Hand gestures that last longer than spoken languages | Hacker News Reader

Hand gestures that last longer than spoken languages

bbc.com

63 pointsPikkie57 comments

Two instances I recall in movies/TV where the wrong gesture lead to problems:

1. In Inglorious Basterds, when British undercover agent Lt. Hicox's cover is blown after he orders three scotch with the British three (index, middle, and ring fingers), rather than the German (thumb, index, and middle fingers) [1].

2. In the TV series Tehran, when an Israeli undercover agent posing as a Persian at a Iranian checkpoint gives the thumbs-up gesture, which, as covered in the article, is not a good thing in Iran. (Frankly, that stretched credulity. I don't think the Mossad would overlook something so basic.)

[1] https://screenrant.com/inglourious-basterds-tarantino-3-fing...

Iranian American here, funny story about that thumbs up gesture:

When we were kids, my Persian grandma made us dinner and she asked in farsi if my little sister enjoyed the meal, having food in her mouth she gestured with a thumbs up. Thumbs up mean essentially f- you. My grandma froze, shocked, then realized what my sister meant and we all laughed.

And an instance where a correctly learned gesture led to confidence and success: the Naked Gun Student Driver Car Chase scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6A6t55qXk&ab_channel=MarkC...

Every single set of predeployment briefing for US troops includes local body signal briefings when appropriate, such as the thumbs up example given, pointing with index finger, using the right vs left hand for certain actions, bowing, and anything else the State Department and/or CIA has recognized. Very few people in these briefings remember them, mostly because there's another thousand things being blasted at you that are arguably more relevant to survival and success. I say this to agree: Mossad would definitely recognize and brief people on this, but retention of training can never really be guaranteed.

Here[1] is North Sentinel island native doing the crotch-grab gesture[2]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSwnBoqjmdo&t=175s

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taunting#Crotch-grab

A great video on non-verbal communication across cultures is this segment from Desmond Morris' The Human Animal https://vimeo.com/153189407 Unfortunately the series doesn't seem to have ever been released on anything but VHS so I haven't been able to find a higher quality version.

I think the most prominent example of such gesture is the handshake. Or earlier just raising right hand to show you're not holding any weapon and your friendly.

Or am I wrong and there are older gestures still in use?

I could imagine the "finger slitting throat" could be an older one

I have to say this is one HN thread that could really benefit from memes, because Drax the Destroyer has some comments on that one.

A slow blink predates to felines and beyond most likely.

hand clapping seems pretty common

Amongst felines?

yes and no..

The salute, perhaps. Apparently knights would raise their visors when greeting to show friendly intentions.

> earlier just raising right hand to show you're not holding any weapon and your friendly.

Yeah thats pretty much universal. Also raising your hands them clasping them afterwards is a "greetings. I come in peace" that should be universal.

Is it universal though? I thought handshaking was an alien concept in many Asian cultures.

Much like how the two finger swear is a European thing (reportedly to demonstrate that one still has their bow fingers attached and thus can still attack their foe -- but that might just be an urban legend) and thus many Asians have accidentally sworn on social media due to doing the V sign backwards, not realising it means something totally different in the west.

The backward V is not even the whole of Europe, just Britain and its former dominions. It means nothing in mainland Europe.

In parts of mainland Europe it's recognized as "warning, rowdy drunk British tourist" ;)

It means nothing in Canada or the US either.

That's UK thing, maybe Commonwealth. I think virtually non-existing in rest of Europe

I made no comment on handshaking but on raising a hand or both hands as a universal signal to "I have no weapons and intend no harm" or as a "surrender"

As for the two finger thing, I have no idea

I think that with the ubiquity of American media, most cultures around the world would not mistake any non-verbal communication that a US citizen might make. Not all, but surely a great many.

I don't know, I have never traveled abroad, but I do know that American movies and tv are everywhere in the world. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

A popular story told to Israeli Defense Army soldiers who serve at checkpoints is of this gesture: https://i.ibb.co/ZBJSY1c/image.png

Apparently, in Italy it sort-of means "go f*ck yourself" (for Italian hnewers, this means "please wait" for the rest of the world).

The story tells about a soldier who once did that gesture to a car carrying some Italian politician, on their way to the West Bank.

Don't remember the rest of the story now, but it did not end well.

> Apparently, in Italy it sort-of means "go f*ck yourself"

No, it doesn't.

It has lots of meanings but the main one could be summed up to "what?".

EDIT: This means "go fuck yourself" in Italy. That's Alberto Sordi by the way.

https://blog.ilgiornale.it/furlan/files/2018/09/Vaffanculo.j...

>It has lots of meanings but the main one could be summed up to "what?".

my experience - although based on neapolitan usage - is more WTF!?!

That too, it also depends on the facial expression. :)

Growing up in a neighborhood that was heavily Italian, I frequently experienced that gesture with my friend after we did something dumb at his house and got in trouble. Either his parents or grandmother would have their hands up in that pinched gesture, shaking them at you while yelling something like "Why in gods name would you two smash [friends sister] toys, put them in dog shit, set them on fire and throw them on the garage roof? Get up there and clean that god damn mess up! And you [me] go home." So yeah, saw that gesture frequently.

