You may have read about this during the Iraq war. A group of local people approach an American position. A US soldier holds out his hand at arm’s length, palm outwards, in the traditional gesture of ‘halt’. The locals keep on coming. He repeats the gesture. They keep advancing. So he opens fire. The locals turn out to be civilians, not fighters. The Americans evidently didn’t know that this gesture, throughout the Middle East, is a friendly greeting. It means ‘hi’ rather than ‘halt’.
Very few gestures are universal, and François Caradec’s fascinating collection shows the way they vary around the world. It’s not a dictionary; more a thesaurus, divided into 37 thematic sections, each one dealing with a different part of the body, and organised from head to foot. He classifies them from the top down — gestures using the head, temple, ear, forehead, eyebrows, eyelashes, eye, nose, mouth, lips, tongue, teeth, cheeks, chin, neck, shoulders, armpits, arm, forearm, elbow, wrist, fingernails, hand, fist, both hands, thumb, each finger, torso, chest, hips, waist, stomach, buttocks, groin, thighs, knees, legs, and feet.
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