8 ms·

'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

58 points by furcyd 8y ago

mirimir 8y ago
OK, so I'm male, and sometimes I'm clumsy, or act too impulsively. So if I used emojis, this one would be about "Oh shit, I'm bleeding again." Head wounds are the most impressive, in my experience. Just a scratch, and there's blood everywhere. I've shown up at meetings, with blood running down my forehead. But hey, they heal quickly, too.
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
It still seems a bit euphemistic and doesn't accomplish the goal, but a good step in the right direction I suppose.
gnarbarian 8y ago
I can't wait to see what the abortion emoji looks like.
- daeken 8y ago
  Yes, because those are clearly the same thing. A completely natural, healthy process, and a medical procedure. I know that when I see a smiley face emoji, I think that we should have a tooth extraction emoji.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    We have an emoji for both, actually. It's U+0020, "SPACE".
- Chazprime 8y ago
  Because we need that...why?
saagarjha 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is just…weird. That would be like asking for a used toilet paper emoji–it's super specific and not all that pleasant.
- piokoch 8y ago
  In the first place it is sad that "emojis", "emoticons", etc. are so broadly used. It only shows how writing skills are deteriorating. Mark Twain or Hemingway didn't need emojis to express sadness or humor.
  - iagooar 8y ago
    Are you really comparing regular people to Twain and Hemingway?
  - Zarath 8y ago
    Are you kidding? Pictures and "emojis" are far more informationally dense than words are. If anything this shows how quickly language is evolving when facilitated by instantaneous information transfer of near unlimited amounts of data.
    - _ZeD_ 8y ago
      Don't be fooled by the pretty images. While painting/photos can express multiple, deep emotions, they are unique. The value added by a copy it's none. Moreover emojis are for 99%+ simple nouns ("hand", "pig", "dog", "smile"). And for thing that are not nouns, you still need to understand that they are logograms, with a "fixed" meaning. Kanjis are not better than Romans - they are just different alphabets. And if you think about it long enough you will find that there is already a 1-to-1 mapping behind the "emojis" and the words (by definition, the unicode is the mapping of numbers - the code point, to meanings - the name, and to images - the pictogram, so you can have U+1F436 associated to 'DOG FACE' and ) , so they are "informationally dense equals" between each others.
plainOldText 8y ago
Also: > A new "people holding hands" emoji will let users mix and match > different skin tones and genders, with 171 possible combinations.[1] This reminds me of the article "Code Inflation". [2] [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples-and-disability-friendly-emojis-coming-soon-to-smartphones https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples... [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573
- sgift 8y ago
  "Code inflation" talks about programs expanding even when they already can do everything needed (e.g. true going from empty to 8k bytes). That's not the case here. These combinations didn't exist before, so the functionality is expanded, not just the code size.
  - plainOldText 8y ago
    The true program in the article was merely an example to illustrate one particular instance of code inflation. Unless it is some incredibly simple program like true/false, most code is always designed to be evolved and to acquire new functionality over time. The key is to know when to stop, and add functionality in a sensical fashion. I would argue most of the new emoji combinations supplied will rarely, if ever be used, so just because one can add them, doesn't mean they should.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    I love emoji but they aren't needed for anything. You can always discuss periods using ordinary words. I have to admit that whilst emoji are fun the apparently endless growth in them combined with the way they break essentially every assumed invariant about text and thus create explosions of bugs all over previously working software is ... a bit concerning. At this point, why not just define a set of code points that let you embed an SVG into the character stream? It'd result in fewer cases of broken text where new emoji are rendered by apps that are all of six months out of date. Actually defining an endless series of semantic code points just seems like a dead end for the Unicode Consortium that opens it up to relentless attacks by activists and political nonsense because it's changed its mandate from encoding languages to defining new ones.
blululu 8y ago
I'm not really sure if these new emoji are beneficial to the medium as a whole. In many ways the trend toward more inclusive emojis is a good thing (the addition of male/female and skin color variations was a huge improvement), but there is also a cost of emoji bloat. According to the article, the new blood drop emoji is justified because someone would need to cobble together some sequence of emoji to express the same concept. In many ways this problem is also the very reason that people enjoy using Emojis. The limitations of the medium requires creativity and humor from both the creator and the receiver. Having highly specified emojis can also take away from the fun of this, while also making it more difficult to explore the full set of available emoji.
dvt 8y ago
