Quoting from the Poetry Foundations’s website:

The editors of Poetry magazine selected the winning manuscripts from more than 1,000 submissions. In announcing the winners, Poetry senior editor Don Share said, “Each year the competition grows larger—and stronger. We’re extremely pleased that the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowships will recognize this diverse and talented group of younger poets.” Editor Christian Wiman added, “The subjects and aesthetics of these writers are as various as their backgrounds, but there are two qualities they all share: excellence and promise. You’ll be hearing a lot from these writers in the years to come.”

Zac…I am awed by your erudition, dedication to art, and discipline.

Congratulations.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In my first Cheesie Mack book, almost-11-year-old Cheesie talks about the unusual nicknames for his mother’s parents:

“I have never met anyone who has a Gumpy or a Meemo. I am collecting grandparent nicknames on my website. You can put yours in if you want.”

Lots of kids have sent in their family’s nicknames, and the list is very diverse. For a first-hand, child-driven take on this “I’m-not-old-enough-to-be-called-Granny” trend among the older generation, visit Cheesie’s grandparent nickname webpage.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Little Johnny can read well long before he can spell well. Should you be worried? Should you send him to a tutor?

Problem-solving technique can be deductive/analytical or inductive/synthetic. Stated another way, an approach can be convergent or divergent.

For every youngster striving for literacy, learning to read and spell requires both convergent and divergent thinking. When reading an unfamiliar word, the child deduces/analyzes, using past phonics lessons and similar-looking words from which to build a guess. Thus, for a kindergartner whose rudimentary reading skills are somewhat developed, a new word like president presents no insurmountable difficulty. Previously learned examples enable the reader to converge more or less successfully.

A word like scientist, however, requires both deduction and induction. How is the c sounded? Is the i long or short? Context provides the clue from which the child may be able to synthesize the correct pronunciation.

Because deduction builds stepwise from past lessons, while induction relies upon wider generalizations that may not yet be within the child’s orbit, the former is inherently more productive.

Spelling, however, leans more heavily than reading upon synthesis.

The paper is blank. My grandson needs to spell scientist, a word he has never before written. He charges into the unknown.

He succeeds! Is there a more synthetically correct spelling than siyuntist? If English spelling were based on sense, rather than history, siyuntist would be the korekt spelling.

The drawing, BTW, is of an “elechtrec” rover machine. I know. I asked.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

My plan was to use accessible poetry and short-short flash fiction to stimulate thought. I began with:

In these sessions we will discover that some things we read are like icebergs. But when I say that, do I mean that these written works are frozen and floating?  Of course not. What I mean is that, like an iceberg, there’s more than meets the eye. And if a writer refers to a “lonely cloud,” does he mean that the cloud feels some kind of emotion?

We started easy. I gave them Humpty Dumpty to read and asked, “Who was Humpty? And did he fall or was he pushed?” None of the participants—six to ten came each week—had any experience in this sort of intellectual challenge. Many of my questions (and that’s all I did…ask questions) got I-don’t-know’s, to which I responded, “I don’t know is the ONLY wrong answer.”

It only took one week for the students’ responses to become almost uniformly interesting and enthusiastic. Hands were shooting up. Over the next several weeks we did Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Percy Shelley, and many others. A sample of their comments about a one-sentence story by Bruce Holland Rogers illustrates their intellectual insertion into the process. (I have changed the students’ names.)

He left the village of his birth, crossed the mountains, crossed the seas,
saw great cities, learned a few words in a dozen tongues, met the high
and the low, and returned after years of wandering to the village of his
birth where for the rest of his life he suffered nostalgia for his village as
it had been when he left.

Q: Why did he leave his village?
…Santiago: To get a job.
…Cesar: To travel, and the mountains means challenges, and it wasn’t easy.
Q: Why does the writer mention that he “crossed the sea”?
…Corazon: Because that means he went very far away.
Q: He left a village and “saw great cities.” Why mention that?
…Corazon: Cities and villages are very different.
…Ariela: A village is small. A city is big…like Denver.
…Cesar: Or across the sea…like Paris.
Q: What makes a city great?
…Corazon: Restaurants, hotels, landmarks, different languages.
…Ariela: National parks.
…Cesar: Size, museums.
Q: What does it mean that he “learned a few words in a dozen tongues”?
…Cesar: He went to lots of places and learned the same words in different languages.
…Coco: It’s a big job to learn how to talk the language.
Q: Who were the “high and low”?
…Cameron: Royalty and servants.
…Ariela: People of different size.
Q: He “returned after years of wandering.” So what?
…Arcadia: He visited lots of places.
…Santiago: He was walking around everywhere.
…Cesar: But when he got back the village had changed.
Q: He “suffered nostalgia.” Why?
…Ariela: Because his village changed, and he liked the way it used to be. He missed the good old times.
Q: Was his journey a success or a failure?
…Leon: Both. Might have fun when he went to the other places, and when he came back the village had changed, and he liked it better the way it was.

