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

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 https://archive.org/details/sciencesanityint0000korz