No menu items!

COSTA RICA'S LEADING ENGLISH LANGUAGE NEWSPAPER

HomeTopicsScience and TechMicrosoft Middle-Finger Emoji — what's holding up everyone else?

Microsoft Middle-Finger Emoji — what’s holding up everyone else?

When Microsoft released its Windows 10 operating system for free in 190 countries Wednesday, it also gave the world the finger. Literally.

The new operating system is the first, and thus far the only, to include support for the “Reversed Hand with Middle Finger Extended” emoji — aka, the middle finger. As Emojipedia reports, despite the fact that Unicode, the global standards organization for emoji, made the character available more than a year ago, most tech companies have been really, really skittish about giving this particular emoji a go.

It’s odd to see major tech companies, like Apple and Google, assume the role of propriety police. It is, admittedly, in keeping with some of their other moralistic design choices: Both iPhone and Android phones don’t recognize swear words, for instance, and Apple’s official dictionary purportedly excludes thousands of other “controversial” words, besides: things like abortion, prostitution, pornography and suicide.

Let’s leave aside, for a second, the issue of whether software should even have that kind of soft-censorship power. There’s another argument to be made against Apple and Google’s finger-wagging: Namely, that the finger isn’t all that offensive in 2015.

Certainly the gesture raises eyebrows, and tempers, in many more polite circles. But it’s also become a more casual expression of protest, annoyance, excitement and rage, deployed readily by everyone from politicians and government ministers to athletes and celebrities. The middle finger has become “so well ingrained in everyday life in this country and others,” the law professor Ira Robbins told the BBC, that it simply doesn’t carry quite the same shock now as it did in, oh, 400 B.C.

Alas, change comes slowly — even in tech. Case in point: Windows 10 will display the middle-finger emoji if you view the character on a website or copy/paste it from somewhere else. But it will still not include the character in its built-in emoji keyboard. At least, not yet.

Dewey writes The Post’s The Intersect web channel covering digital and Internet culture.

© 2015, The Washington Post

Trending Now

El Salvador Retries Environmentalists Over 1989 Wartime Killing

A new trial against five Salvadoran environmentalists, accused of murdering a woman in 1989 during the civil war, will take place on Tuesday, announced...

Keylor Navas Joins Pumas After Controversial Exit from Newell’s

Costa Rican goalkeeper Keylor Navas is officially the newest player for Pumas UNAM, but his move from Argentina’s Newell’s Old Boys has been anything...

Costa Rica Report Uncovers Serious Flaws in Airport Runway

The resurfacing of the runway at Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport (AIDOQ), completed this past February, is now under judicial investigation, and at the...

Costa Rica Surpasses 500 Homicides as Gang Violence Escalates

Costa Rica has officially surpassed 500 homicides so far this year, according to figures released Monday by the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ). As of...

Chiquita Executives Convicted in Colombia for Financing Death Squads

Colombian justice on Wednesday sentenced seven former executives of the multinational banana company Chiquita Brands to more than 11 years in prison and a...

Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly Vacation in Costa Rica with Baby

Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly touched down in Costa Rica for a family getaway with their three-month-old daughter, Saga Blade Fox-Baker. Photographers caught...
spot_img
Costa Rica Coffee Maker Chorreador
Costa Rica Coffee Maker Chorreador
Costa Rica Travel Insurance
Costa Rica Rocking Chait
Costa Rica Travel

Latest News from Costa Rica