This week brought news that code for about two hundred and seventy new emoji had been released by the Unicode Consortium, which manages the standards for how text appears in software products around the world. This means that the shorthand language of visual icons—prized by many, mocked by President Obama—is about to include more hearts, more facial expressions, new animals, and dozens of bland office-related symbols that you’ll never use.
What it won’t include, however, is a hot dog. This despite a campaign, including a petition addressed to the President (he hadn’t yet voiced his skepticism of emoji) led by Laura Ustick, the general manager of her family’s Superdawg Drive-In, in Wheeling, Illinois, outside of Chicago, whose cause was detailed this spring in the Wall Street Journal.
Word of the expanding emoji palette made me think of Ustick, and wonder how she and her fellow hot-dog evangelicals were handling the bad news. “Based on previous statements from the co-founder of the Unicode Consortium, such as ‘The problem with the hot-dog emoji is, what do you then want with the hot dog? Would we do one with ketchup or without?’ we knew it was a long shot,” she said in an e-mail. (Chicagoans, and others, deplore the use of ketchup on hot dogs.) “Even so, we had faith and rushed to the computer to scan the new list, which, despite some questionable additions, still did not include the hot-dog emoji.”
It falls to developers at places like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to render the universal code into specific visual expressions, so for now all we have are the Unicode descriptions of the new characters. Many seem to be obsolete already (“clamshell mobile phone,” “fax,” “old personal computer”), while it’s difficult to imagine how we lived without others for so long (“airplane departure,” “airplane arriving,” “book,” and, at last, “reversed hand with middle finger extended”). There are very few food items in the new batch, save for what is being described as a “hot pepper.”
I asked Ustick to frame her feelings in emoji. “There was no emoji response,” she said. “While a sad or crying face would have been appropriate, we thought not using an emoji sent a louder message of our disappointment with the announcement.”
Emoji began in Japan; the word means, basically, “picture letter” in Japanese. Many of the foods currently available—sushi, noodles, oden—connect back to those origins. The Unicode Consortium, meanwhile, is an international organization, and other emojis range from a dish of curry to a hamburger. I asked Ustick if the hot dog was perhaps too provincial, too American, for what have become emoji’s global speakers. “We were hoping that as a universal language, emoji would grow to include a universal sampling of different culturally relevant foods,” she said. Champions of a taco emoji were also disappointed this time around.
The Unicode Consortium has a submission procedure for people to suggest new emoji, but Ustick described the process as complicated and dauntingly technical. “Ultimately, we determined that our greatest impact would be felt on a grassroots level by generating more exposure for the missing hot-dog emoji, with the hope that we might encourage someone with the technical know-how to get involved and bring it home,” she said. “We’re still waiting for that person to materialize.”
While the world awaits its tech-savvy hot-dog messiah, we’re left searching for workarounds to ask our pals to meet us at Nathan’s, or to tell the world that we’re enjoying a seven-dollar dog at the ball game. I submitted a possible hack: [#image: /photos/59095122ebe912338a3726ed]
Ustick demurred, pointing out that the sweating face could be mistaken for a crying one. (Tears are bad for business.) Instead, she offered [#image: /photos/59095122ebe912338a3726f0]—which, she noted, “isn’t without its own deficiencies.” America’s favorite tubular meat loses much of its charm when rendered, menacingly, as “fire puppy.”
Illustration by Maximilian Bode.
