anyhow, so they might as well be.

Re:Make Them Androgenous

[HornWumpus]

((:-{)>

That's Mohammed.

((:-)-8

That's the 'dude with boobs' version of Mohammed.

Re:Make Them Androgenous

[subanark]

Because women have long hair (and ponytails) and men have short hair... at least according to the differences I saw between them (except for the swimming one).

Re:Make Them Androgenous

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be much better. If by "equality" they mean having an emoji for every possibility, then I don't want to see the number of emojis after they handle every combination of "race equality", "age equality", "hair color equality", "body size equality", "handedness equality", ...

Re:Make Them Androgenous

[Anonymous Coward]

This, how I wish they would have called it the Symbol Joining Widget.

Googles emojis used to just be genderless yellow blobs (including everyone by including noone), people complained that neutrality was not diverse enough.

Re:Make Them Androgenous

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely haram!

So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[mi]

Oh, wait, "Mother" has already been replaced with "Parent 1"... Is there an emoji for that — and is it different from the symbol for "Parent 2"?

Here is the symbol for "family" — and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

A family unit, which is commonly represented as a father, mother, and one or two children.

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the description of the typical emoji not the definition for the actual word.. what were you? homeschooled?

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[serviscope_minor]

Here is the symbol for "family" - and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

If by "triggered" you mean "triggered into writing stupid shit on the internet", then sure. Other than that, taking the piss out of people who mention trigger warnings is about on the same level as taking the piss out of people who mention epilepisy warnings before a video.

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[Anonymous Coward]

taking the piss out

"Taking the piss out"? That's a good one... I'll need to remember it the next time I get off your mom...

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, right. These entitled millenials are falling into seizing convulsions over that time the mean man on the television didn't say the thing they like.

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the symbol for "family" - and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

If by "triggered" you mean "triggered into writing stupid shit on the internet", then sure. Other than that, taking the piss out of people who mention trigger warnings is about on the same level as taking the piss out of people who mention epilepisy warnings before a video.

Um, no. An epileptic doesn't have any choice about how they will react to a video, flashing directly affects their condition without conscious thought.

The other kind of trigger is subjective; the receiver is responsible for how they interpret and react to it. Even if they have PTSD.

Let's remember that the first amendment protects the right to offend.

Re:So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The other kind of trigger is subjective; the receiver is responsible for how they interpret and react to it. Even if they have PTSD.

Yep. We don't get to choose our feelings. We do get to choose how we handle them.

I third this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sick of fucking emojis and there are already more than I need. If I want to type out fucking emojis I WILL USE THE EXTENDED CHARACTERS GOD(Grouchy Old Developers) gave us when they invented the ASCII character set! Other than that, I need all major written languages with a full open fontset and working implementations of all current and historical character reading/writing directions, and if they get finished with that they can go dumpster diving for historical languages that have fallen out of mainstream use.

All that giving us more fucking emojis proves is: They have no respect for how difficult utf-8 has already made text filtration while allowing native speakers to legibly convey their languages without triggering spam filters, and that if all they are doing is adding more fucking emojis, then their job is done and they can move to a 5-10 year cycle between meetings, and formally disband if another PRODUCTIVE use of the consortium doesn't happen before that time. We need to get rid of these trade groups that stop existing to provide a solution and start existing just to exist.

Fuck emojis, fuck unicode emoji characters, and fuck the Unicode Consortium for going outside the scope of their charter and fucking things up even worse. The only real way to solve this is to either hard fork unicode based off either filtered specifications minus emoji, or start over with a new characterset and deal once again with type conversion and assumptions in code. Neither is a good option, but with the increasing bloat and visual confusion thanks to emojis, it may soon be worth doing.

Re:I third this.

[sexconker]

The only real way to solve this is to either hard fork unicode based off either filtered specifications minus emoji, or start over with a new characterset and deal once again with type conversion and assumptions in code. Neither is a good option, but with the increasing bloat and visual confusion thanks to emojis, it may soon be worth doing.

Option 3, best option: ASCII for life.

biological gender emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking for an emoji that displays as small photographic of the senders genitalia. Perhaps done using a camera in real time, or simple through Big Data.

Multiracial but not multicultural

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Mozilla's shows up as a couple of histapnic and irish descent, but that does imply they are both Cathoilc and therefor share the same religion. *TRIGGERED*

Re:Multiracial but not multicultural

[Anonymous Coward]

couple of histapnic

What in the name of god is "histapnic"?

