SIGN of the TIMES
ECCENTRIC ACADEMIC HAS COMPILED A DICTIONARY OF GESTURES
Long before emojis and gifs became the dominant accessories to modern language, there were gestures.
Some are crude, like the middle figure. Others are toxic, like the open-palmed fascist salute. Many, many, many are sexual. Gestures can be direct — air quotes, zippering the lips, or flapping one’s arms to suggest someone is a chicken. Like a gif or a face emoji, or the stylized shoulder-shrugger, ¯\_( )_/¯, these offer a more or less literal take on the subject matter.
Others are metaphorical, like a finger twirled by the temple to suggest insanity. Some are contradictory, multipurpose or ambiguous, like the hand wave that means both hello and goodbye, or the “thumbs up” that signifies either satisfaction or the desire to hitch a ride.
Still others start out literally but take on novel figurative meanings, like the sign of the cross. The eggplant emoji, similarly, was not designed to mean “penis,” but here we are. People are endlessly creative. Meanings shift, in images and gestures just as in words. Keeping track on behalf of a general audience is never easy, and not always even possible.
The illustrated Dictionary of Gestures, a strangely eclectic reference manual by the late French writer François Caradec — which has been newly translated into English by Canadian Chris Clarke — is not exactly the Oxford English Dictionary.
It makes no pretensions to completeness or objectivity. “There are no universal gestures,” Caradec declares on page one, making clear his book is not an “exhaustive inventory.”
But as a glimpse into the semantic similarities between gestures and their newer counterparts of emojis and gifs, it is an eye-opener. It is also the latest example of a literary tradition that goes back through the Italian ethnographer of body language Andrea de Jorio’s 1832 guide of gestures based on artifacts uncovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the British physician John Bulwer’s 1644 Natural History of the Hand, which called gesture “the only speech which is natural to man”; Giovanni Bonifacio’s 1616 The Art of Signs; and all the way back to Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, who in AD 95 wrote about hands’ ability to speak.
“Have they not power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder or shame?” Quintilian wrote in his opus on rhetoric. “Do they not take the place of adverbs and pronouns when we point at places and things?”
All those works form a tradition that today finds its expression in resources like Emojipedia, the keyword searchable Giphy.com, and now, Caradec’s dictionary.
Which is not to say that compiling definitions of gestures is always a soberly scholastic endeavour. In a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Thea Lenarduzzi notes that Caradec’s Dictionary of Gestures “raises more questions than it answers.”
This is an understatement. You can practically hear her winking, raising her eyebrows or perhaps rolling her eyes.
The Dictionary of Gestures is clearly the product of a strange mind. Caradec, who died in 2008 aged 84, was the polymathic author of an encyclopedia of practical jokes and farces, a dictionary of slang, and a guide to the extensive weird and mysterious cultural underbelly of Paris.
“It’s like he was a collector,” said Clarke, the literary translator and PHD researcher who worked on the English version of the dictionary for MIT Press. But instead of collecting familiar things, “he just collected oddities, things that made him curious, or things that made him laugh.”
He was ribald and foulmouthed, with an irreverent sense of humour that drove his writing. He was a member of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, a group of writers, artists and other thinkers who share a deep erudition but also an anti-academic attitude, and came at things that interested them from “quirky” angles, aiming to pursue the “inexact sciences” or what Clarke calls “make-your-own sciences.” Though it resists definitions, ‘pataphysics is often described as the “science of imaginary solutions.” (It takes the apostrophe, as Clarke puts it, “just because.”)
Caradec was also a member of the Collège’s spinoff movement called the Oulipo (an abbreviation that, in French, means “workshop for potential literature”), that is best known for other members such as the writer Italo Calvino and the artist Marcel Duchamp.
At times, the Dictionary of Gestures can seem like the author is on a lark, jotting down whatever gestures come to mind along with fragmented and rudimentary definitions, regardless of their usefulness to others, like a precocious child writing her own dictionary in crayon on construction paper.
Deep research is not much in evidence, and consists mainly in short literary quotes after Caradec’s definitions describing the gesture in question, from authors as diverse as Jules Verne, Rabelais, Colette, and Gustave Flaubert.
“During the course of my research, each time I asked someone to name for me the people who gesticulate the most, I was first told the Italians … followed by the Native Americans,” Caradec writes, though he includes few Native American gestures. It is among the hints that Caradec’s work, originally published in French in 2005, is not entirely in tune with the current cultural moment. If there is little overt racism, there is a casual blending of all Arabs or Africans or Native Americans into single cultures, as well as the traditional French disdain for the English and Italians. Clarke also observes that there is evidence of a lingering misogyny in Caradec’s choice of gestures about women, with countless variations on the theme of what people intend to do to your sister, mother or wife. There is a similar preoccupation with homosexuality, which is apparently signalled by just about everything, from stroking the ear or the eyebrow, to tapping the nose, the upper lip, or the nape of the neck.
He entirely avoids sign language, which is a language unto itself. His interest is on the complementarity of gestures to spoken language, as additional sources of meaning, or rhetorical embellishments. For Caradec, gesture enriches communication.
It is on this point that a contrast emerges in how people consider gestures and emojis. A common modern complaint is that emojis reveal a certain laziness, a half-arsed acceptance that an image will suffice and spare the communicator the bother of actually putting their thoughts into words. In this view, using emojis is taking the same path of least resistance that corporate and military types use when they speak in acronyms. What was once an efficiency eventually becomes a crutch. What was once precise and clear becomes vague and opaque to all but the most deeply initiated.
The effect, according to this common cranky argument, is that eventually everyone is offering up the exact same pre-packaged visual hot take. No one is actually saying anything new.
Caradec, however, offers richly detailed evidence that exclusion — of parents, for example, or other lame oldsters, or suspicious foreigners — has always been half the attraction. Inscrutability is often the point.
His Dictionary defines the gestures of everyone from Freemasons and medieval monks to Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles and gay people throughout the ages, all of whom had reason to keep their symbolic meanings close to their chests.
The result is a taxonomy of human gestures that would be familiar to any 20th century Westerner. Structured from head to toe, they reveal a sentiment that Caradec attributes to a French prime minister, whom he does not identify: “There is also an intelligence to the hand, and it isn’t subject to complexes, because it communicates directly with the heart.”