Basho (1644–1694)

My small wings
I am forbidden to fly
I’m a flightless bird

…Cesar: Forbidden is the most interesting word in the poem. It means you can’t fly…not that you are not able, but someone or something has stopped it.
…Leon: It’s forbidden because there is a hunter out there, and it has been prevented.
Q: Why does this bird have small wings?
…Cesar: We had a cockatoo and had its feathers clipped. Maybe that.
…Coco: It could be deformed. But that would not mean forbidden. It would mean unable.
…Arelia: Maybe this is about a person who thinks of herself as a bird.
…Leon: I think it’s about a young girl who is not allowed to leave her house and go out with boyfriends.

The candle is lit. PSST’s goal is to get these kids to graduate from high school. They have promised each a $2,000 college scholarship if they do and gotten a commitment (with a certificate suitable for framing) from Sonoma State University guaranteeing admission if they graduate and meet the minimum entrance requirements. If the kids, the large majority of whom are children of Hispanic immigrants, succeed (and PSST will work with them continuously through middle school and high school), almost all of them will be the first in their family to go to college.

Paying forward.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer who is aware and knowledgeable about the discussions and unwarranted controversy about whether man has contributed to changes in and to the earth, has written an article for Yale’s Environment 360 website that addresses the naming of the geological epoch we are current in. She asks:

Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

An-THROP-o-cene. What’s in a name is not a trivial concern. The human act of giving a name to something both legitimizes and limns what may have previous been unrecognized and ill-defined.

Gordon Moore

Ray Kurzweil

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.

photo: Working Group on the Anthropocene website

Technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

Jan Zalasiewicz

The Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other.

In terms of change over time, this will be the most vertiginous ride this Earth has ever taken.

*     *     *     *     *

Below is Kolbert’s article, The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact, reprinted in its entirety.

The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.

In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.

Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.”

Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation.

“Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.”

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen

The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”

Soon, the term soon began popping up in other scientific publications. “Riverine quality of the Anthropocene,” was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences.

“Soils and sediments in the anthropocene,” read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain’s University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. “I noticed that Paul Crutzen’s term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony,” he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At a luncheon meeting of the commission, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea.

“We simply discussed it,” he said. “And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term.”

In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene… as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization.” (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to “global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary,” the period that ended 2.6 million years ago.

Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record — by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary — the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene — ought to exist, or if  the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the International Commission on Stratigraphy decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.)

In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy.

Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes.

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

“We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.”

Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Try this experiment? Write a declarative sentence using the word “anymore” that does not include a negative. You are not allowed to split the word into “any more” as in:

“If there are any more interruptions, I shall clear the courtroom.”

I’ll wait while you cogitate…

The vast majority of you will not be able to.

Sentences like…

“I enjoy eating persimmons anymore.”

…will sound awkward or just plain wrong. You will, however, be comfortable saying…

“I don’t enjoy eating persimmons anymore.”

The first time I noticed a speaker use “anymore” without a negative, I asked and learned that she had grown up near Dayton, OH. The second time I heard the locution, I immediately asked the speaker (a woman I had just been introduced to) how close to Dayton was her elementary school. Her jaw dropped. Her childhood home was Yellow Springs, only 20 miles away. This regional origin was borne out over many years and many interrogations, until West Texas was a surprising answer.

I chalked that up to migration or accident, and waited for another similarly located Texan to prove the existence of another anymore-without-a-negative region. It has not happened.

The latest instance occurred a week ago in Needles, CA, where a waitress’s usage prompted me to ask the hometown question.

“San Diego,” she replied. A bit daunted, I persevered. “Where were your parents from?”

Voila! Her mother grew up in Deersville, OH, less than 200 miles from Dayton.

The American Heritage Dictionary offers an explanation:

In standard American English the word anymore is often found in negative sentences: They don’t live here anymore. But anymore is widely used in regional American English in positive sentences with the meaning “nowadays”: “We use a gas stove anymore” (Oklahoma informant). Its use, which appears to be spreading, is centered in the South Midland and Midwestern states, as well as in the Western states that received settlers from those areas. The earliest recorded examples are from Northern Ireland, where the positive use of anymore still occurs.

Mention of Oklahoma may support my lone Texan. But the extreme rarity in my experience of a “positive anymore” belies the AHD’s claim that “anymore is widely used in regional American English in positive sentences with the meaning ‘nowadays.’”

Wikipedia says the usage occurs in Midland American English, and that a

“common feature of the greater Midland area is so-called ‘positive anymore‘: It is possible to use the adverb anymore with the meaning ‘nowadays’ in sentences without negative polarity, such as Air travel is inconvenient anymore.”