> for Italian hnewers, this means "please wait" for the rest of the world

Central Europe here, I doubt this gesture would be understood here that way. The closest meaningful gesture would be demanding money (if the thumb would move along the index finger).

that is a totally different gesture (and with the same meaning in italy)

It depends on the hand motion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZk5rAVuNsc&t=15s

>this means "please wait" for the rest of the world

In UK+Ireland I don't think anybody would understand anything from that gesture (certainly to everybody I've just surveyed)

Here, "please wait" would be a palm held up flat, without the fingers/thumb spread ("stop", which would be what I'd expect at an official checkpoint) or the more polite informal version, a raised hand towards the person with index finger raised and usually with a nod (this is what I'd expect at a restaurant or an office for "I see you but I'm busy right now")

I read that as the gesture literally means “go f*ck yourself” in Italian, which in Italian is a relatively mild way of saying “please wait”, not that the rest of the world would use the gesture for “please wait”.

>(for Italian hnewers, this means "please wait" for the rest of the world).

I would really like to know, out of curiosity, at least 1 country where it means "please wait", I've never encountered it before.

Only in Israel I saw that gesture with the meaning "please wait" and israeli people who travel a lot told me that is only a israeli thing. The italian gesture is slightly different and, as others have already written, doesn't mean "go f*ck yourself".

I've always taken the shoulder shrug to mean "I don't know" but have been told that in England it's an unfriendly way of saying "I don't care". A theory I like but can't confirm is that the gesture originated during the French revolution to mime the effect of the guillotine as a way of recommending silence about a dangerous subject, and that it may still carry that connotation in France.

As someone from England I can confirm that's true, although I think both meanings as possible depending on the facial expression that goes along with the shrug

In the US, I've always used it (and seen it used) both ways, and a third way - "oh well!", depending on the context.

As a French interested in our history, this is the first time I hear that theory.

We do not even really shrug the shoulder, just move it up and then the real message comes from the head and the face you are making.

A rhythmic hip pump seems like it would be pretty universally understood...

Haha that's a good one! I imagine the same is true for extending your arms up to the air to ask to be noticed

Hand gestures are an area of visual semiotics which are fascinating. I want to say three things--

This is wild.

Once I worked as a short order cook at a small cafe, and my co-worker was an immigrant from Central America. He was a real pain to work with, not least because he couldn't speak English. Every day I worked with him we butted heads. One day he tells me to do something, and I give him the finger-gun gesture with a smirk and a wink. I would describe the idea going through my mind as, you don't recognize at all that you have no authority to direct my work and I'm not going to do that thing. So my finger-gun gesture is a rejection and somewhat ironic. BUT that's not how he took it. WOAH. He freaked. It took a while for him to calm down before he was able to communicate to me this gesture in his country (and his young life experience) was a threat of death. I didn't much like the guy, but I didn't want to kill him. Sheesh.

Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski (the map is not the territory--guy) writes about circumstances when pointing with your finger is the only way to communicate.

"The crucial difficulty is found in the fact that whatever can be said is not and cannot be on the objective level, but belongs only to the verbal levels. This difference, being inexpressible by words, cannot be expressed by words. We must have other means to indicate this difference. We must show with our hand, by pointing our finger to the object, and by being silent outwardly as well as inwardly, which silence we may indicate by closing our lips with the other hand. The verbal denial of the ‘is’ of identity covers this point also when shown on the Differential."

(p500. Korzybski, Alfred. Science and sanity : an introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. Lakeville, Conn. : International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co. ; Institute of General Semantics. 1950) [1]

Gang signs

There's a movie (I can't think the name right now, but my note from 2012 dates it before then) about youth and gang culture in Los Angles. Hand gestures feature strongly in that film. Because the main story in the film is about making choices, in a creative moment, I imagined the leadership in these gangs used hand gestures as perscriptive decision tools. How does an uneducated youth process the decision about when to use violence? Right? I imagined the hand gestures as verbal decision tree for the gang's rules when leadership is not present (to act first). Of course this was completely from my own imagination. Maybe gang signs are only ever reaction-based threat displays. Even if there was only a hierarchy, that would be interesting.

I would very much like to read research on gang signs and their place in gang culture.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/sciencesanityint0000korz

There's a great book on non-Aristotelian systems (particularly categories, replacing the Aristotelian definition (species := genus + differentia, for example human := animal + capacity to think, bachelor := man + unmarried) with the notion of prototypes + extensions.

I originally bought it just based on the title:

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff.

Seems pretty obvious to me that if you mime shooting someone with whom you have an ongoing mutual animus, they might take it as a threat.

I don't live now nor come from the third-world and don't share this person's context. If my description or was triggering for you I apologize. No pun intended.

[edited]

Off-topic, OP seems to be new here but constantly submits new posts. Or I am reading too much into?

Interesting, OPs posting pattern certainly looks like something an intern at sciencemag, guardian, BBC would do :)

or they are new here and have those places as places they normally read?

They're definitely reading way too much into it and should probably take a good, hard look at themselves.

20 posts in the past 48 hours seems like a bit much.

maybe but I sometimes go through times when I do a lot of posts because I'm going through my bookmarks for the day - probably 5 or 6 though but could be I'm not that prodigious.

I hope this isn't a weird thing to say but I always really enjoy the links you post. Your bookmarks must be an interesting place!

Thanks, it's not weird, I guess that's the point of HN.

HN can suck you in, especially if you're bored at work.

Anybody else feel personally attacked right now?

I have never been so offended by something I 100% agree with.

Did anyone contact a admin about it yet? altough, it could be a false positive

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