#emblems
The Vulcan salutation is such an iconic feature of the Star Trek universe that it has its own Wikipedia page and was added to the Unicode emoji set (). There are many ways to build a fictional reality, and gestures are one way of doing this.
These gestures are often Emblems, a type of gesture that has a fixed form and a fixed meaning for the group that use them. Gestures are distinct from performing magic or Jedi mind tricks, which in the fictional world are technically actions. There’s also this fun paper that looks at the way people in scifi use gestures to interact with computers and technology.
The intentional use and fixed meaning of emblem gestures mean that they can take on a life outside the fictional world. For example, here’s European Space AgencyastronautSamantha Cristoforetti in 2015 on the ISS, in a final salute to Leonard Nimoy.
Perhaps the most fascinating example of an emblem gesture extending beyond fiction in recent times has been the emergency of the three fingers salute from the Hunger Games books and films. This gesture has been used in pro-democracy protests in countries including Hong Kong, Thailand and Myanmar. The image below is from the 2021 protests in Myanmar.
These examples got me thinking about emblem gestures in other fantasy and scifi worlds. A recent one that came to mind was the two fingered blessing from Emperor Cleon in the television version of Foundation. Iconic enough in-world that statues of him are positioned using this gesture. It has a long history in Greek rhetoric and Christian iconography.
There’s a rude hand gesture in P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent books - two fingers raised in a backhanded V, which parallels the Up Yours gesture in the UK and Australia, but also fits the in-world context as the offensive act is to plug someone’s nostrils (the hight of rudeness in a scent-focused world!).
I’m sure there are others too. I’ll undoubtedly start noticing them and add them to this post! (if you have any examples, I’d love to hear from you!)