I’m not satisfied with these explanations. I think I’ll investigate this anymore.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Winter in Southern California is barely winter. But colds, coughs, and bad dreams can besiege a child in any clime.

I was six. My older brother was nine. Our baby brother was just months old. Dad came into the big boys’ bedroom to solve some medical or psychological problem. He carried two glasses of what appeared to be milk. My brother and I immediately noticed globules of melted butter floating on the surface of the warm liquid. We questioned.

“It’s a guggle-muggle,” Dad explained. “Drink.”

The name was intriguing and, I was sure, fabricated to entrance his boys. The concoction was sweet, warm, and delicious.

We feigned illness several times thereafter in order to occasion repeats.

His recipe, we eventually learned, was simply milk, butter, and honey, warmed until the butter melted. I can’t imagine it had any real medical efficacy, especially for those illnesses where phlegm might be one of the symptoms, but a search has revealed the guggle-muggle’s widespread use in Jewish folk medicine. Who knew?

Clearly, almost everyone but me. But once I looked, I found guggle-muggles galore!

I even found a book written by Argentinian Eliahu Toker entitled, Gogl Mogl! El Gran Libro Del Humor Judi: “El Gogl Mogl es un exquisito postre muy popular entre los judíos de Europa Oriental.”(The guggle-muggle is an exquisite dessert very popular among the Jews of Eastern Europe.)

The name has various spellings (not surprising since it is a tranliteration into English of Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew letters). Gogl-mogl, gogol-mogol, gogel-mogel, kogel mogel, gurgle-murgle, and uggle-muggle are the ones I’ve found. There are undoubtedly others. I found one source that claimed the name comes from a cantor named Gogel who sang in a synagogue in Russia. He lost his voice and couldn’t sing, only regaining his voice by drinking a mixture of raw eggs and wine…with sugar, because he had a sweet tooth. This is, IMO, bogus.

Do not confuse the guggle-muggle with the muggles in Harry Potter’s saga. Not Jewish!

The recipe is even more varied than the spelling. It is always hot, and most preparers include a raw egg yolk…some the whole egg. Some use sugar instead of honey. Cinnamon, occasionally. Maybe grapefruit or lemon juice. Many include a bissel bronfen (a little slivovitz, rum, or brandy—maybe a lot!). Hot tea? Yeah, some.

I even found this reminiscence: “If I am not mistaken this was a concoction of cod liver oil and chocolate syrup. My father would take me to the druggistnik to make a guggle muggle when I was constipated or just had the blahs.“

Oy!

There’s an old saw about two Jews having three opinions. There is no definitive recipe for a guggle muggle. It is to be made exactly how bubbie used to do it.

Former NYC mayor Ed Koch spoke of it on his radio show. Barbra Streisand said her mother gave it to her to strengthen her voice.

And from the beginning of a short story that won third prize in a 1997 online literary contest:

I came down with a heavy bronchial cough one year to the day after my Bar Mitzvah and on the very day that my mother went to the hospital to give birth to her third child, a baby girl, my little sister. My father tended to me in her absence. When on the third day of my illness the cough hadn’t disappeared in spite of my taking medicine prescribed by a doctor, my father took matters into his own hands. He put together a concoction that his own parents had given him when he was a child: the yellow of eggs, one squeezed lemon, one spoon of honey, and two or three teaspoons of sugar, all mixed together and taken down as if I were drinking a milkshake or an egg cream in the candy store downstairs. Unlike all other medicines, this tasted fine. In fact, I made note of the ingredients so that I could put all that stuff together for myself secretly, even when I didn’t have a cold.

“What is it called?” I asked my father.

“In our shtetl in Galicia and in Russia, an uggle-muggle,” he said. “In Rumania, a guggle-muggle. In France, a chateau, but what do they know.”

You could say the same about me. I thought my father invented the whole thing. What do I know?

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Commonly—and erroneously.

The internet offers near-instant access to information. It is ironic that in some cases this easy of access decreases accuracy.

Wikipedia explains the term clearly and correctly:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.” Different definitions place the “extra” moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon’s timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.

• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.

• The Farmers’ Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.

But in its March 1946 issue, Sky & Telescope magazine unintentionally set the record wrong, misinterpreting previous definitions and stating that a blue moon was the term given to the second full moon in a single calendar month. The new-and-wrong definition caught on, and even thought the magazine eventually corrected its error (in its May 1999 issue and again in a good-hearted, self-effacing press release two days ago), over that half-century, the new, easier-to explain definition had almost completely supplanted the old.

That’s the way of language; it changes.

It’s me replaces It’s I.

I’m  like… replaces I said…

Blue moon gets a new definition.

