A gesture is a movement made to imply something.
Ademán is a concept with a very interesting etymological origin. The term comes from a classical Arabic word that referred to a legal guarantee . When a person tried to replace said guarantee , they resorted to promises or oaths accompanied by pompous gestures . In this way, the meaning of gesture changed until it was associated with the movements that an individual makes to transmit a message or imply something .
For example: "The old man made a gesture with his hand to tell the young man not to continue talking" , "In the stadium no one understood the gesture the footballer made after scoring the goal" , "A dog must learn to interpret gestures" of his master .
Example of gesture
Take the case of a person who wants to take a taxi . To do this, you will stop at the edge of the sidewalk to wait for one of these vehicles to approach. When you detect that a taxi is coming, you must make a hand gesture to tell the driver to stop as you want to get in. The gesture usually consists of extending the arm with an open hand.
In this context, we can also use the word sign to refer to a gesture with which a person intends to imply something in particular, generally performed with one or both hands. It is important to clarify that in each Spanish-speaking country there are different uses for these and other terms, such as gesture , which usually speaks of a characteristic position of the eyebrows and lips, among other parts of the face , although it can also describe an action. with hands or legs.
Gestures allow messages to be transmitted.
Your connection with culture
Gestures are not universal , but are invariably connected to a culture; For this reason, when we travel to a foreign country we must avoid communicating through this language , until we learn the local gestures and the meaning that ours have there.
There are many stories of embarrassing situations in which a tourist makes a gesture that in his hometown denotes gratitude or joy, but that for the locals has a rude or obscene connotation.
Other uses of the term gesture
When used in the plural, the term gesture serves to refer to a person's manners, that is, all those actions they use to be noticed and distinguished from those around them, demonstrating their level of education . In this way, just as we can talk about someone's good or bad manners, it is also possible to describe their mannerisms as rude or casual, for example. It is important to clarify, however, that this use is not very common in everyday speech, but is found especially in written language.
A gesture, on the other hand, can be a body posture or an action that reflects a mood , an emotion or an intention . Suppose a police officer intercepts a man who was walking in a suspicious attitude, with his face covered. This man first stops at the officer's call but, while the police officer asks him some questions, he makes a gesture of escape , abruptly turning his body. Then the police officer decides to stop him and immobilize him to prevent him from fleeing.
As can be seen in the previous example, this use of gesture serves to describe an action that does not come to fruition: the suspicious man tries to escape, but the police officer stops him in time, preventing him from achieving his objective . We do not often find the term gesture with this meaning in everyday speech; To express this type of situation, it is more common to use the verb atinar : "The man managed to escape, but the police caught him before he could start running."