Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Even with these expansions, the official Unicode process is slow and deliberative by design. At its core, Unicode is still a unique, uniform, universal encoding system. The goal is to create symbols that work on every device in the world long into the future. No more blank boxes. This means that once Unicode adds a symbol, they never remove it—doing so would defeat the purpose of a unified standard. That’s also why Unicode doesn’t accept emoji proposals for celebrities and pop culture references. They’d be fun for a while, but our great-grandchildren won’t really need their keyboards cluttered with the faces of one-hit wonders from the early twenty-first century. To get around this, there are individual apps that use an emoji aesthetic with larger, more of-the-moment pictures, which are sent as normal image files rather than encoded like letters, known as customizable emoji keyboards and sticker apps. Plus of course, there are still gifs, and even the regular kinds of images that you find or make for yourself.