Cajun and Zydeco musicians REJOICE!! Soon we will have an accordion emoji! Woooo! I’m not even sure why I’m so excited about it, it’s not like it was made with South Louisiana in mind… or maybe it was? It doesn’t matter!
Emojis have enabled us to insert more feelings and emotion into our typed words than ever before… Just when you thought they had one for everything already, the Unicode Consortium announced 117 new ones, coming later this year!
Some of the highlights include the accordion, a ninja, bubble tea (Asian drink with tapioca pearls, mmmm!), transgender flag, a toilet plunger, a magic wand . . . and a non-gendered Santa Claus? *shrugs*
One of them I am oddly excited about is the needle and thread emoji. It seems that as the years go by, I find fewer people who share my hobby of sewing clothing and costumes, probably because of how cheap it is to order clothes from Amazon and Wish. But the fact that there’s an emoji that represents my favorite hobby reminds me that the art of sewing is still alive and kicking!
Something that this new wave of emojis focuses heavily on is gender. They’ve added the transgender flag and transgender symbol, along with non-gendered versions of a person in a tux, a person in a wedding dress, a person feeding a baby, and possibly the most unexpected one… the non-gendered Santa Claus. Even though they are just emojis, they represent diversity, modernity, and a departure from the antiquated, closed-minded views of our puritanical ancestors. It’s truly a beautiful thing.
Of course, there are some new additions that leave us scratching our head a bit, wondering when we will ever have a use for them, such as the human heart and anatomical lungs… I guess maybe if you’re a surgeon they may be useful? Speaking of odd emojis, I still don’t understand how the Moai Head Easter Island statue thing got its own emoji. I like to use it anyway, just to confuse people.