Category Archives: Gestures

Flex: A Basketball Gesture

AW is a 19 year old college student. She is a freshman computer science major and loves basketball. She played as a child and closely follows professional basketball today.

Context: This is performed during a basketball game, both amateur and professional. This was collected over dinner at the collectors home.

Transcript:

Collector: What does it mean when a player flexes?

AW: It comes from when a player scores an AND1, which is pretty much when the player scores despite really tough defense and being fouled. When a player scores a bucket on an AND1 they flex their arms as a boast of how good they are. Boast and just to say, “Yeah, I’m the shit”. When they flex, their teammates and even fans flex too.

Collector: Is that something you participate in yourself?

AW: Definitely when I’m watching a game. It’s fun and it might sound corny but you feel connected to the players and other fans. That’s my favorite part, I think.

Flex gesture

Analysis: Sports play a significant role in American culture. There is jargon between all sports but gestures are something that remains unofficial but still largely shared. This gesture specifically is shared between the performer and the people around them. The knowledge of this, like with other gestures, is social and serves the same function as jargon and sayings.

Russian Spit Luck

Description:

“So basically, my Russian great grandmother would spit in her daughter- my grandmother’s hair, for good luck. My grandmother then went and did it to my mom, which passed down the tradition to her. And then my mom would do it to me. It’s a little tiny spit in your hair, and she’d do it to me before I’d go in for any audition or big sports game. That sorta thing. I don’t know how far back it goes beyond my great grandma, but it’s always been present in my family.”

Background:

The informant, CR, is an ashkenazi jew/russian-american college student who is pursuing acting. He often has performances and big events like this where, if he’s with his mom, she will spit on him for a little extra luck. He believes in the power of this superstition and thinks it to provide that boost of confidence that can make all the difference.

Context:

CR had brought up this ritual superstition and I inquired what the full picture was. Specifically asking where this practice emerged from and what he knows about it.

Thoughts:

Having noted how this was a practice on his Russian side of the family, I dug into the archives to see if there was any other occurrence of this strange little ritual and found that there was! In a post called “Spitting on the Devil,” a folklorist describes a tradition spitting over/on your shoulder three times to prevent the Devil from interfering with your good intentions. In this case, it’s a practice that follows the common superstition of “knocking on wood” when you say out loud a belief of good fortune so as to not “jinx it.” While CR’s example has deviated from the religious affiliation of this luck practice and anti-jinx, the lucky spit seems to be correlated.

Reference:

To read more on the spitting practice, check out the archive post linked below.

http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/russian-pessimism/

Video Game Taunting – Online Insults

Main Perfromance:

In the online game series called “Halo,” CS was exposed to the start of a long running insult to one’s opponent called “tea bagging.” The movement, crouching up and down over a dead enemy, was so infamous that it got its very own name.

Background:

This action of crouch spamming over an opponent that the player killed, has since expanded to pretty much all online shooters, but is less often called by the name. Instead, the action is by far the most recognizable part of the gesture.

Context:

When playing the online game “Overwatch” with CS, he got killed and “tea bagged” by the enemy team.

Thoughts:

Disrespect and crude humor is a common occurrence in online video games, especially when it gets very competitive. The same way that basketball players might taunt each other before and after making shots, online gamers treat the sport with a similar attitude. With more and more humor coming from the internet, on occasion, this emote/crouch spam taunting makes its way even into the material world.

Reference:

I found one other post about this online taunt/humor in our archive:

http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/video-game-celebration-american/

Jazz Slang – Band Leader Terminology

Main Piece:

CS (mid-twenties, white male, music degree background, LA resident) and I had a conversation about musicians.

Me: “So can you like explain that phrase, ‘take it to the top?'”

CS: “Take it to the top means to go back to the beginning of the song.”

Me: “That’s it?”

CS: “Well, like, there’s also usually a hand motion too.”

He mimes spinning his hand in a circle in the air.

CS: “When we used to play at bars in New York, I’d have to swing my hand around all wild and scream it out just to get people to hear me. It’s usually energetic like that, ya know? Like when you want to keep the jam [song] going, you take it back to the top.”

Background/Context:

Phrases like this seem to be universal to musicians and are passed on homogeneously by other musicians and music teachers. The emphasis of this saying is returning to the “top,” which references the top of a music sheet where the notes would begin. The only real time that this phrase would appear would be during a live performance or amidst a practice with a band that plays the sort of songs that don’t have a clear run time.

Thoughts:

Jazz definitely serves itself to folk expression because of the collaborative nature of the music. Call outs like this connect the band into a collective consciousness that allows them to move as a uniform organism. The call out to loop the song also greatly relies on reading the audience for when the energy in the room wants the song to continue, versus wanting it to end.

Musical Theater Pre-Show Ritual: Linking Pinkies and Biting Your Thumb

Text:

MA: “A pre-show ritual we would do at my high school, if you were sticking your thumb and your pinky out, you would link your pinky with someone else’s and then bite your thumbs in front of each other’s faces. It’s kind of like a kiss, but you’re not actually kissing.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old college student from Orange County, California, who did musical theater throughout her childhood and attended a performing arts high school. She and her castmates in high school would do this ritual before the beginning of a performance. MA described how the gesture allowed performers to be calm in the high anxiety moments before a show. The intimacy of this act, which she compared to a kiss since “you’re literally a hand’s length away from each other’s faces,” fosters a sense camaraderie between members of a cast which can boost performers’ confidence.

Analysis:

This ritual, like many if not all pre-show rituals, evokes a sense of solidarity between performers. Because performers spend so much time together rehearsing, members of a cast tend to bond with each other. This is important since live theater relies on each individual’s performance as well as the interactions between performers, so fostering a sense of community promotes the success of the actors and of the show. The medium demands vulnerability from performers, who must put themselves on display and maintain their dramatic personas while fielding the immediate, unfiltered reactions of the audience. Thus, a show’s success relies on the cast’s ability to trust one another. This intimate musical theater ritual both reflects and promotes the closeness of the cast, conveying that the performers’ trust and believe in each other. This sense of support and community can build confidence and lessen stress, enabling better performance. It can also be interpreted as a good luck ritual or even a superstition.