Outrage culture at its finest. NPR cites a few tweets. Let's analyze: [1] has 13 likes; [2] has 8. No one cares about emojis this much. Real activists (not Twitter keyboard warriors) don't care about emojis, they care about, you know, actual social progress. It took this group like 2 years to get 54,600 signatures when joke petitions like [3] are in the same ballpark. I mean, give me a break. But articles like this are built from the ground up to (a) get clicks and (b) get people fired up in the comments section to, you guessed it, get more clicks. Journalism, if you can even call it that anymore, is in a sorry state right now. And instead of proving Trump's inane "fake news" diatribes wrong, we have highly-respected news outlets essentially printing garbage like this. [1] https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E869632011316727808&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src... [2] https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1093430548171841541&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_sr... [3] https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secure-resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016 https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secu...
- mulmen 8y ago
  The existence of this story and any flaws that may or may not exist in it do not represent the state of journalism as a whole.
  - dvt 8y ago
    Actually they do; this kind of click-bait yellow journalism has become the norm, not the exception. From Breitbart to Huffington Post, they all do it.
    - mulmen 8y ago
      Neither Beritbart nor Huffington post are particularly reputable journalistic outlets, they're both at the extremes of the political spectrum. My point is that you can't condemn the entire discipline of journalism based on a single story.
black-tea 8y ago
Period activists? There are people who dedicate their entire lives to increase human rights for others. Those are activists. What is getting a picture of a drop of blood on my phone supposed to achieve? I know women have periods. What am I supposed to do about it? Keep your problems to yourself.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Do you know that girls are excluded from school when they have their period? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seclusion_of_girls_at_puberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seclusion_of_girls_at_puberty Or that girls avoid school because they cannot afford tampons or pads? This doesn't just happen in poor countries, it happens in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-day-period-girls-missed-school-uk-sanitary-products-menstruation-a8244396.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-day-...
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    I‘m sure that adding a blood drop Emoji is the most efficient solution for these problems. m-(
    - DanBC 8y ago
      If it helps women and girls talk about it then yes, it's one of the small things that will help.
  - black-tea 8y ago
    Do you know that in the UK girls consistently do better at schools than boys year after year? Whatever problems they have it doesn't seem to affect them much. Worry about your own problems. 75% of suicides in the UK are men. 70% of homeless in the UK are men. This is happening while people like you are busy worrying about whether women can effectively communicate about periods on whatsapp.
    - aeredhel 8y ago
logicchains 8y ago
"2^16 characters should be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates, probably, when adding UCS2 support to Windows.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
It seems virtually certain that the "drop of blood" is more useful for issuing threats (jocular or serious) than for talking about menstruation, for the simple reason that there's a lot more threatening than there is talking about menstruation. Calling blood "the symbol of the period" is overreaching a bit.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  A drop of blood is a traditional symbol for blood donors, and I wager that is the context where it will end up seeing the most use. That is certainly how I would use it.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    But this is the only blood emoji there is. A drop of blood may be a traditional symbol for blood donors, but blood, the substance, is a traditional symbol for all kinds of different things. And I'd expect this to get used anywhere someone wants to reference "blood" in a cutesy way.
    - KozmoNau7 8y ago
      It's very specifically a drop of blood, not a splatter or a smear or a stain. Maybe it'll be used more in context of vampires.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    There are a lot more women than there are blood donors. Periods, something that directly affects half the population at some point in their life, is going to be a much more common point of discussion than donating blood.
    - stinos 8y ago
      Your statement only holds if women talk about their periods. Which depending on culture, how they were raised, personality, ... definitely is not the case for all of them.
tzjmetron 8y ago
Stupid.
mahgnous 8y ago
WTF is a period activist? People have lost their damn minds.
beaker52 8y ago
I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know what equality or inclusivity really mean.
- josteink 8y ago
  They don’t care. The only thing they care about is virtue-signaling. With our current outrage-culture, it’s literally a competition in virtue-signaling at this point. When you look at the movement from this point of view, lots of the utterly irrational behavior starts to make sense.
  - rfw 8y ago
    Dismissing a position as "virtue signaling" is fundamentally lazy. Ironically, aren't you "virtue signaling" right now about how you're sincere enough to be able to look down on people who do it?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Virtue signaling is contagious; it infects everything that touches it. My response here will be seen as virtue signaling too, simply because the concept was invoked upthread. Personally, I see a problem less with signals and more with how people make them and respond to them. Aforementioned attempt to appropriate a generic symbol for specific movement is an example of hostile behaviour. Sane people would roll their eyes and carry on with their days, but on the Internet, it starts to become dangerous to let this nonsense pass unchallenged, as then you might find yourself on the business end of Twitter pitchforks after saying something you're unaware that some activist group apparently has dibs on.