Re:Multiracial but not multicultural

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it means they get a lot of allergies.

Re:Multiracial but not multicultural

[Anonymous Coward]

Or allergies causing sleep apnea?

Re:Multiracial but not multicultural

[Anonymous Coward]

Help! I'm allergic to tacos!

Hello Slashdot,

[fustakrakich]

Now you have another reason not to use unicode here, as if there aren't enough already.

Re:Hello Slashdot,

[Anonymous Coward]

(__)__)::::::::::::::D

my emoticon still works

Re:Hello Slashdot,

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that, one of those long swabs you use when loading a cannon?

gender equaity is not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a version of all those emojis for transgender one-armed fat black red-headed small people.
and for polyandric old blind white women with no breast (with a mustache)

Where is gender equality pregnant male emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is gender equality pregnant male emoji?

Re:Where is gender equality pregnant male emoji?

[LostMyBeaver]

Isn't that the realistic plumber emoji?

Re: What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. If they were content, they'd lose their hobby.

Up next:

[wonkey_monkey]

I demand my own personal emojis. I'm triggered by emojis that differ from me by gender, race, eye colour and baldness pattern.

Re:Up next:

[Anonymous Coward]

I demand my own personal emojis. I'm triggered by emojis that differ from me by gender, race, eye colour and baldness pattern.

Do you really think being full of sh*t makes you influential?

tag: slownewsday

[Opportunist]

Seriously, did the static integrity of bags of rice in China improve so much that this is now a story?

Too bad Apple shutdown Ammosexual

[pecosdave]

Sure bicycles are an okay hobby and have an emoji, sure taking a dump has a turd emoji dedicated to it, but going to the range is a hobby that gets Tim Cook's panties in a twist.

Microsoft is just as bad, but everyone considers them evil anyways.

This is fucking ridiculous

[jgfenix]

When was the last time the Unicode Consortium did anything useful? It seems they only care about ridiculous emojis

Re:This is fucking ridiculous

[narcc]

It seems they only care about ridiculous emojis

That's because it's a hot news topic. It's a topic that angers up the blood of powerless nerds, thus generating page views.

If you want to know about something other than emoji, you'll need to head over to unicode.org yourself. For example, there was a meeting in Cambridge a few days ago focused on improving support for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Last month, a group met at Berkeley to begin work on including Mayan hieroglyphs.

Last month, support was added for over 7500 characters, less than 1% of which were emoji, from a mix of modern and historic languages.

Just because you haven't heard about all the other work that's being done, doesn't mean that all they've been doing is fighting over emoji. The Unicode Consortium is large and varied, and most of the work, no matter how important, is dull and uninteresting to most people.

Re:This is fucking ridiculous

[ebvwfbw]

They're just like a lot of environmental groups, unions, political parties. They have to do something once in a while to make it seem like they're still needed. Otherwise, why have the org exist at all?

Not Good Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

As a female with short hair, I am gravely insulted that all the female emojis have long hair. It is very oppressing that these images depict long hair as a female trait and that I must fight against society to keep my hair short. Being bombarded by long and straight haired images of women as the ideal female shape destroys my self esteem and my will to live. Why must the world be against me?

Re:Not Good Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a man with long hair and I approve this message!!

Re:Not Good Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a haircut. Then get a job.

There are two kinds of "men" with long-hair: the unemployed (Gypsies, bikers, stoners, slackers) and part-timers at shady video rental stores.

If you want to be a faggot bum your whole life, that's your business. But take it from me, you're wasting your life.

Making Emojis for a living

[theblkadder]

It must be great to have nothing better to do than make up emojis for a living.

Western languages becoming pictogram-based

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty soon the emojii will outnumber even the Chinese characters. You'll be able to write large works of literature that consist entirely of emojii. And people will wonder how it ever came to pass that the concise easy-to-type letter-based text of western languages got morphed into this unwieldy mess of thousands of ideographs, that you need to memorize obscure keyboard sequences to access. Or wade thru many levels of pull-down menus to find your next "word".

Emoji is for morons

[Stormwatch]

If you have a working brain, you can express yourself with words. If you can't, you're a moron. To hell with emoji.

Insanity

[CanadianMacFan]

It's going to get out of hand to declare the emoji pretty soon by using the ZWJ. We're going to have
base emoji + gender + skin tone + hair length eye colour + ...

