LET US take, for a start, the nose-thumb gesture, in which the thumb touches the tip of the nose and the fingers fan out. The tandem version of this has the thumb of the other hand touching the little finger of the first, and, for good measure, there can be a waggling of digits, a protruding tongue, and a leer of derision.
The gesture is known all over Europe, and there is no ambiguity about it (unlike, say, the thumbs-up signal, which it is unsafe for a British hitchhiker to use on certain southern high roads). It is pretty old, too: Rabelais mentions it; Peter Brueghel shows a prancing jester doing the double spread, and it seems to be an animated version of the fool’s coxcomb.
It has many names in English – cock a snook, pull a snook, take a double sight, make Queen Anne’s fan, pull bacon. As a child I knew it as making fat bacon. In Portugal you tocar trompete, or play the trumpet. German children go ‘Atsch! Atsch!’ as they make die lange Nase. In Italy the gesture is known as marameo, which ties it in with a cat’s mewing.
In England it seems to be dying out. I last saw it publicly performed in the 1960s by Quintin Hogg at a political meeting, the one-handed version accompanied by a little prance. British children have replaced it with the obscene V sign.
There are two ways of pronging a pair of fingers into the air – one with the palm presented, the other with it hidden. The latter is an undoubted insult, and Churchill, introducing (at the urging of the Belgian lawyer Victor de Lavelaye) the victory sign in 1941, did not at first realise the obscene significance of the back-of-the-hand version. Somebody had to tell that remarkably innocent man of the world that he must not go around signalling up yours (one up the fundament, one up the vulva) to friends and allies, so he turned his hand round.
Mrs Thatcher, in a photograph reproduced in this book, up-yourses very happily in a moment of minor triumph. I do not know what she did with her hand in her recent victory. Properly, the obscene finger prong should be in rhythmical motion and accompanied by a fierce whistle with lips spread. Then it is known as the Old Roman sign.
A lot of work has gone into this manual, which deals with the cultural distribution of 20 selected gestures. There are maps dappled with rings of comparative frequency. Thus, if you kiss your fingertips to signify praise, appreciation, adoration (as in John Bulwer’s Chirologia – or hand-speech – of 1644, which has the superscription O, Adoro over a rapt finger-kissing cavalier), you will be better appreciated in France, Spain, and Germany than in Italy, Sardinia, Sicily or Great Britain. Use the gesture as a salutation, and the deep European South will know what you mean. So will Stockholm and Lisbon. Scotland will be totally bewildered.
It is in Naples that we find the richest proliferation of hand signals. The Neapolitans are a subtle people, fearful of giving too precise a meaning to words. In court a witness will ask in deadly seriousness whether the magistrate requires the regular truth or the true truth, or some other truth on a scale between lying and total veracity. In this wretched vivacious city you will get a variety of manual signals which are more definite than speech, from the ear-touch (meaning effeminacy) to the nose-tap (be on your guard), taking in the cheek-stroke (delicious) on the way.
Modern Britain does not go in for gestures much at all, except for vulgar ones which grow increasingly vulgar, but the evidence of Elizabethan literature seems to show that we were once as manually voluble as the Italians. Evidently the yea-and-nay tradition of Calvinistic dissent outlawed the nuance of the gesture.
Finding etymologies for some of these hand signals is apparently as chancy as looking for the origin of an expression like OK (on which Dr Morris and his colleagues expend a paragraph that, as was to be expected, gets us nowhere). Take the horn sign, the equivalent of the word of fear unpleasing to a married ear. It is over two and a half thousand years old as a device for warding off evil, though the investigative team that Dr Morris led discovered that the cuckold meaning has almost totally driven out the protective effect.
By extension, to make the horns has become a means of expressing generalised deadly insult, but the imputation of cuckoldry is the father and mother of all insults. Why the horns? Still around in Latin Europe, alive in Shakespeare, they make sense as an attribute of the devil warding off the devil, in the final ambivalence of Mediterranean religion, but we have to work hard to make them reasonably signify inability to protect husbandly rights. Do they mean a gelded bull or bullock? Alien penises poking their way in?
Oral language is slippery and highly mutable. There have been serious attempts to recommend a universal language of gesture which could replace speech and restore (or is it destroy) the tower of Babel. This book shows that manual gestures can form as closed a system as linguistic ones. Dr Morris and I were once near-neighbours in Malta, where horns are solely a talisman against evil and where an upward wag of the head means (as it does in Sicily) a negative. I invited some young Maltese to tea and learned belatedly that they were gesturing no to more cake when I thought they were signalling yes. Why were they allowing their plates to be piled up and yet not eating anything? As for the thumbs up, meaning good, fine, OK, it may be used with confidence over most of Europe. But go to Greece, Corfu or southern Sardinia and it becomes a deadly sexual insult.
This book is clearly only a beginning: there is much to be done in the mapping of all the varieties of non-linguistic communication that any person who has travelled, or has merely lived long, has been fascinated to observe.
As a novelist whose craft involves the invention of long patches of dialogue, I am aware of what my characters are doing with their bodies as well as their tongues. Yet I despair of ever being able to set any of it down: the instantaneous flick of a shoulder or bunching up of a mouth requires too much description. One is forced to use words in an area whose virtue is that it is able to dispense with them.
But words, some say, are a kind of upstart successor to visual gesture – invisible but audible signs of the night, to be replaced at dawn by the more satisfying semantemes of the eye. This book shows how dumb the world would be without fingers.
Observer, 13 May 1979
Review of Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution by
Desmond Morris et al (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979)