I've been keeping up with the Document Register and following some
of the discussions therein, especially regarding Emoji, and I remain
surprised with some of the bizarre suggestions. Not random people
suggesting weird emoji, but things from the ESC and UTC!
A lot can be summed up in the simple question, "Why doesn't anyone
listen to Charlotte Buff?" She has written, from what I have seen,
pretty cogently and clearly on various minefields that emoji
decisions are likely to be treading, and has been quite the opposite
of "entitled" or demanding of strange special characters. For the
most part, she has warned *against* encoding too much, lest covering
some special cases open up demand for covering all of them. What is
the UTC thinking, that hair variation can be reasonably covered, in
initial cases, by RED/CURLY/NONE/WHITE? Are these supposed to be
orthogonal? In which case, the instant question is how to handle
hair that is red and curly. If they can be combined, how do we
handle CURLY+NONE? Why are the more common colors (brown, black,
blond) left for future study?
Regarding
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18027-wg2-fdbk-response.pdf, I also
don't really see what the point of SOFTBALL is as distinct from
BASEBALL, especially since softballs I've seen are often the same
color as baseballs, and can be distinguished mainly by size—and
neither size _nor color_ is something reliably encoded in a Unicode
character (characters with colors in their names notwithstanding.
Glyphs are canonically foreground-vs-background markings, from what
I can tell.) A similar issue of color might apply to NAZAR, which,
without blue coloring, looks mostly like some form of target.
MAGNET kind of has to be horseshoe-shaped. Otherwise it's just a
cylinder. The horseshoe shape is indeed already obsolete, as it was
used mainly to keep old alnico magnets from demagnetizing
themselves, and modern magnets (especially NdFeB magnets) have no
need of such gentling. But cartoons for decades represented magnets
with the distinctive horseshoe shape (with the ends marked off, so
it doesn't look like an actual shoe-for-a-horse), and any kid in the
appropriate culture would instantly recognize such a shape as a
magnet. (Cultural specificity of emoji is a longer rant I may
inflict on this list. Briefly, nothing about emoji is "culturally
neutral" and it's ridiculous to make them so.) Even though
technology changes, our symbols often remain. Telephones are no
longer shaped like U+1F4DE TELEPHONE RECEIVER or U+1F57D RIGHT HAND
TELEPHONE RECEIVER or U+260E BLACK TELEPHONE or U+1F57E WHITE
TOUCHTONE TELEPHONE, but the symbols are widely recognized.
ERLENMEYER FLASK is certainly a strong and recognizable science
symbol.
This circles back again to some of Charlotte Buff's points. A
"bride" is a culturally-recognizable symbol, with specific graphic
cues (bridal gown, which is unlike other dresses in use; veil) that
we associate with a bride and weddings, specifically. The "male
counterpart" of a bride is not a "man in tuxedo." A man in a tuxedo
is a man in a tuxedo, and might be the head waiter. It happens that
Western culture lacks recognizable cues that signify "man about to
be married"; that symbol just isn't representable the way "bride"
is. Show any European or American (and probably Japanese) kid a
picture of a bride, and they'll say it's a bride, no matter what
other pictures you showed them before. Show them a picture of a
groom—without any other context—and they might recognize it as a
waiter, or a maitre-d', or a person going to a fancy ball... Much
the same argument regarding kid-recognizability can be made with
respect to Santa Claus/Father Christmas vs "Mother Christmas." Any
time of the year, in any context, any kid will recognize Santa
Claus. Mrs. Claus, on the other hand, shown out of context, would
be a real stumper. I could easily see someone guessing she was
Mother Goose. (Actually the whole "show it to some random kids"
test is not a bad idea for judging the sensibility of proposed
emoji.)
There are a bunch of cultural visual cues we recognize for a variety
of things, some of which aren't yet emoji (or emoji sequences) but
likely could/should be. Certainly something like BURGLAR or THIEF
would be recognizable by the telltale mask and hat (person + mask
might be a good sequence—if we had a "mask" emoji, which we don't
and likely should); CONVICT by the striped clothes. (Not all the
things we like to talk about are things we approve of.)
OK, enough rambling for now. Back to your usual discussions.
~mark
Received on Wed Jan 17 2018 - 20:31:34 CST