People are going to spend longer defining a single emoji than it would have taken them to write what they wanted to say in the first place.

Of course the opposite direction and trying to include a distinct emoji for every case will be just as crazy.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

I cant wait for my hand + zwj + penis emoji combo

Need basement-dweller emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Anonymous Cowards

[somenickname]

I think it's interesting to see how many AC posts have been modded up on this article. I'll go ahead and post some inflammatory shit under my normal username:

I think it's utter bullshit that so much of societies time is being wasted on things like gender equality emojis, workplace diversification statistics, LGBT issues, etc (all things posted on Slashdot this week). You are going to have people that are extremely polarized on any of those issues but, those people will not, under *any* circumstances, change their view. NEVER. Really, all this SJW stuff does is alienate the majority of society who are effectively neutral and maybe even mildly supportive to begin with.

If it weren't for SJWs, I don't think I would have ever formed an opinion on anything that they stand for. Because I didn't care. I judge people on their merits and not their gender, race or sexuality. But, with the advent of SJWs, I feel a great resentment towards almost anything they say. I'm a middle aged white man. That doesn't make me guilty.

Re:Anonymous Cowards

[SuricouRaven]

The SJW issue is simply people taking a good idea, and running with it to an often-ridiculous extreme.

Equality? Good idea. Diversity? Sure. Bending over backwards to recognise and celebrate every difference in race, gender, gender identity, cultural background, language and religion? Not so good.

Re:Anonymous Cowards

[narcc]

I judge people on their merits and not their gender, race or sexuality.

No, you don't. You've just never had to confront your bias directly before.

But, with the advent of SJWs, I feel a great resentment towards almost anything they say.

See, if you were actually this mythical perfect egalitarian, like you believed yourself to be, you wouldn't even notice those horrible SJW's save to say "huh, I didn't know that was still an issue" before moving on.

The truth is that you've carried countless conscious and unconscious biases with you for your entire life. You've just been protected from confronting those biases by a society willing to reinforce them.

Really, all this SJW stuff does is alienate the majority of society who are effectively neutral and maybe even mildly supportive to begin with.

So you believe that the status-quo should be preserved? Marginalized groups should stay on the outskirts of sciety, hidden away, to protect your precious social norms, and the privilege that grants you? You don't believe we should work towards a more egalitarian society?

I judge people on their merits and not their gender, race or sexuality.

Liar.

Re:Anonymous Cowards

[Anonymous Coward]

The defining trait of an SJW is they have lots of ideas about how other people should behave.

Requires a new encoding, too.

[DoofusOfDeath]

WTF-32

images.

[MadMaverick9]

These fucking things called "emojis" are images and should be treated as such.

They have no business being added to Unicode.

And I can not believe that there is actually a "Unicode Emoji Subcommittee".

For crying out loud. What's this world coming to?!?!?!

Definition of Unicode:

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

Do you even remember what Text is? Can you even Write anymore?

Re:images.

[Pfhorrest]

Unicode has to support emoji, because the mission of Unicode is to interconvert with every text encoding from everywhere ever, and there are old proprietary Japanese text encodings that support emoji, so Unicode has to too.

And if Unicode has to support some emoji in the first place, and people are actually going to take that legacy support and run with it, then it may as well do it right while it's at it, instead of just whatever haphazard shit a handful of old Japanese coders threw in their proprietary standards for shits and giggles.

SJW's days are numbered!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh lordy, I how can't wait until these parasites are gone!

This Is An Outrage!

[TooManyNames]

Not only does this exclude those who self-identify as gender neutral or fluid (among many other identities), it just assumes that longer hair is enough to signify womynhood, which is a clear nod to the patriarchy!

In all seriousness, though, this is a private company adding to their services. If it really bugs you that much, don't use Google's services (there are alternatives).

Re:This Is An Outrage!

[TooManyNames]

And by "private company," I mean, of course, "public company." D'oh.

Clearly, what I was getting at is that this is a company that you don't absolutely have to affiliate with. It can't govern you, and there are alternatives -- even to a behemoth like Google -- if this issue really rises to the level of boycotting or something.

Re:This Is An Outrage!

[fnj]

And by "private company," I mean, of course, "public company."

Those terms don't have any real meaning. Google is a publicly TRADED company, but it is not publicly MANAGED or publicly OWNED. And whether it was publicly or privately traded, it would be governmentally REGULATED (although the regulations would differ somewhat between publicly and privately traded).

Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

... they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

Male and female yes, but those are not genders. They are sexes.

The very point of the modern construct of 'gender' was to isolate that which is social construct (masculine/feminine) from physiological sex (male/female). This really is not a difficult concept to grasp. Why is this such a challenge for you? [Rhetorical question: I realise you are not too stupid to understand the distinction, you are motivated to misunderstand].

Gender is not a social construct.

Doublethink! Gender, at least in the usage you to which are objecting (not grammatical gender etc), is a social construct by definition . Of course you might object to the usefulness of the concept, or its impact on the object of study (i.e. society), perhaps even its theoretical coherence, but just stamping your feet and insisting "black is white" is simply unintelligent.

It is noteworthy that the first link you supply does not make the error of your second link of conflating 'gender' with 'sex.' The anthropologists understand they are determining sex (which is, of course, highly correlated with gender, particularly in traditional societies*, but thankfully** also in ours). The ignorant error in the second link, if it is not ideologically motivated ignorance (but merely sloppy English), is probably due to a lack of relevant education: that anthropologists would not make this error, but forensic scientists might is telling.

While social constructs such as gender are not directly to be determined by looking at bones --one cannot examine the pelvis of a body from the 1950s and tell that being a nurse was considered a normal form of employment for women but not men --if you have a knowledge of 1950s society, in addition to the bones, you might reasonably infer questions of gender. Eg. you may be able to exclude the probability that the male (and presumably also masculine) skeleton you are examining was not a nurse by occupation ... or that he ordinary wore a dress ... or all those other facts of gender which are not determined (outside of culture) by physiological sex.

[*But not all traditional societies, note the Polynesian and Indian traditions of tripartite genders.]

[**If tranny sex is your thing you may not be as thankful as I am.]

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so let's say that I'm holding a black pen in my hand, but I would prefer to have a blue pen, and I tell people that my pen is blue.

Does this actually make my pen blue, or does it mean that I am a person holding a black pen who wishes they had a blue pen?

The physical configuration of a person has no correlation to the emotional or mental state of a person. I'm not saying mental illness, just mental state, having a black pen while wanting a blue pen does not make you mentally ill, neither does having a penis but wanting to have a vagina.

Having a black pen but wanting a blue one means you're a person with a black pen but wants a blue one, nothing more, nothing less. Having a penis but wanting to have a vagina makes you a man that wants to be a woman, nothing more, nothing less.

Sex and gender are both nouns referring to the same thing, the physical configuration of an organisms body.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Hylandr]

having a black pen while wanting a blue pen does not make you mentally ill

Having a black pen while *insisting everyone must call it a blue pen* makes you mentally ill

Thank you for the wonderful analogy to help highlight my point.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

Thank you for the wonderful analogy to help highlight my point.

Analogy to what? It certainly doesn't analogise the distinction between 'sex' and 'gender.'

What do you call the propensity of female humans in our culture to wear skirts and the propensity of of male humans not to? Because that is what is being referred to by the concept of 'gender.' Do you believe that this propensity is a physical property (inasmuch as 'black' or 'blue' are physical properties)? Do you believe the propensity for women to wear skirts is biologically determined? Do you think we will soon be able to point to a specific gene that encodes for skirt-wearing behaviour?

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Hylandr]

There is no distinction between sex and gender. Sex and gender are two words to describe the same thing.

Citation:
http://www.etymonline.com/inde...

What do you call the propensity of female humans in our culture to wear skirts and the propensity of of male humans not to? Because that is what is being referred to by the concept of 'gender.'

No, this is called 'culture'.
Roman armor and kilts destroy your entire argument regarding skirts.

Roman Armor Skirts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Scottish Kilts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Arabic Thawb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Just.Stop.Now. You're not doing the LGBT / Feminist movement any justice.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

Ok, so let's say that I'm holding a black pen in my hand ...

Silly attempt at an analogy ... what is supposed to stand for the physical state of being 'sex' and what is supposed to stand for the cultural practices which surround that physical state 'gender?'

Having a penis but wanting to have a vagina makes you a man that wants to be a woman, nothing more, nothing less.

Stop the obsession about wanting to have dick chopped off already. Jeebus ... you need only mention the word 'gender' and these guys immediately think the conversation is about trannies ... leave it off!

Sex and gender are both nouns referring to the same thing, the physical configuration of an organisms body.

'Blue' and 'sad' are both adjectives referring to the same thing, a negative emotional state.