    - josteink 8y ago
      > aren't you "virtue signaling" right now about how you're sincere enough to be able to look down on people who do it? No. I’m just making an observation about a supposed movement’s true motives. I am in no way trying to appear superior or “better” (more virtuous) as a result of it.
josteink 8y ago
While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc) are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are reinventing ideographs, poorly and politically. Quite fascinating, but also incredibly sad.
- FabHK 8y ago
  No. A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so much in my view: 馬. B) Nobody is proposing to replace all words with hackneyed emojis. (“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a reference to an owl.) C) The notion that CJK characters represent ideas, not words & sounds, (embedded in the term “ideograph”) has been extensively criticised, eg by John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_a...
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings. [1] Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics and no pronunciation or syntax. [1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but that's incidental to the way they function.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Egyptian hieroglyph for "horse": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6.png https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6...
- mirimir 8y ago
planktonite 8y ago
I don’t understand why emojis are a part of Unicode. Unicode was an effort to unify the world under one character set, which is a grand and historic idea. Emojis are not grand and they will sour with time and I hate them. Why did we add all this nonsense mush to the fundamental literary foundation of human civilization? It’s only logical to make a fundamental and foundational thing as simple and intuitive as possible. Emojis were a huge mistake and one that is now baked into human society probably forever.
apexalpha 8y ago
So a bunch of IT males discuss whether or not women discuss periods... This thread could use some diversity now I think.
- nisuni 8y ago
  Are you assuming their gender?
salex89 8y ago
Funny how these things can have different meanings. Here I read menstruation, threat and what not. If somebody sends this to me, I would instantly think:"Going to donate blood?". This droplet emoticon , or a variation of it, is very often used as the blood bank/transfusion center logo on my country, and based on Google, in some surrounding. You can see it around on t-shirts (donors get a t-shirt and they wear them proudly), vans for gathering blood away from the center, public announcements and calls.... Basically a like a logo, not sure how official. I felt humble the second I've seen this emoji.
- int_19h 8y ago
  FWIW, it's used in that manner in every single country I've lived in, US included. Also, it looks like this is exactly how they got it adopted: "Then in September 2018, Plan UK teamed up with NHS Blood and Transplant, the U.K. government's blood and organ donations service, and submitted a new proposal for a blood drop emoji. Unicode selected it as an official emoji in February."
- thinkingemote 8y ago
  It's like a word. It can be used in sentences to mean other things. To you, seeing it makes you feel humble on it's own - but emojis are hardly ever used alone. I would imagine it being used in a variety of ways to communicate blood. I imagine some might not make people feel positive about it's use. That's language for you!
buttholesurfer 8y ago
How did we ever survive without a period emoji?!
Waterluvian 8y ago
What perplexes me is the level of ignorance of the people pushing these. You don't get to decide how people use emojis. That kind of evolves naturally. I'm more concerned with it being yet another thing activists get upset over when people start "using it wrong." I just wanted to communicate that I had Chipotle last night.
- Jonnax 8y ago
  The article doesn't even say this. The story is that a group was pushing for the creation of an emoji. They wanted underwear with a droplet symbol on it, but Unicode only approved a blood droplet. Of course it can be used for other things and that's what the quote from that group said, expressing their disappointment. I'm confused as to why most the comments here seem to outraged about activists trying to own the emoji when that wasn't mentioned at all in the article and sounds ridiculous.
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago
  I don't think the two organisations 'pushing' these - the UK national health service and a humanitarian organisation - expect that the emojis will or should be used solely to represent menstruation. But they will make that a possibility for the first time. And the likelihood is that that will be their dominant use. By doing so, they hope to make talking about menstruation more normal. Your comment has almost nothing to do with the actual article. It reads like pure reaction: you don't like feminism, so you don't like this.
jimmcslim 8y ago
Something that seems to be missing from both the article, and the discussion here, is the idea I've heard elsewhere, that to signal menstruation you would combine the blood droplet with a moon emoji. The blood droplet emoji by itself has plenty of other uses; blood donation, etc.
faissaloo 8y ago
Emoji is the mistake that will kill Unicode mark my words.

