Definition of
Gesture
Gesture It is a concept with a very interesting etymological origin. The term comes from a classical Arabic word that referred to a legal guarantee. When a person tried to replace said warrantyappealed to promises or oaths accompanied by bombastic gestures. In this way, the sense of gesture was changing until it was associated with the movements that an individual makes to convey a message or imply something.
For example: “The old man waved his hand to tell the young man not to talk any more.”, “In the stadium nobody understood the gesture that the footballer made after scoring the goal”, “A dog must learn to interpret the gestures of his master”.
Let’s take the case of a person you want to take a cab. For this, it will stop on the edge of the sidewalk to wait for one of these vehicles to approach. When you detect that a taxi is coming, you must perform a hand gesture to signal the driver to stop as you want to get on. The gesture usually consists of extending the arm with an open hand.
In this context, we can also use the word sign to refer to a gesture with which a person intends to imply something in particular, usually made with one or both hands. It is important to clarify that in each Spanish-speaking country there are different uses for these and other terms, such as gesturewhich usually speaks of a position characteristic of the eyebrows and lips, among other parts of the face, although it can also describe an action with the hands or legs.
Gestures are not universal, but are inextricably connected to a culture; For this reason, when we travel to a foreign country we should avoid communicating through this language, until learning the local gestures and the meaning that ours have there. There are plenty of stories of embarrassing situations in which a tourist makes a gesture that in his hometown denotes gratitude or joy, but to the locals it has a rude or obscene connotation.
When used in the plural, the term gesture is used to refer to the manners of a person, that is, to all those actions that they use to be noticed and distinguished from those around her, demonstrating her level of education. In this way, just as we can talk about someone’s good or bad manners, it is also possible to describe their gestures as rude or brash, for example. It is important to clarify, in any case, that this use is not very common in everyday speech, but is found especially in the written language.
A gesture, on the other hand, can be a body posture or one action that reflects a mooda emotion or one intention. Suppose a policeman intercepts a man who was walking in a suspicious attitude, with his face covered. This man first stops at the agent’s call but, while the policeman asks him some questions, he makes a gesture of escaping, sharply turning the body. So the policeman decides to stop him and immobilize him to prevent him from running away.
As can be seen in the example above, this use of gesture serves to describe an action that does not come to fruition: the suspicious man tries to escape, but the police officer stops him in time, preventing him from fulfilling his aim. We do not very often find the term gesture with this meaning in everyday speech; to express this type of situation it is more frequent to resort to the verb hit: “the man managed to escape, but the policeman caught him before he could start running”.