Everybody loves capybaras. They are chill, they are calm. They are friends with other animals, and, for what I know, harmless. I like them as well, but here is the truth: I hate the name capybara. The word simply doesn’t add up to this great specimen that I’ve known my entire life as capivara.
Brazilians have been taking these animals for granted for ages, and now that they've become more and more famous our shy, mundane appreciation for them just turned into love and pride. They are our newest national treasure, like pandas in China and maybe sheep in Ireland — so why can’t I use a capybara emoji on my iPhone? There is a 🐼 and a 🐑, after all.
Well, I’ll be honest: the first time this question popped in my mind was about six hours ago when I learned that a Brazilian is trying to get us there. Revista piauí tells us her name is Anna Levin and that she’s a professor of medicine at Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ms Levin practices rowing twice a week on the university campus and noticed four years ago when a small family of capybaras showed up apparently from nowhere. Let’s say they were parents and their child because there were three of them. And we can only assume these parents were very active since nowadays this once small family grew to a small town with more than 40 inhabitants.
Professor Levin and her buddies from the rowing team have been sharing space with the rodents for years. And not only them; the appreciation for the animals is such a strong one that there is an annual regatta named after them. Everybody comes to see the wet population of that growing town, and everybody wants to talk about them on Facebook, Instagram, etc., but the problem is: there is no capybara emoji so all this talking is just boring and monochromatic. Nothing as fun as when you see a squirrel in Central Park and send a 🐿 to your family WhatsApp group during a New York trip.
So in June last year, the doctor took action and sent an email to WhatsApp presenting her complaining. The email subject, writes journalist Paula Scarpin, was “Very disappointed!”, but Ms Levin couldn’t know that her disappointment would only increase, for she would learn that nor WhatsApp or Facebook — its owner — were responsible for creating emojis, and thus there was little they could do to help her.
WhatsApp’s customer care actually acted pretty gently pointing the professor to the Unicode Consortium’s website. Now the report calls that place “labyrinthine”, and, since I write about technology and often visit such website, I couldn’t agree more.
But nothing would stop Anna Levin. She faced all the necessary steps in order to turn a nation’s dream into reality — one can only imagine how nice it would be to use a capybara emoji — including researching how often the term is used in different languages and explaining what makes capybara such a unique word that it could not be translated by using other emojis combined.
Here the article was very clever and cruel because Paula Scarpi opened her penultimate paragraph writing about the announcement by Unicode, in August this year, that 67 new emojis were coming soon. I wrote about this at the time and didn’t see any capybara, so I was already assuming that I had lost the chance of making history in Brazil for reporting the arrival of our mascot amongst the other not-so-Brazilian ones. But then I kept reading and found out that this was only a writing trick — don’t do this anymore, please, I was sad already — and, in fact, professor Levin hasn’t even sent the application!
But this doesn’t mean she gave up. It turns out, she had to stop in the middle of the process because Unicode asks for a sketch and she doesn’t know a designer for the job. Ms Levin is keen to see her project thrives, though, and she plans on registering the idea in 2018. But the professor will need someone capable of such art skills. When she finds this person, Unicode, it will be your move — please don’t let us down.
We'll even let you guys call them capybaras, okay?
