More than words: How we say it best when we say nothing at all
Eventually she nailed it – the shrug, I mean. One more piece of visual vocab to add to the nod, the air quotes, the meh waggle, her withering eyeroll. Separate from words, each gesture offers meaning, a nuance in context. A facepalm in traffic declares frustration, different from its squeamish betrayal during a horror film.
Despite their silence, gestures speak. More than enrich our language, as philosopher Damon Young argues, gestures perform as a parallel language, 'the tangible culminations of a living tempo'. They can brim with immensities like the Hercules statue, the demigod hovering his finger on his lower lip, an ageless naïve 'amazed by his own stone self', as Young writes in Immortal Gestures (Scribe, 2025).
Gesture derives from gerere, Latin to carry. But carry what? Implicit meanings, of course, from the doom of an emperor's thumb to the hush of the librarian's finger. Yet also the ancestral baggage of the signal itself, to the point our gestures are not uniquely ours. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claims, 'Society literally informs our bodies in this way'. In effect, we carry our culture through every wave and pout.
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Even if unsighted to our gestures, as shown by a study among congenitally blind participants. Yes, the blind also gesture, suggesting the embedded necessity of this 'other language', the molecular urge to sketch our story via our anatomy. Nor was that the only revelation. Seyda Ozcaliskan, a psychologist at Georgia State University, led her team observing two lots of blind speakers – one in English, the other Turkish.
With no visual learning, each group gestured in its own distinct way. English speakers, recounting the same story, fused action and direction ('rolling downwards', say) into a single movement. While Turkish speakers would isolate each detail via hand signals, mirroring their native grammar where both rolling and descending resist the unity of a verbal clause. Proof that speech and syntax shape each nation's tic-tac.
Gesture study is blossoming across academia, aided by video technology that allows researchers to anchor each twitch to its exact point of speech – or pause. Books reflect the boom, with Lauren Gawne, a senior lecturer in Languages and Cultures at LaTrobe University, offering Gestures: A Slim Guide (OUP, 2025) to the genre.
Scholarly in tone, Gawne's book unlocks the wonders of alternative spaces that various cultures adopt. As westerners, the semaphored telling of a journey moves left to right: a kinetic sentence. Subconsciously, we flourish hands as though the future lies before us, the past behind our shoulder. Yet high in the Andes, the opposite is true among Aymara speakers, where the past is what can't be seen, while the future remains invisible behind the speaker's back.
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More than words: How we say it best when we say nothing at all
When my daughter was three, she learnt to shrug. Clumsily, it must be said. Somehow Tess sank her head rather than hoisting her shoulders. A rookie error magnified by chats on the phone, where Tess shrugged to grandma instead of using words. With no FaceTime, no Zoom, my mum didn't know that Tess didn't know. Eventually she nailed it – the shrug, I mean. One more piece of visual vocab to add to the nod, the air quotes, the meh waggle, her withering eyeroll. Separate from words, each gesture offers meaning, a nuance in context. A facepalm in traffic declares frustration, different from its squeamish betrayal during a horror film. Despite their silence, gestures speak. More than enrich our language, as philosopher Damon Young argues, gestures perform as a parallel language, 'the tangible culminations of a living tempo'. They can brim with immensities like the Hercules statue, the demigod hovering his finger on his lower lip, an ageless naïve 'amazed by his own stone self', as Young writes in Immortal Gestures (Scribe, 2025). Gesture derives from gerere, Latin to carry. But carry what? Implicit meanings, of course, from the doom of an emperor's thumb to the hush of the librarian's finger. Yet also the ancestral baggage of the signal itself, to the point our gestures are not uniquely ours. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claims, 'Society literally informs our bodies in this way'. In effect, we carry our culture through every wave and pout. Loading Even if unsighted to our gestures, as shown by a study among congenitally blind participants. Yes, the blind also gesture, suggesting the embedded necessity of this 'other language', the molecular urge to sketch our story via our anatomy. Nor was that the only revelation. Seyda Ozcaliskan, a psychologist at Georgia State University, led her team observing two lots of blind speakers – one in English, the other Turkish. With no visual learning, each group gestured in its own distinct way. English speakers, recounting the same story, fused action and direction ('rolling downwards', say) into a single movement. While Turkish speakers would isolate each detail via hand signals, mirroring their native grammar where both rolling and descending resist the unity of a verbal clause. Proof that speech and syntax shape each nation's tic-tac. Gesture study is blossoming across academia, aided by video technology that allows researchers to anchor each twitch to its exact point of speech – or pause. Books reflect the boom, with Lauren Gawne, a senior lecturer in Languages and Cultures at LaTrobe University, offering Gestures: A Slim Guide (OUP, 2025) to the genre. Scholarly in tone, Gawne's book unlocks the wonders of alternative spaces that various cultures adopt. As westerners, the semaphored telling of a journey moves left to right: a kinetic sentence. Subconsciously, we flourish hands as though the future lies before us, the past behind our shoulder. Yet high in the Andes, the opposite is true among Aymara speakers, where the past is what can't be seen, while the future remains invisible behind the speaker's back.
