Just when you were getting used to the last round of new emojis, there’s a fresh new batch for you. By this point, things are getting, uh, pretty specific. They’ve covered all the bases, they’ve worked on making them more gender-diverse and racially diverse, so all that’s left is… the merman:
Thank God we finally have a merman.
Emoji 5.0 also brings with it a whole stack of other mythical creatures, which will be used for when you’re chatting shit on Tinder about Lord of the Rings, or when you’re roasting the shortest member of your group chat for being a “little elf bitch” (G’day Andy).
It also includes a more diverse range of people, including a woman wearing a hijab, a woman breastfeeding, an older person and a bloke with a beard. Bearded blokes have been denied emoji representation for far, far too long, obviously.
If you’re someone who cannot discuss specific activities in your life without some kind of visual representation, you’ll be glad to know there’s now a rockclimbing emoji too. I am counting down the moments until it becomes a stand-in for some kind of depraved sex act:
The Unicode Consortium puts out these guidelines for software developers to interpret, so it may not look exactly this way when it eventually lands on your phone – i.e. the fact the Apple version of a gun is the frankly pathetic green water pistol. Keep an eye out of these bad boys when they land on your device this year.
Source: Emoji Consortium.
Photo: Emoji Consortium.