When, OTOH, 'blue' is being used to indicate colour, or 'gender' is being used to indicate the social constructs which surround biological 'sex' the words no longer refer to the same thing. And when 'gender' is being used specifically to distinguish that which is biologically given from what is culturally supplied then insisting that "gender is not a social construct" is just like insisting that "blue is not a colour."

So once again ... In the relevant use of the word 'gender' is defined to mean that which "refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men," and this is done precisely because of the need to distinguish those culturally constructed aspects of masculinity and femininity (e.g. skirt wearing) from the physical sexual characteristics of male and female, it is no silly to insist that "the social construct gender is not a social construct."

You are not seriously insisting that skirt-wearing is a biologically encoded physical characteristic of women (and not of men) are you?

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

You're not doing the LGBT / Feminist movement any justice.

Neither are you.

There is no distinction between sex and gender. Sex and gender are two words to describe the same thing.

They can be used to mean the same thing but generally are not. The etymology notwithstanding, a check of almost any contemporary dictionary will qualify that 'gender' is "typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones."

But more to the point, it is the very usage of gender as social construct in distinction to biological sex, not some other less formal use, to which you are objecting. This one:

"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.
"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.
http://apps.who.int/gender/wha...

Roman Armor Skirts; Scottish Kilts; Arabic Thawb;

What?! You mean the propensity of skirts to be worn by women but not men, in our culture, is not universal? You mean construing skirt-wearing being feminine is a .... gasp ...social construct, and not biology? Aha!

Well done!

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Hylandr]

The etymology notwithstanding

Facts be damned...

http://apps.who.int/gender/wha... [who.int]

You're quoting a political entity rather than a factual entity.

Not happening.

What?! You mean the propensity of skirts to be worn by women but not men, in our culture, is not universal? You mean construing skirt-wearing being feminine is a .... gasp ...social construct, and not biology? Aha!

What in the ever loving hell are you on? It's a cultural fashion, skirts are detached from Gender.

Let's get this clear. Gender is not a social construct. It is what you were born with. If you think that dressing or looking like a woman will make you a woman you are deranged. It is an insult of the highest order to women and all that they put up with that their body puts them through.

Gender is not a social construct, it's the X or Y that you were born with. There is no mental retardation that will change that fact. You will just have a echo-chamber full of retarded people that think they are special somehow. And bluntly, I can think of a lot more productive activities if I really wanted to feel special.

Bye.

We are done here.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Hylandr]

I lied, almost done here.

One more little nugget for you.

http://www.dsm5.org/documents/...

71% of people with gender dysphoria will have some other mental health diagnosis in their lifetime.
http://www.webmd.com/mental-he...

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

That said I am going to assume you are a member of the 71% and recommend you see a doctor, and cease communications on this topic for the time being since you are obviously not well, and debating with the mentally ill is rarely productive.

It is with all sincerity that I wish you; Good luck.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

Facts be damned...

Nope, just the etymological fallacy. When you wrote "LGBT" did the 'G' mean 'happy?'

You're quoting a political entity rather than a factual entity.

I'm quoting one of the most widely accepted definitions of the distinction. What's more, you understand full well that this is how the term is being employed ... you're entering 'bad faith' territory here. But if you want authoritative, let's see what the OED has to say:

3 b. Psychol. and Sociol. (orig. U.S.). The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones ...

For which a 1945 example is given as an early usage:

Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 58 228 In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’.

What in the ever loving hell are you on? It's a cultural fashion, skirts are detached from Gender.

No, the cultural fashion is gender, it's as detached form sex.

Gender is not a social construct, it's the X or Y that you were born with.

No, X and Y are not, to use the OED defn: "social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones. " X and Y are not, to use the WHO defn, socially constructed roles &c. X and Y are very clearly biological.

What in the ever loving hell are you on?

One might ask the same of you. You know stuff. You know: 1. that wearing skirts is not universally considered feminine, but that this is a cultural given. You know: 2. that sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, feminists, public health specialists and countless other -ists use the word 'gender' to describe situation 1 above. How can you keep arguing that gender, in the particular sense of the word in which it describes that which is cultural and socially constructed in distinction to biological sex, is not socially constructed.

Your position is untenable.

Re:Ignorance is Strength

[Capsaicin]

I lied, almost done here.

Sorry gender dysphoria, despite your apparent obsession with it, is only tangentially relevant here.

