What does this hand gesture mean?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Coffing, who blogs as The Speech Doctor, has a post on August 1, 2020 titled The Best Advice on Gestures in which he claims the one shown above offends nobody in any country around the world. Presumably he thinks what he terms The Palm Gesture only means Stop or That’s Enough. Last week he linked to that post from the Public Speaking Network at LinkedIn.

 

But he is quite mistaken. The image shown above is an illustration used in the Wikipedia article about the Mountza (or Moutza), the most traditional insult among Greeks. The Mountza or Hand Push mimics pushing excrement into the face of a prisoner. It also is discussed in another Wikipedia article on Obscene Gesture, which says in Africa it can mean You might have any of five fathers (you are a bastard). Both those other meanings are discussed in an August 18, 1996 New York Times article from Reuters titled What’s A-O.K. in the U.S.A. is Lewd and Worthless Beyond.

 

And it has still another meaning. On February 19, 2022 I blogged about A dictionary of gestures with over 880 entries. In that post I quoted from another article from CBC Radio that explained it also was an Arab greeting, so people thought they were being waved on rather than being told to Stop. Be careful when using gestures, since they are far from universal.