Wedbings launches. Years pass. Unicode standardizes the world's emoji set. And then in 2014, somebody asked Unicode to turn that oddly specific Webding into an oddly specific emoji. And for some reason Unicode said yes.
That kind of thing can just happen! Because anybody can propose an emoji to Unicode. And if Unicode says yes, it gets it add it to every digital device on Earth. Anybody can do that.
Weird, right? Anybody in the entire world can do that.
...including me! Alex Schmidt! Your pal! I proposed the bison emoji. Unicode said yes. Also you can't use it yet. The emoji rolls out to world keyboards sometime in the fall of 2020.
It took more than a year of research and effort to create the bison emoji. It's brought a lot of great folks into my life. It's the subject of my new podcast, so PLEASE SUBSCRIBE because no one blog can contain the full story. But here's a little bit of it.
When you saw that "Bison" entry header up there, did you immediately know what that is? You should have! After all, the American bison is the largest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. The American bison is the official national mammal of the United States. And the American bison...is the animal basically every American calls "the buffalo."
Jack Dykinga/Wikimedia CommonsFun fact: its scientific name is "bison bison."