WHILE MOST AMERICAN gang signs are relatively new, they're part of a tradition as deep as human history. According to David McNeill, an emeritus professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago and one of the fathers of the field of gesture studies, hand gestures have a power in social situations that speech, for example, lacks.
Though he hasn't studied gang signs in particular, McNeill points out that hands have long been seen as instruments of great and sometimes otherworldly power: We not only work with our hands and write with them, we cast spells with them.
New neurological research, McNeill suggests, offers some reasons why hand signals might have a power beyond speech. When we see someone performing a gesture, so-called mirror neurons fire as if we were gesturing. In the realm of gang signs, this could create a bond of sympathy with someone flashing one's own sign, for instance, or an upsetting sense of collusion at the sight of a hostile sign - or one's own sign presented in a mocking way.
The NBA seems well aware of the power of signs. Although it rarely penalizes the verbal taunts that players constantly trade during games, it doled out two significant fines for gestures last weekend: The night after Pierce's incident, the Washington Wizards' DeShawn Stevenson earned a $25,000 fine of his own for a gesture that included a mimed throat-slashing.
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