The Finger

La gestualità è un modo di comunicare in via di estinzione. Lo sostiene Angus Trumble in un curioso libro intitolato The Finger. A handbook (Yale UP). "An old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon male can go through life with his hands in his pockets. Almost the only times he is on the receiving end of a significant hand movement are when the priest blesses him in church (index and middle fingers together and turned outward), or the umpire gives him out at the crease (index finger raised solus), or he is abused by an angry cyclist (index and middle finger splayed and turned inward).
This last was the original form of Churchill’s V-sign, until delicate-minded advisers advised him to do it palm outward. Trumble himself admits that we live in a gesture-impoverished world where hand signals are disappearing as fast as many minority word-languages. Only perhaps in Italy does the full panoply still flourish, from the corni and the mano fica to the minaccia by way of a dozen variants of the raised digit, the clenched fist and the smacked palm. TLS.