Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

196 pointsJaruzel162 comments

Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art is a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with their index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since you would generally point with your index finger alone. The use of two fingers represents the divine and human natures of Christ.

A few examples:

https://i2.wp.com/catholicism.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/fil...

https://jimmyakin.com/wp-content/uploads/st-augustine-and-fo...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_VIII#/media/File%...

It shows up in formal photographs of the Pope in the 20th century:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ch3pBw3dBY0/WeG5Oo9_k1I/AAAAAAAAC...

And the TV series The Young Pope even included this gesture as a detail: https://youngpopesart.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

It also frequently seen in images of the child Jesus.

The pope photo is not him pointing upward, he's doing the blessing. Imagine someone standing right in front of him and he's pointing two fingers at their head, then move to torso, then left shoulder, then right shoulder. Depending on the speed of the camera at that time, he might pose like that for a second just to take the photograph as if he's in the middle of the blessing someone. I've never seen priest doing it with one or three or four fingers.

Tldr: they're not pointing upwards, they're pointing to someone's head (the viewer of the painting/photography most likely)

I bet when they used one finger people were asking "me?" and then looked behind them to see if there is someone else. If priest uses two fingers it's obvious he's not pointing at you or someone behind you. It also helps if he points it little bit higher not just right between your eyes like a gun.

It's literally the hand sign of dual nature of Christ. Blessing or posing.

The Catholic Church has had quite a few years to solidify and formalize their rituals. Nothing a priest does during mass is accidental or coincidental. They go to school for these things.

>The Catholic Church has had quite a few years to solidify and formalize their rituals.

so they retconned it?

> Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art is a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with their index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since you would generally point with your index finger alone. The use of two fingers represents the divine and human natures of Christ.

At Disney employee training they taught me to point with index and middle finger (or my whole hand) too.

That is less about the gesture than it is about avoiding a different gesture. Many cultures do not appreciate pointing with a single finger. So Disney wants their people to use two.

I had thought it was more about pointing at a person with a finger was unwelcome, than pointing at a destination. I suppose in a crowded place such as an amusement park, you could inadvertently point at a person when giving directions?

The use of two fingers represents the dual natures of Disney Channel and Disney Plus.

If you have played Elden Ring, There is an amazing video on the "two fingers" and "three fingers" by "The Tarnished Archaeologist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hETam732CvY

My favorite secret hand gesture in a painting is in the portrait of the Duchess of Alba by Goya. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Francisco-de-Goya-Duches...

The text on the floor that she is pointing to reads 'solo Goya' (only Goya) and was not discovered until the painting was cleaned in modern times.

As to it's significance, draw your own conclusions.

From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.”

This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any given reasoning. I’m surprised to find this in what appears to aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory.

Any thoughts?

32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.

However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.

> 32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.

Would you actually be able to say it if they were?

The other guard always lies.

Link to the logic puzzle that flir is referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves

Ask what would the other do and do the opposite.

I wonder if you could do that with tristate logic somehow. maybe with more guards or other variables.

Solve for the general case.

Maybe you need num_guards-1 questions?

I doubt you could solve for 50 guards with 1 question.

If you're allowed to create a hypothetical question that translates a hierarchy of guards into Boolean logic, then it doesn't matter how many guards there are.

What are you thinking? I was wondering about dividing them into sets.

"What would each of the other 49 guards would say the 49 guards other than them would do?" It would be a pain to do the deduction from all of that info, but it seems like it would be enough enough. Maybe it would make more sense to have that guard write down the answer (and throw in a pencil and a few extra sheets of paper)...

"Label the guards, 1 to 50, starting with you as 1, the guard to your left as 2, etc. For each guard, tell me what answer they would give if I asked them if your door was safe".

If all the guards say the same thing, you're talking to the lying guard. Otherwise the liar is simply the one that answers differently.

Would that work? I think so.

I would just not comment, in that case.

