Giovanni Bonifacio’s ;e Art of Signs (1616) and
John Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia (1644)
list hundreds of gestures, citing passages from
the classics on their meanings. According to
Bulwer, we know that “to smite suddenly on the
left hand with the right” signi;es anger because
Seneca used it in a description of an angry man.
Most guides to gesture advised against mere
mimicry or acting out the content of the speech
they accompanied. Quintilian believed the gestures of an orator “should be suited rather to his
sense than to his words.” ;e purpose of gesture
was not to repeat information, but to add it. Indeed this is how even those untrained in oratorical gesture seem to use it. We use gestures
to show how the events we narrate happened,
and to point to the particular things or people
we talk about. ;e gestures of the Italians Efron
studied added information about the physical
qualities of the things they talked about as well
as their attitudes toward them. ;e gestures of
the Jews he studied illustrated the connections
they were making between ideas and their relative importance. Gesture can communicate a
layer of meaning missing from the speech.
But it would be wrong to say that the rea-
son we gesture is to communicate. Almost any-
thing can communicate—the clothes you wear,
the ;owers you send, the way you ;utter your
fan or fold your handkerchief. Gestures com-
municate too, but they are much more inti-
mately tied to the act of speaking. ;ey are not
a language in themselves, but they are a com-
plement to language, a partner with language, a
byproduct of language. Subsequent research in
the ;eld that Efron founded has failed to ;nd a
culture that does not gesture during speech. Not
everyone does it as colorfully as the Italians and
Jews, but everyone does it, even Englishmen.
While aspects of the way we do it are learned
or culturally conditioned, and while some of
our gestures are intentionally formed with the
goal of communication in mind, imitation can’t
explain why congenitally blind people gesture,
especially when they know they’re speaking to
other blind people, and communicative intent
can’t explain why people gesture when they’re
on the phone. Gesture is simply a part of lan-
guage use. When we form our thoughts into
speech, some of it leaks through our hands.
The sense that gesture is a language of its own is even more pronounced in those
cases where it seems to replace speaking en-