So on New Year’s Eve, this wrong new definition shone around the world.

Singapore’s Straits Times got it right: “The original meaning of ‘blue moon’ was the third full moon in a season with four instead of the usual three.”

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “But a real blue moon – not a reference to the moon’s tint but designating its appearance a second time in a single calendar month – was visible Thursday night where there were no clouds – along with a partial lunar eclipse that could be sighted throughout the Middle East.”

The Times of India noted correctly, “It is basically a calendar event and has no astronomical importance as such.”

Some of this New Year’s references to blue moon were benign, even charming:

A segment on Omaha’s WOWT-TV included, “It happens once roughly every two and a half years. Thirteen moons in a twelve month period—when two fall in the same calendar month, it’s called a blue moon. And the saying “once in a blue moon” refers to a rarity—something that doesn’t happen very often….And just before midnight a wedding.”

Some were educative.

Richard Brill, writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noted correctly that “A full moon on New Year’s Eve is rare, but when it happens it is always a ‘blue moon.’”

Others were simply inaccurate, misleading, or both.

The Christian Science Monitor mis-cited the initial Sky & Telescope article: “But in 1943 [sic], Sky and Telescope Magazine erroneously wrote that the second full moon in any calendar month was called a blue moon. The label stuck and is still used today.”

China View got the definition entirely wrong. In a caption to this photo, it wrote: “The sunset is reflected on the wing of a commercial airliner as the full moon rises over clouds in the horizon over Athens December 31, 2009. For only the second time in nearly two decades [sic], Earth is illuminated by a “Blue Moon,” the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.”

NASA, as should be expected, referenced the Sky & Telescope error-and-restatement correctly, but blundered when it stepped down from its ethereal bailiwick into song lyrics: “In music, [blue moon is] often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.”

A quick search will show that those two musical interpretations occur in the same immensely popular Rodgers & Hart song (Blue Moon), recorded variously by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and scores of others, but made most popular by the Marcels’ in their #1 do-wop version (1961).

Do the research. More frequently than once in a blue moon, the internet will be wrong.

But if the tune is good…sing along!

-

-

-

Photo credits: Blue moon---canyonhiker (who admits to PhotoShopping it blue); Jetliner---Xinhua/Reuters Photo

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

…the nearby hipster donut shop, Dynamo, whose most popular item is the Maple Glazed Bacon Apple donut…

…reserving sweet dishes for the end of a meal is thus a recent development. In the Middle Ages, a main course in England or France might include a dish like rabbits or beef tongue in gravy covered in sugar…

…as French cuisine develops from the 14th and to the 18th century, main courses become more and more savory rather than sweet, and sweet dishes slowly shift toward the end of the meal…

…Chinese dates with “snow frog”, 雪蛤. Snow frog is the poetic name given to frog fallopian tubes…

—flavor elements for sour tend to be rice vinegars in China, tamarind in south-east Asia, lemon juice or grain vinegar in the United States, sour orange or key lime in Central America, and wine vinegars in France (hence the name vin-aigre, ‘sour wine’). The Yiddish souring element is crystals of citric acid called “sour salt”.

I encourage you to consume Jurafsky’s entire meal.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Today I was trying to complete this phrase: palms up in a gesture of _____? I was stymied because that gesture seems to have an unusually wide range of possible meanings.

In Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Adam Kendon writes:

Open hand Supine (or “palm up”) family gestures…are used in contexts where the speaker is offering, giving or showing something or requesting the reception of something. It also includes gestures in which, very often, both hands, sustained in the Open Hand Supine pose, are moved away from one another, as if being withdrawn from the space immediately in front of the speaker. The semantic theme of these gestures is that of the withdrawal of action or of non-intervention.

I did a Google search and found Kendon’s explanation to be generally accurate, but writers who utilize this gesture in their works stretch it much further. Here is the surprisingly long, and in parts contradictory, list I assembled from just the first 75 or so Google hits.

Palms up in a gesture…

of acceptance
of amazement
of apology
of benevolence
of blankness
that states, “Case closed”
of clueless irritation
of defeat
of dismissal
that drove home the point
that seems French
of futility
of giving
of greeting
of helplessness
of hopelessness
of ignorance
of incredulity
of innocence
of invitation
of invocation
of magnanimity
of openness
of peace
of pleading
of prayer
of receptivity
of resignation
that asks, “So nu?”
of submission
of supplication
of surrender
of thanks
that states, “There you have it”
that states, “This is easy”
of vulnerability
that asks, “What can I do about it now?”  
that asks, “What the hell is your problem?”
that asks, “What’s up?”

Gesture, because it is non-verbal, opens itself to ambiguity when it is translated into human language. But such ambiguity engenders flexibility and with that comes creativity.

So nu? Palms up. What’s your problem? There you have it!

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.