Paul McPharlin provides an extensive history of manicules starting on page 47 of his 1942 book, Roman Numerals, Typographic Leaves and Pointing Hands [1].

"Why did so many readers, until relatively recently, take the trouble to stop and draw a whole hand when they simply wanted to mark something as important? And why did so many authors and printers use the increasingly heavy-handed image of the manicule to direct the attention of their readers?" William H. Sherman explains in his 2005 paper, Toward a History of the Manicule [2].

[1] http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4200870

[2] http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/papers/FOR_2005_04_001.pdf

This is also considered in Keith Houston's entertaining book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks.

It traces the history of some other common symbols such as the at sign and asterisk.

For a use in literature, see letter 229 from Clarissa Harlowe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-richardson/clarissa...

Precisely. It is not an emoji and is under the miscellaneous unicode symbols in most OSes and the like. Not exactly 'Emojis'.

But of course on Twitter, misinformation is ok.

Downvoters: So you're telling me it is an emoji then?

Is '' an emoji then? Can you see it?

You're getting downvoted not because you're wrong about what that symbol is, but because you're immediately leaping from 'someone makes a light hearted comparison on twitter' to 'someone is spreading misinformation'.

Honestly, there's really no need to take a throwaway tweet so seriously.

I think it is important to see it in its context, as an icon for “the finger of contempt” rather than the typical use of a manicule as a bullet point in an index or to connect some annotation with some text. That seems somewhat similar to the use of emoji today.

Doesn't matter what it was.

https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/

You mean this? (U+261A) and not (U+1F448) [0] [1]?

From: [0]

> This Unicode character has no emoji version, meaning this is intended to display only as a black and white glyph on most platforms.

I guess that means '' and 'U+261A' are emojis then?

[0] https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/

[1] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+261A

 is not specified by Unicode. Why are you so angry?

A very simple question: Is '' aka (U+F8FF) and 'U+261A' emojis?

Yes or No?

> '' aka (U+F8FF)

In passing: Many HN readers on non-Apple platforms probably don't see the glyph you intended in this comment. The Apple logo does not exist as a character in the Unicode standard. U+F8FF is a Private Use Area codepoint, which has no standardised, interoperable meaning.

Yes, Apple uses this codepoint for the logo in their fonts, but that's purely a private matter, largely restricted to their platforms. (I wouldn't be surprised if non-Apple fonts that include it are actually violating a trademark, or something like that.)

> Many HN readers on non-Apple platforms probably don't see the glyph you intended in this comment.

That is the whole point of my comments. They cannot ever see it unless they are running on an Apple platform. Unless they wanted to see an empty box, the symbol is meaningless to non-Apple users. That is why I asked 'Can you see it?'

Even posting the 'U+261A' glyph here on HN renders nothing and a box on other sites and that is defined in the standard; but they still cannot see it.

So that is a definite 'No' then for '' aka (U+F8FF) and the same for 'U+261A'? OK.

It has been indirectly admitted. Case closed.

Emoji: a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc.

Often times, yes.

Yes