Emojis aren’t just for sending cute messages anymore.
One of the buzziest features of Apple’s iOS 9.1 update this week is the inclusion of 184 new emoji characters, including a taco, a unicorn, and, yes, the middle finger. So now iPhone users can make plans for lunch, imagine whimsical fairy-tale creatures, and curse at each other without using any actual words.
Another addition is a skin-tone modifier, which allows users to create avatars that look more like themselves.
Emojis are standardized across multiple platforms by a group called the Unicode Consortium, which blessed the recent iOS update. The group exists to ensure that it is possible for the same emojis to be used across different operating systems. Without this standardization, you couldn’t send a taco emoji from an iPhone to your friend who uses an Android, and that friend would never know that you wanted to say “taco” to them.
Next May, the Consortium will vote on the addition of 67 more proposed emojis, include a dancing man, a selfie-taking arm, and a cucumber. That cucumber debate sounds like it could get prickly.