58 points by furcyd 8y ago

OK, so I'm male, and sometimes I'm clumsy, or act too impulsively. So if I used emojis, this one would be about "Oh shit, I'm bleeding again." Head wounds are the most impressive, in my experience. Just a scratch, and there's blood everywhere. I've shown up at meetings, with blood running down my forehead. But hey, they heal quickly, too.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

It still seems a bit euphemistic and doesn't accomplish the goal, but a good step in the right direction I suppose.

gnarbarian 8y ago

I can't wait to see what the abortion emoji looks like.

daeken 8y ago
Yes, because those are clearly the same thing. A completely natural, healthy process, and a medical procedure. I know that when I see a smiley face emoji, I think that we should have a tooth extraction emoji.
- int_19h 8y ago
  We have an emoji for both, actually. It's U+0020, "SPACE".
Chazprime 8y ago
Because we need that...why?

saagarjha 8y ago

I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is just…weird. That would be like asking for a used toilet paper emoji–it's super specific and not all that pleasant.

piokoch 8y ago
In the first place it is sad that "emojis", "emoticons", etc. are so broadly used. It only shows how writing skills are deteriorating. Mark Twain or Hemingway didn't need emojis to express sadness or humor.
- iagooar 8y ago
  Are you really comparing regular people to Twain and Hemingway?
- Zarath 8y ago
  Are you kidding? Pictures and "emojis" are far more informationally dense than words are. If anything this shows how quickly language is evolving when facilitated by instantaneous information transfer of near unlimited amounts of data.
  - _ZeD_ 8y ago
    Don't be fooled by the pretty images. While painting/photos can express multiple, deep emotions, they are unique. The value added by a copy it's none. Moreover emojis are for 99%+ simple nouns ("hand", "pig", "dog", "smile"). And for thing that are not nouns, you still need to understand that they are logograms, with a "fixed" meaning. Kanjis are not better than Romans - they are just different alphabets. And if you think about it long enough you will find that there is already a 1-to-1 mapping behind the "emojis" and the words (by definition, the unicode is the mapping of numbers - the code point, to meanings - the name, and to images - the pictogram, so you can have U+1F436 associated to 'DOG FACE' and ) , so they are "informationally dense equals" between each others.

plainOldText 8y ago

Also: > A new "people holding hands" emoji will let users mix and match > different skin tones and genders, with 171 possible combinations.[1] This reminds me of the article "Code Inflation". [2] [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples-and-disability-friendly-emojis-coming-soon-to-smartphones https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples... [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573

sgift 8y ago
"Code inflation" talks about programs expanding even when they already can do everything needed (e.g. true going from empty to 8k bytes). That's not the case here. These combinations didn't exist before, so the functionality is expanded, not just the code size.
- plainOldText 8y ago
  The true program in the article was merely an example to illustrate one particular instance of code inflation. Unless it is some incredibly simple program like true/false, most code is always designed to be evolved and to acquire new functionality over time. The key is to know when to stop, and add functionality in a sensical fashion. I would argue most of the new emoji combinations supplied will rarely, if ever be used, so just because one can add them, doesn't mean they should.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I love emoji but they aren't needed for anything. You can always discuss periods using ordinary words. I have to admit that whilst emoji are fun the apparently endless growth in them combined with the way they break essentially every assumed invariant about text and thus create explosions of bugs all over previously working software is ... a bit concerning. At this point, why not just define a set of code points that let you embed an SVG into the character stream? It'd result in fewer cases of broken text where new emoji are rendered by apps that are all of six months out of date. Actually defining an endless series of semantic code points just seems like a dead end for the Unicode Consortium that opens it up to relentless attacks by activists and political nonsense because it's changed its mandate from encoding languages to defining new ones.

blululu 8y ago

I'm not really sure if these new emoji are beneficial to the medium as a whole. In many ways the trend toward more inclusive emojis is a good thing (the addition of male/female and skin color variations was a huge improvement), but there is also a cost of emoji bloat. According to the article, the new blood drop emoji is justified because someone would need to cobble together some sequence of emoji to express the same concept. In many ways this problem is also the very reason that people enjoy using Emojis. The limitations of the medium requires creativity and humor from both the creator and the receiver. Having highly specified emojis can also take away from the fun of this, while also making it more difficult to explore the full set of available emoji.