Maybe that knowledge is unlocked when hitting 33°.

Probably not, the Freemason Police patrol this internet web site daily, and he'd disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Be sure to follow up on his comment history a month from now, to see whether he's said anything since.

The last time the government found out about the Masonic Police, the leader mysteriously died right before trial and the other charges were swept under the rug. I definitely wouldn’t mess with those guys.

https://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-fraternal-police-2...

Most of the secrets and symbols are available in publications and online for a very long time.

There's a surprising amount that aren't.

And even then:

1. Every Freemason knows what's on the Internet. Identifications have evolved.

2. The leaks lack... important contexts... about what they are.

But what are they actually used for? The only things i heard about freemasonry were from conspiracy theorists. But i never really found out, what they actually do. And the secret handshakes are performed with strangers to tell each other secretly they're unknown brothers?

If he told you that, he’d have to… initiate you

I hope he's comfortable with goats.

we're not rude, we were just taught to be caustic.

You gotta do the gestures to get the keys to the shriner cars.

Source: my grampa was a mason, but didn't do any brickwork, and told me nothing.

Instead of relying on secrets that can be leaked, you should be using asymmetric cryptography.

> presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.

I wouldn't bet on it. Performative secrecy is very common in esotericism.

Touche. You are correct. In fact, a number of paintings of esoteric figures now come to mind where their hands are in a particular configuration.

Sometimes with these sorts of organizations their deepest secrets are the meaning of their public symbology.

Do you have any examples you could share?

Source: Nicolas Cage

Sorry to break the news to you Jake but there are two orders. Those of "that era" are the actual power breakers, you guys are the peculiar but innocent window dressing.

> And since, ..

No, the meaning is the secret :) Oh dear.

What is secret is the meaning, not the gesture itself.

Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.

I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...")

And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry."

A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.'

I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?

The genius of your proposition is that you wouldn't have to be surprised, you'd just know

There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.

"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize crypto-jews each other"

"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize masonic followers each other"

I have never heard this verbiage before... Did an AI write this? Or, can someone explain to me how "used to recognize followers each other" is grammatically sound?

It's not grammatical. Reading the article parts of it seemed poorly machine-translated to me (and the whole thing seemed mostly a sequence of straw-men).

And yet...

I recall when young, people were commenting on how most media came from centralized locations. That with newspapers, and then radio, and now TV, pronunciation was moving towards being less regionalized, diverse, yet also that the choice of words to use, the synonyms to use, was changing.

I also recall the same being said for a variety of things, such as spell checkers, and grammar checkers used in wordprocessors. Some grammar was "OK", but other forms were being pushed by (most especially) earlier wordprocessors, with grammatically valid text being marked with that wavy underline.

Now we have AI.

My point?

Kids are going to be raised in a world with AI. If it spends a decade or more spewing blather such as this, an entire slew of people will grow up, from 10 to 20 years old, 15 to 25 years old, learning to cobble together sentences in this sort of way.

Not only will they read it, but "helpful" assistants will change their normal prose, into this gibberish.

So I'm sorry mkl, it sort of will be grammatical. And no, I'm not happy about it.

Indeed. And now imagine an opinionated government controls the AI which helps formulate not only articles, blogs, etc, but even the predictive text software that facilitates writing a language very poorly suited to writing on a phone. And then imagine how much harder it will be to overthrow that government when even your own speech is subtly nudged to support the will of Big Brother. And there you have the fate of the Chinese people.

> Did an AI write this?

I think you know an AI didn't generate the sentence because it's ungrammatical.

The publication in question (Acta Biomed) is oriented around "mainly national and international scientific activities from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries", so there's a reasonable chance none of the the authors speak English as a first language. This in no way excuses bad editing—the journal publishes in English, after all.

This reads like it belongs in an episode of The Curse of Oak Island not an article.

I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.

Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture.

I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.

> hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body

Huh, I had always assumed the reason that they were featured in renaissance art was the trend of depicting subjects with a sort of realism, combined with hands tending to be a more difficult feature for artists to master; so a good depiction of hands showcases the skill of the artist and enhances the work’s merit as a status symbol for its owner.

I guess both could be true. Hands are an important focus of attraction in the modern day tbf.

I am reminded of a short scene in the film Goya's Ghosts, where the artists claims to charge more if the portrait he is painting includes one or two hands.

> unnatural hand position

Is it really unnatural? Interestingly, as a right-handed, the two middle fingers of my right hand tend to effortlessly group together; this feels noticeably less true on my left hand, but still observable if I try to relax it.

The peculiar "mission tile" (half-cylindrical) flexibility of the palm region, encouraged by writing for example, may foster this grouping.

It's a bit surprising for the article not to address potential anatomical causes.

I naturally keep my pinky and ring fingers together on my right hand, and I think this is a result of how I hold my phone. It made me wonder if there is an easily overlooked common activity of that time that would cause people to naturally hold their middle and ring fingers together.

Your example of writing makes sense too. Perhaps because writers were a more exclusive club then, prominently showing your subject’s hand with that finger grouping was a message in itself.

I’d also consider the possibility that artists might use their own hand as a reference when detailing hands in a painting, and their own physiology might be affected by long hours working with a brush. Artists training other artists might reinforce this collective conclusion that this is a natural relaxed hand pose, because when they look at their own hands that’s often what they see.

Agreed. I think it is somewhat uncommon to have the fingers touching, but the pinky and pointer are both much more separable from the rest.

The ulnar nerve goes to finger 4 and 5, and the median to 2 and 3 plus a branch to 4. For me, 3+4 is the most difficult combination to maintain, and raising 4 is the most difficult, but the effect (as you suggest) is strongest in the non-dominant hand.

So I interpret this position as simply the most difficult hand position to maintain, thus indicating some intention, practice, or awareness -- and thus self-control, which was considered the master virtue classically.

Same here, just a natural anatomic relaxed hand/finger position in my case.

If I absently place my hand on my chest, the resulting configuration looks just like the “unnatural” one in the painting.

Maybe because you're biased having read the article? I just looked at a picture of me waving at the camera taken 2 weeks ago, and my fingers are splayed apart with even spacing.

It's a pity we don't have renaissance paintings of subjects waving at the painter. While making a silly face too.

When I rotate my hand toward my body the middle fingers come together, when it rotate it away they fan out. I can feel this happening in the tension of my muscles and ligaments during rotation. In contrast, pulling my two middle fingers together on purpose with my hand held out, without also pulling together all my fingers, feels weird. I simply think this is a mechanically likely think to happen due to the design of the forearm, though it may not be the case for everyone depending on tension and strength and anatomy.

As an exercise, pretend you’re a 16th century lord, or just a very theatrical person, and raise your arm with a drooping hand, then gently touch your chest with your fingers splayed and wrist at an angle. Your two fingers in the middle naturally touch first, and stay together once you lay down the whole hand, exactly like in the portraits. It’s not a straining position.

I’m also surprised the paper (?) doesn’t go into simple behavioural explanations for this.

I think the claim that it’s an unnatural position definitely needs justifying. A search of a corpus of modern photographs to determine the base rate for hands resting in this pose and a comparison of that to the rate depicted in renaissance art would seem to be the minimal due diligence to determine if there’s even an effect that needs explaining, before delving into the relative likelihood of Masonic symbolism.

Yep. If I just naturally lay my hand down on something, my middle and ring fingers do tend to naturally come together.

It takes a tiny bit of intent to splay my fingers out.

Portrait artists constantly study people very closely and are likely attuned to thousands of little nuanced details that go unnoticed by most people. This is probably one.

Now I’m going to start looking at people’s hands to check their finger positions. That might have been a good exercise for the authors of the paper to determine if this is a natural hand position.