Fucking Search Company?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you get the idea, I keep searching for fucking and I get nothing.

I GOT THE BEST IDEA FOR REDDIT SLASHDOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Just have one emoji of some testicles. Women like them more than men.

Deeeeeeeeeeeez nuts.

You people lost your fucking minds listening to Google dictate gender issues. It is a fucking search company that sells devices, and that sold out to the US government.

Make a second emoji of Eric Schmidt's face with rainbows and pixies around it and it can be the female one. No man likes that sellout cocksucker.

Reddit reddit Reddit reddit

Unicode

[rl117]

Maybe the Unicode consortium need to supplement the ZWJ character with an SJW character.

In all seriousness, while Unicode is intended to be universal, I don't think that bullshit emojis have a place in it. We have markup in addition to characters, not to mention SVG and other formats which can better represent them. They don't have to be in the Unicode standard.

Re:Unicode

[Pfhorrest]

Unicode has to interconvert with Japanese proprietary text encodings that support emoji (because unicode has to interconvert with every text encoding, that's its entire mission), therefore Unicode has to support emoji.

And if it has to support emoji and people are actually going to use them, it may as well do it right instead of whatever shit a handful of Japanese programmers felt like throwing in there.

We've all been waiting for these...

[Kirth]

...medieval punctuation marks of course.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charl...

Japanese programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't we just get the Japanese programmers away from the Unicode standard? It seems pretty clear that there is no meaningful or comprehensive purpose behind adding cartoon emojis to the standards. It is nothing but bloat that actually makes communication more difficult.

Re:Japanese programmers

[Pfhorrest]

It's not about Japanese programmers currently being involved in Unicode, it's that Unicode has to support everything that the programmers of some old Japanese text encodings decided to support, which is where the original emoji come from. And then if it has to support some emoji at all, it may as well do it right.

Yeah that should work

[m76]

Clearly the genders aren't equally represented in the workforce because there were no matching emojis until now.

Mum I want to be a welder girl, but I can't because there is no emoji for it.
Or
Mum I want to be a male nurse but I can't because there is no emoji for it.

Will women be demanding to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

... all the dangerous, and sometimes DEADLY jobs, that men do? Like mining, building high rises, working in slaughterhouses, oil rigs, steel plants, etc.etc?
Thought not.

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

All my life I have been waiting for a "welder" emoji. I will use it all the time. Wow!

What a waste of resources!

[LWATCDR]

I mean people used to make up emojis and now we have committees to from standards and graphic artists designing them and people debating them. Take the time and money and do something that matters even a little. I am still waiting for the one eyed bisexual Episcopalian Kangaroo emoji.

Where's the tranny emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the tranny emoji?

Re:Where's the tranny emoji?

[ebvwfbw]

Now you've done it. One that looks like a Ford, one that looks like a Chevy and one that looks like a Chystler tranny? What about the asian tranny's.

Where the default emojis male until now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't even know the default emojis where male. Since there also is a male modifier shouldn't the default be gender neutral, if gender equality is the goal that is? The only visual difference is short hair for male and long hair for female, which both could pass as gender neutral as far as I'm concerned. I'm a male with long hair. Which emoji should I choose to best express my emotions? So confusing! And take one of the main job categories, rock star, don't they all have long hair? A rockstar with short hair, male of female, it's just unnatural! Except if it's David Bowie, of course. Or perhaps Annie Lennox. And it's a good decision to let the rock star show the sign of the devil. That should exclude all christian rock stars who are just unnatural and not what the devil intended! Except if it's Ozzy Osbourne, of course. (I hope you read this at the Unicode Consortium and take notes.)

All this seems like a lot of work for just some silly things, like much else in the development of unicode lately. But I can't help to like some of it. Silliness can make things more fun and actually be an improvement some times.

Blow? Hand? Rim?

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs . . .

Just what kind of jobs are we talking about here?

If you need gender emoticons, you have no equality

[allo]

Just use fucking smileys. A head. Yellow, like no person looks like. Looking nice, clean and clear to understand.

But no. The smileys got debile like the "tears of joy" face, a parody of what they should tell. And the rest needed to get features like hair, which is associated with gender (do you see, how there is no equality, if you claim you need some smiley with pink shirt and long hair to identify it as female?).

So female = long hair, male = short hair

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this means that even for SJWs, females should have long hair ? And all coder females must wear glasses ?
What makes the "male" emoticons "male" ? Did they DNA-test them ?