I talk with my hands

It's funny when the wide Internet ocean washes up two similar pieces of information in one week, but that's what I found on my shore. First, the always delightful Brain Pickings people posted a curious article about erotic Surrealist hand signaling.

Like so much about Surrealism, it seems laughable in its juvenile naughtiness. It's mostly crude jokes appended to the signs of the ASL alphabet.

But when you see two things about gestures, you need to take notice. And so, when I finished laughing at A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion, I knew I had to share these...

The Critical Whirl. ‘I’ve read too much Marx and I can’t get my words out’

Circle hand clockwise in a small but rapid motion towards the audience. Accelerate and repeat until idea unpacked.

Though these are just silly coincidences on the web, they call to mind a few things...first I think about the way gestures and speaking are related. I've been reading a good deal about the origins of language over the last few years in hopes of putting together a class, and I've been fascinated by some of the ideas I've encountered.

Closely related is the way that gesture clarifies communication - I have heard stories about when the telephone was new and how people couldn't quite communicate through it clearly, lacking facial expressions and gestures. Even now, we have to supplement emails and postings with punctuation and hints about the emotional tenor of our messages ;-)

Finally, I was thinking about Andrew Solomon's doorstop of a book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, with its detailed discussion of deaf culture. These are, of course, not about that, but they do imply the limits of speech and the need for us to have recourse to communication by other means....Solomon poses an interesting question about ablism in his book, suggesting that deafness is not - as it is so often figured - a handicap of 'deficiency' as a form of 'horizontal' identity, a term he invented to describe the kinds of communities we join that are not passed down to us through genetics, heredity, or tradition. From time to we all need to join other communities, and these sites talking about gesture codes play on that need in a small way...