Note that "mudras" have significant meanings in Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism. Mudras used in Indian dances convey feelings or elements of story etc. Also used in yoga. And mudras are not just hand gestures but also facial expressions, eye movements and so on.

Though there does not seem to be any connection of mudras with European paintings. There were cultural links between India and the Greco-Roman world in 2nd-1st century BCE around the time of Indo-Greek kingdom (northwest of the current India) but seems unlikely that would have such an influence centuries later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudra

This kind of speculation is what Friday afternoons were made for.

It is so poorly researched and, with such a weak seeker spirit, that I doubt they spent more than a weekend to it while playing video games.

The only two plausible explanations to me are either that artists conventionally drew hands like this (for religious, artistic or other reasons) or that artists' subjects conventionally posed like this, for a similar variety of reasons, or because the artist told them to.

The article helpfully rules out a third explanation, an "epidemic of syndactyly", but doesn't make a strong decision between the other two. It seems to lean towards this being a quirk of the artists, but it could do with a quantitative study: if artist A painted subject A like this, what happened when artist A portrayed other subjects, or other artists portrayed A?

Yeah, to me it is an artistic thing (then followed perhaps by painters copying "the Masters").

Fingers spread evenly is artistically uninteresting — naive even. Fingers all joined is also rather dull — suggests a rigidity in fact.

My thoughts exactly: by bringing two of the five fingers together you achieve a more interesting effect of overall asymmetry among the fingers, and yet because the two joined fingers are each flanked by a "detached" finger, it creates another layer of symmetry within the non-thumb fingers.

The overall effect is quite pleasing to the eye, which may account for it having caught on to the point where it became a trend. I see this as the Occam's Razor of explanations.

400 years later, this mysterious hand gesture would resurface in the character designs of Capcom's Mega Man / Rockman series of video games.

https://themmnetwork.com/2010/03/18/the-great-mega-man-finge...

i think papers like this reveal the benefits of domain-specific methodologies. a scientific paper is a bad choice for historiography.

art historical texts are usually much more concerned with close reading of artworks to establish syncretic pathways of artistic convention. art writers are usually unconcerned with null hypothesis and burden of proof. the authors here had no real claim about history or any interesting reading of artwork. i couldn't imagine something like this being disseminated in an arts journal or publication-- there just isn't enough time spent with the methods of art history, i.e close readings of the examples presented, primary source inclusion, historiographic narrative, formal analysis, etc.

i wish i could provide a counterexample, but my work is on american conceptual sculpture, not renaissance art. i think the last very good text i read on the renaissance was james hall's book on michelangelo's anatomy published some years ago.

The famous Arnolfini Portrait [0] by Jan van Eyck also has quite a bit of symbolism depicted in the hands of the portrait subjects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait#Interpretat...

The knife in the hand and the knife-like hand:

https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/82e1c6954dc87273a...

Plot twist: those pieces of silver were planted by the Romans...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lngmx0v3aOs&t=25s

> Finally, there is no letter or religious gesture, Hebrew or otherwise, similar to the splayed hand.

Isn’t there? Not including the thumb, it looks like the letter shin. Of course, the Vulcan salute also famously makes the shin letter (but, includes the thumb).

"During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body."

[Example painting is a Titian with a naked Mary Magdalene]

I love that there's a section for conflicts of interest.

Would have been interesting to see a disclosure for a pharma company working on syndactyly or a disclosure that the authors belong to some secret society.

Or a disclosure that their ancestors were for or against a secret society.

Or that the authors are themselves in a secret society that uses this gesture.

> It is an unnatural position of one or both hands in which the third and fourth digits are held tight together, as if almost fused, resembling syndactyly, and the second and fifth fingers are separated from the central ones.

My favorite example is in the Flammarion engraving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving

It's fascinating that modern gang signs might be considered a recent development although they have probably been always with us.

