We all recognise it: the international sign for “can I have the bill please?”. A mime of signing a piece of paper1], made across a noisy restaurant or bar: a gesture to waiting staff that you’d like to get the bill delivered to you, that you’d like to kickstart the process of leaving. And thereby, that it’s you that is somehow in charge of things.
It’s so common a sight we hardly notice it. In London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Capetown, Bogota. Cardiff, Cornwall and Cromarty. Which is, in a way, a good indicator that it has become woven into the culture whose weft we slip through. But what kind of thing is this gesture? How does it get to be so popular? How does it spread around the world? And why doesn’t it change?
One way of thinking about it is as a “pantomime”: an acting-out, a mime of a behaviour, but one which is highly functional: it prompts a particular response from another person (the waiting waiting staff). It dates from the time when we signed things with pens, bills and credit card slips, but in most countries we stopped the literal signing some two decades ago, yet still the squiggle lives on. The thing it referred to is long gone. Many of the people in the restaurant have never used a card in that way. Yet they still use the air-sign to move the social dance with the waiting staff on, to wind up proceedings at the table. To bring the curtain down.
There are lots of these kinds of gestures that hang around long after the behaviour they’re rooted in has withered away: the roll-down-the-window crank that is still used by cyclists and traffic cops when most cars on the road today have electric windows; the camera shutter click, when most photos are taken by phones not bizarre black boxes; the time-out T that stops play and discussion; and the “call me” – raising your hand to your head with thumb and little finger extended to suggest a future phone call. This gesture, has lost its original anchor but still plays on long after those old fixed-line handsets disappeared.
Gesture researchers have drawn a distinction between pure pantomime gestures (things that act out the thing we are trying to say, an everyday charade) and emblematic gestures (those that have come unrooted from the actions they depict and work more symbolically). In fact, the recognise things are often a bit of both: they talk of a spectrum from one thing to the other. From pure mime (an improvised one-off, maybe) to pure symbol, where the gesture has no physical link to what it means. The thumbs-up, say. The throat-cut we use to tell a speaker to stop sits somewhere in the middle.
Many of the examples above, including the squiggle, are more towards the symbolic end than the pure-mime end. To work, to be effrective, they need to be understood by everyone involved (we really don’t need the effort of a new parlour-game performance every time we need to ask for the bill, with waiting stuff shouting their guesses out loud). Both sides of the exchange need to understand the intended meaning and the desired response. In Lisa’s taverna, as in every such environment, both guest and waiting staff play their roles, and grasping what the squiggle gesture means is an essential part of each performing their part successfully. If one fails, the whole show goes downhill.
But how do these kinds of gestures actually get to be popular? By copying (or “Social Learning” if you prefer). By one person following another and then others following them. Just as Frank Bass taught all those years ago.
In particular, these kind of things are learned in context: by people seeing how to use these gestures to manage the smooth flow of human interaction in the pub, the bar or the restaurant. And that’s why gestures like this stay popular long after their physical root is gone: because we know that everyone else here knows what they mean and how to respond to them. These things get locked into our culture, into our social world. It’s not that there’s anything particularly superior about them as a gesture. Often, as in the case of the squiggle, they’ve lost the referent, the physical root of the mime. Rather, it’s just that we all know it. And we know that everyone else knows it. We know that that’s how things are done round here.
Which is why the squiggle will see off its successors too. The carbon slip went twenty years ago from the actual payment. Even the signature itself is going now: tap, face, number. Already you can begin to see a flat hand patted on the air across the odd restaurant, a mime of contactless payment, arriving at the table before the squiggle has left it. It won’t catch on. The squiggle may have started with the slip, or the signature, or the card, all it ever needed was us.
Watch, listen, reflect
Watch. Next time you’re in a restaurant or a bar, ask for the bill with your hands only and time how long the waiter takes to nod. Then notice how fast you read his reply. If you can, do the same on your next visit abroad.
Listen. Over one day, count the words you use for technology that no longer exists: dial, hang up, rewind, film, etc. Note that how many people correct you.
Reflect. What in your own organisation is the equivalent of squiggle, like a routine that’s the exact shape of a task nobody does any more, held in place because everyone expects everyone else to expect it? Some are dead weight. Some, like the bill gesture, are doing real work that nobody can name. Work out which before you stop doing it.
Sources
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. University of Chicago Press.
Ekman, P. and Friesen, W. V. (1969). ‘The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: categories, origins, usage, and coding’. Semiotica, 1(1), 49–98.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.
Bentley, A. and Earls, M. (2011). I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior. MIT Press.
[1]Signing the check, for our North American chums. Il conto, l’addition, die Rechnung, la cuenta, y bil for other folk.