dvt 8y ago

Outrage culture at its finest. NPR cites a few tweets. Let's analyze: [1] has 13 likes; [2] has 8. No one cares about emojis this much. Real activists (not Twitter keyboard warriors) don't care about emojis, they care about, you know, actual social progress. It took this group like 2 years to get 54,600 signatures when joke petitions like [3] are in the same ballpark. I mean, give me a break. But articles like this are built from the ground up to (a) get clicks and (b) get people fired up in the comments section to, you guessed it, get more clicks. Journalism, if you can even call it that anymore, is in a sorry state right now. And instead of proving Trump's inane "fake news" diatribes wrong, we have highly-respected news outlets essentially printing garbage like this. [1] https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E869632011316727808&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src... [2] https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1093430548171841541&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_sr... [3] https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secure-resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016 https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secu...

mulmen 8y ago
The existence of this story and any flaws that may or may not exist in it do not represent the state of journalism as a whole.
- dvt 8y ago
  Actually they do; this kind of click-bait yellow journalism has become the norm, not the exception. From Breitbart to Huffington Post, they all do it.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    Neither Beritbart nor Huffington post are particularly reputable journalistic outlets, they're both at the extremes of the political spectrum. My point is that you can't condemn the entire discipline of journalism based on a single story.

black-tea 8y ago

Period activists? There are people who dedicate their entire lives to increase human rights for others. Those are activists. What is getting a picture of a drop of blood on my phone supposed to achieve? I know women have periods. What am I supposed to do about it? Keep your problems to yourself.

DanBC 8y ago
Do you know that girls are excluded from school when they have their period? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seclusion_of_girls_at_puberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seclusion_of_girls_at_puberty Or that girls avoid school because they cannot afford tampons or pads? This doesn't just happen in poor countries, it happens in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-day-period-girls-missed-school-uk-sanitary-products-menstruation-a8244396.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-day-...
- lazyjones 8y ago
  I‘m sure that adding a blood drop Emoji is the most efficient solution for these problems. m-(
  - DanBC 8y ago
    If it helps women and girls talk about it then yes, it's one of the small things that will help.
- black-tea 8y ago
  Do you know that in the UK girls consistently do better at schools than boys year after year? Whatever problems they have it doesn't seem to affect them much. Worry about your own problems. 75% of suicides in the UK are men. 70% of homeless in the UK are men. This is happening while people like you are busy worrying about whether women can effectively communicate about periods on whatsapp.
  - aeredhel 8y ago

logicchains 8y ago

"2^16 characters should be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates, probably, when adding UCS2 support to Windows.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

It seems virtually certain that the "drop of blood" is more useful for issuing threats (jocular or serious) than for talking about menstruation, for the simple reason that there's a lot more threatening than there is talking about menstruation. Calling blood "the symbol of the period" is overreaching a bit.

KozmoNau7 8y ago
A drop of blood is a traditional symbol for blood donors, and I wager that is the context where it will end up seeing the most use. That is certainly how I would use it.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  But this is the only blood emoji there is. A drop of blood may be a traditional symbol for blood donors, but blood, the substance, is a traditional symbol for all kinds of different things. And I'd expect this to get used anywhere someone wants to reference "blood" in a cutesy way.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    It's very specifically a drop of blood, not a splatter or a smear or a stain. Maybe it'll be used more in context of vampires.
- onion2k 8y ago
  There are a lot more women than there are blood donors. Periods, something that directly affects half the population at some point in their life, is going to be a much more common point of discussion than donating blood.
  - stinos 8y ago
    Your statement only holds if women talk about their periods. Which depending on culture, how they were raised, personality, ... definitely is not the case for all of them.

tzjmetron 8y ago

Stupid.

mahgnous 8y ago

WTF is a period activist? People have lost their damn minds.

beaker52 8y ago

I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know what equality or inclusivity really mean.

josteink 8y ago
They don’t care. The only thing they care about is virtue-signaling. With our current outrage-culture, it’s literally a competition in virtue-signaling at this point. When you look at the movement from this point of view, lots of the utterly irrational behavior starts to make sense.
- rfw 8y ago
  Dismissing a position as "virtue signaling" is fundamentally lazy. Ironically, aren't you "virtue signaling" right now about how you're sincere enough to be able to look down on people who do it?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Virtue signaling is contagious; it infects everything that touches it. My response here will be seen as virtue signaling too, simply because the concept was invoked upthread. Personally, I see a problem less with signals and more with how people make them and respond to them. Aforementioned attempt to appropriate a generic symbol for specific movement is an example of hostile behaviour. Sane people would roll their eyes and carry on with their days, but on the Internet, it starts to become dangerous to let this nonsense pass unchallenged, as then you might find yourself on the business end of Twitter pitchforks after saying something you're unaware that some activist group apparently has dibs on.
  - josteink 8y ago
    > aren't you "virtue signaling" right now about how you're sincere enough to be able to look down on people who do it? No. I’m just making an observation about a supposed movement’s true motives. I am in no way trying to appear superior or “better” (more virtuous) as a result of it.

