Every day we make a wide variety of gestures voluntarily, we use them because through them we transmit information that other people understand, how often this happens, the fact that we make gestures and others understand, sometimes make us think that a gesture makes sense On the contrary, gestures do not make sense, the sense is made by us , the people who interpret them.
When we travel to places where people have different cultures, mimicry can end up being strange, we may not be able to understand the meaning of signs very similar to those we perform in our daily lives, the truth is that every gesture is world or, at least, it can be.
- Let’s take a wink as an example.
- This gesture involves closing one eye for a while while the other remains open.
- It’s an easy gesture to recognize.
- But not so easy to interpret.
Imagine the next situation. On the porch of a bar, several people drink coffee, a boy blinks at a girl looking at him, at another table, another boy who does not look directly at anyone also blinks, the girl blinks the boy, while another girl looks at the three blinks also blinks one eye.
How to solve this flicker crossing? You may want to think about what each wink means so that by reading it you can compare it to the true meaning. Below is an interpretation of this story:
With this story, though invented, we have shown that flicker can have many meanings and be both voluntary and involuntary. Did you understand the meaning of a wink? Imagine how difficult it can be to interpret a signal, without proof of the meaning that a sign usually has in a given context, and at some point, guessing the meaning of a sign can be quite complicated.
For Ferdinand de Saussure, signs are the union of signified and signifier, the signified is what it means, while the signifier is the word that represents it, both in its writing and in its pronunciation, in the case that we are talking about, the gesture. , the signifier would be the gesture.
The union of the two, the union of signifier and meaning, has no motivation and, therefore, their relationship is arbitrary, that is, a simple movement of the hand can acquire a meaning with which it has no relation. Sometimes it’s so hard to know the meaning of gestures.
Different cultures often have gestures with different meanings. Some of these gestures that have a different meaning are as follows:
On your next trip, pay attention to the interpretation you’ll give to signals, and be more careful with the gestures you make, when you don’t know a culture or context, you can make way for absurd conclusions. The question can resolve or avoid a conflict.