Pointing the finger

And remember how much a hand can express,
How a single slight movement of it can say more
Than millions of words – dropped hand, clenched fist,
Snapping fingers, thump up, thumb down,
Raised in blessing, clutched in passion, begging,
Welcome, dismissal, prayer, applause,
And a million other signs, too slight, too subtle,
Too packed with meaning for words to describe,
A universal language understood by all.

That would be [prev in context] Hugh "Marxist" MacDiarmid suggesting that all human endeavour amounts to a bit of dust flicked heedlessly off God's cuff. I guess we're not usually conscious of gestures - either made by us or seen in others. But that's not to say either a) that we are heedless or b) that gestures don't matter. 

I think that gesture may be treated separately from Sign Language on which I've had a good bit to say: BSL .ne. ISL - Makaton - Koko - Haptic - Washoe - SingAndSign. Tom Scott agrees that they are different; that gesture is co-speech or paralinguistic communication. Maybe like the adverbs of the basic comms.

Lauren Gawne [the Southern half of Lingthusiasm] has f i n a l l y brought her book to publication: Gesture: a slim guide [that's an autopuff alert from Gawne which abstracts 5 cool facts about gesture]. The Blob has been quite the fanboi for Lingthusiasm, the podcast. They took their podcast to YT for episode 30 about Gesture. Obvs you're going to lose a lot in such a dialog if all the info is coming only through your headphones. That's a still clip [R] of Gawne gesturing a tomato rolling down hill. Turkish tomatoes roll exactly the same as English ones; but the accompanying gestures track the constraints of each language. Turkish (and french) emphasizes the down, while English privileges the roll.

If you are a normally unobservant person, you won't thank me for making you aware of co-speech. You'll never be comfortable watching your boss's left hand chopping the air to show herself she's in charge.