josteink 8y ago

While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc) are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are reinventing ideographs, poorly and politically. Quite fascinating, but also incredibly sad.

FabHK 8y ago
No. A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so much in my view: 馬. B) Nobody is proposing to replace all words with hackneyed emojis. (“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a reference to an owl.) C) The notion that CJK characters represent ideas, not words & sounds, (embedded in the term “ideograph”) has been extensively criticised, eg by John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_a...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings. [1] Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics and no pronunciation or syntax. [1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but that's incidental to the way they function.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Egyptian hieroglyph for "horse": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6.png https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6...
mirimir 8y ago

planktonite 8y ago

I don’t understand why emojis are a part of Unicode. Unicode was an effort to unify the world under one character set, which is a grand and historic idea. Emojis are not grand and they will sour with time and I hate them. Why did we add all this nonsense mush to the fundamental literary foundation of human civilization? It’s only logical to make a fundamental and foundational thing as simple and intuitive as possible. Emojis were a huge mistake and one that is now baked into human society probably forever.

apexalpha 8y ago

So a bunch of IT males discuss whether or not women discuss periods... This thread could use some diversity now I think.

nisuni 8y ago
Are you assuming their gender?

salex89 8y ago

Funny how these things can have different meanings. Here I read menstruation, threat and what not. If somebody sends this to me, I would instantly think:"Going to donate blood?". This droplet emoticon , or a variation of it, is very often used as the blood bank/transfusion center logo on my country, and based on Google, in some surrounding. You can see it around on t-shirts (donors get a t-shirt and they wear them proudly), vans for gathering blood away from the center, public announcements and calls.... Basically a like a logo, not sure how official. I felt humble the second I've seen this emoji.

int_19h 8y ago
FWIW, it's used in that manner in every single country I've lived in, US included. Also, it looks like this is exactly how they got it adopted: "Then in September 2018, Plan UK teamed up with NHS Blood and Transplant, the U.K. government's blood and organ donations service, and submitted a new proposal for a blood drop emoji. Unicode selected it as an official emoji in February."
thinkingemote 8y ago
It's like a word. It can be used in sentences to mean other things. To you, seeing it makes you feel humble on it's own - but emojis are hardly ever used alone. I would imagine it being used in a variety of ways to communicate blood. I imagine some might not make people feel positive about it's use. That's language for you!

buttholesurfer 8y ago

How did we ever survive without a period emoji?!

Waterluvian 8y ago

What perplexes me is the level of ignorance of the people pushing these. You don't get to decide how people use emojis. That kind of evolves naturally. I'm more concerned with it being yet another thing activists get upset over when people start "using it wrong." I just wanted to communicate that I had Chipotle last night.

Jonnax 8y ago
The article doesn't even say this. The story is that a group was pushing for the creation of an emoji. They wanted underwear with a droplet symbol on it, but Unicode only approved a blood droplet. Of course it can be used for other things and that's what the quote from that group said, expressing their disappointment. I'm confused as to why most the comments here seem to outraged about activists trying to own the emoji when that wasn't mentioned at all in the article and sounds ridiculous.
Emma_Goldman 8y ago
I don't think the two organisations 'pushing' these - the UK national health service and a humanitarian organisation - expect that the emojis will or should be used solely to represent menstruation. But they will make that a possibility for the first time. And the likelihood is that that will be their dominant use. By doing so, they hope to make talking about menstruation more normal. Your comment has almost nothing to do with the actual article. It reads like pure reaction: you don't like feminism, so you don't like this.

jimmcslim 8y ago

Something that seems to be missing from both the article, and the discussion here, is the idea I've heard elsewhere, that to signal menstruation you would combine the blood droplet with a moon emoji. The blood droplet emoji by itself has plenty of other uses; blood donation, etc.

faissaloo 8y ago

Emoji is the mistake that will kill Unicode mark my words.