Do you suffer from Lexidactylophobia?

That term was in the title of a 12-page magazine article by Donald A. Grushkin which appeared on page 404 in the December 1998 issue of the American Annals of the Deaf - Lexidactylophobia: The (Irrational) Fear of Fingerspelling. You can read the abstract at Pubmed. Fingerspelling is using the American Manual Alphabet letter by letter rather than American Sign Language for representing entire words. (I’ve shown above how to fingerspell the word hello). Gallaudet University has a downloadable educational article about The Importance of Fingerspelling for Reading. 

Why did I bring up this obscure phobia? As a reminder that finger, hand, and arm gestures all are important in public speaking. In previous posts I have blogged about Common and obscure gestures and how Gesture size usually should match audience size.

Enough of that serious stuff! Have some fun watching gestures in YouTube videos of Johnny Otis and Cliff Richard performing the song Willie and the Hand Jive, and Born to Hand Jive from the 1978 movie Grease and on GLEE.