What does this emoji mean on MN ?

[Oldh]

I keep seeing it. A beige or light brown square? I don't even have it on my phone emojis to use as an example.

A lot of the emojis like people are actually coded as two characters (text characters) so your computer/browser sees two symbols and combines it into one to make the symbol appear correct. You would never see the second character usually. This is especially common for the skin tone ones, in order to save space.

👍
👍🏼

When emojis first started to get popular they were only supported on phones and not browsers. So MN made a load of code to convert the invisible emoji characters into actual MN emojis. For the ones which are two characters, you often see the two separate characters, so you'll see a person and then the skintone swatch.

Not long after this most popular browsers added emoji support so MN never updated their native emoji list, and just uses the Windows/Apple/etc set for those newer ones.

That is why there is a MN-specific version of 😨 but 🥱 will show up as the native version from your phone/computer/browser.

Interesting follow ups:

List of different emoji releases:
emojipedia.org/emoji-1.0/

Interesting video by a man who accidentally became an emoji expert thanks to a project:

Springtime you used a hand symbol which is too new. If you use one of the original hand symbols from version 1.0 like the thumbs up I did - the first one is yellow and the second, one of the skin tones.

But it didn't come up as a brown square, which is what I was hoping for! Will keep trying some more :o

👊🏼
🙋🏼‍♀️

Link to the emojipedia article on one of these
emojipedia.org/light-skin-tone/

@BertieBotts

Springtime you used a hand symbol which is too new. If you use one of the original hand symbols from version 1.0 like the thumbs up I did - the first one is yellow and the second, one of the skin tones.

👍🏽👍🏼👍🏿👍🏻👍

Oh that could be it. Trying again.

Yes that's it @Bertiebotts

The last hand was the default colour, so no square for it.

biscuit

This?

You never had one of those push the correct shape through the hole toys as a kid did you?

Slightly off topic but @JaneJeffer was it you that got this one 💪🏼 from someone and you looked at it sideways and thought it was male genitalia? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laughed about that since.

Oh it’s given the brown square to me now 🤦‍♀️

@ErrolTheDragon Apparently those are newer ones and they show correctly.

@Oldh I think we've figured it out now with the older emojis but they work properly with the newer ones.

I always thought the biscuit looked like a rosette ribbon to signify an award given sarcastically.

Here's an award

I still like to think of it that way.

Glad I asked now. Thanks all x

@Notbluepeter

This whole time I thought was a doughnut i.e. calling someone thick...now I feel like doughnut!

This is exactly what I thought too 🤣

The biscuit often means “I think you are a troll but we are not allowed troll hunt so I’ll just post this biscuit as code” imo.

@Mamette

Slightly off topic but *@JaneJeffer* was it you that got this one 💪🏼 from someone and you looked at it sideways and thought it was male genitalia? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laughed about that since.

Not me

@FrappuccinoLight No, as others have said, it's from the infamous Gordon Brown webchat where he didn't answer the biscuit question. So has a kind of 'yeah, nothing to say' meaning, but in a snarky way. It really isn't a placemarker!

It actually turned out that GB wasn't ignoring the question, an aide was reading out the questions to him so he was just answering what he was being asked directly, and had no idea that half the webchat was taken up with MNers bellowing 'ANSWER THE QUESTION WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE BISCUIT???'

I think he did later say what his favourite biscuit was, but it was too late.

It's where someone has used an emoji that's ethnic. So this one is 👍🏾because I'm using the darker skin tone emoji for a thumbs up on my phone.