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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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/ .
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.)
Readit News
The commercial petitions for taco played no part in its selection; the taco was approved based on evidence in its proposal, not the petitions.
https://www.change.org/p/unicode-consortium-the-taco-emoji-n...
(I mean, if we can have 'taco'…)
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.
I suppose you could start a popular open source project and name it the word you want to become an emoji.
(/s because from TFA "Petitions are not considered as evidence since they are too easily skewed")
Internet: "Boaty McBoatface."
Boat owner: "Democracy is a mistake."
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Let there be ten thousand cat breed emojis via combining characters!
(It would be much more fun if they'd just represented them as citrus hybrids with ZWJs.)
Deleted Comment
> 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
No elephant -> toss immediately. Save time.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1053/