A great deal of hand talking is suprisingly universal | understood quickly enogh on opposite sides of the globe, almost all hunter gatherers have finger talk and share common enough base despite seperate regions.

eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuhhn-GSejs

Was not sure but had to look up a definition. "Syndactyly is a condition wherein two or more digits are fused together."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndactyly

I thought maybe it was some sort of condition that caused finger to contract like that.

It's just a matter of style. People copy the styles that they identify themselves with/aspire to. Artist copy each other, black kids copy 50cent, white kids copy jake paul, gay men copy each others feminine affectations. Once you notice it, it's everywhere.

> gay men copy each others feminine affectations

Do you know of research on this? I have two gay friends with feminine speech and both are adamant that they don't choose to have this and would prefer not to. Each has their own theory as to why they have it. One suspects it might be (epi)genetic while another suspects its influenced by being raised by women. I can't buy the latter since many very masculine straight men were raised exclusively by women.

I don't have any research, no. Never searched for it either.

update: There's a wikipedia page for this. Because of _course_ there is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech

The guy at 4:04 articulates exactly the same idea as I did above

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkm0rmigGOw

One of my aspirational hobbies is designing Apple Vision Pro games and interfaces that trick people into unwittingly making embarrassing hand gestures in public.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsGnqf3CUW8

I just wanted to add something I didn't see mentioned in the article or the discussion. In the Christian tradition, figures are often portrayed with their pinky and ring fingers curled up, while the thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended. This is done to symbolize the holy trinity.

> ...with their pinky and ring fingers curled up, while the thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended.

leading to a local joke:

Q. How can you spot a forester on a Saturday night?

A. (while making sign above) 5 beers, please!

Not Poire, then

And here I'd thought « entre la poire et le fromage » ?

(William the first may have preferred calvados, and the current William is unlikely to be based enough to style himself William the last [ending the monarchy in 2066], but I prefer my Williams in a bottle)

Well, faces and hands are still considered important. There’s a saying that if you get the face and hands right, you can get away with anything.

Also common advice for artists is to group the middle and ring fingers together. It just looks better and they kind of tend to do so naturally anyway.

I really like this article. Many humanities articles are political or opaque.

But simple articles like this add to knowledge in a fun way. I hope this becomes more common with more open journals.

Not sure if Acta Biomed is open.

Can probably rule out Freemasonry. If it were masonic, it would be a very rare symbol, sign, or token that has not survived to modern times.

Maybe those are their herb fingers while they sit still waiting during the photo and walt disney edited it out

So there are somewhere lists of such symbolisms? Where would one find them?

The spread fingers make three points on a fibonacci curve. It is just the most aesthetically pleasant gesture. The artists were always in pursuit of beauty and this is what it is.

I discovered I was using that very gesture on my touchpad to scroll through the article and this thread...

Same here.

Of all the hypotheses they considered, they seem to have missed the obvious one: Cosimo I de' Medici is Eastside and Jesus, God and Mary Magdalene are Westside.

https://www.justnerd.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Ali-G-Sac...

“ It should be considered an artistic device or a symbolic hallmark without any conveyed meaning rather than a true pathologic depiction of syndactyly.”

Well, that was tax money well spent. Is this actually considered science now? Is this what (art) historians actually do? Speculate a bit and then say “well, it probably was something”?

Symbolic language in paintings is always so interesting for me to discover

I'm surprised the paper doesn't entertain the notion that some things look cool, artists copy one another, and trends simply start like that naturally.

I mean, it's not like Corinthian style columns have a hidden meaning. They look nice and provide artists with a great default.

Great, now I can't stop thinking about what I do with my hands all day. Thanks.

But for real, this seems like selection bias. Is combination of fingers touching actually any more or less common than any others?

west side

My thought as well. The article suggests it's an "M" for Medici, but it could just as easily be a W" for "Westside Connection". This sort of proves a theory of mine, that Ice Cube has a time machine.

(Presumably he developed it in order to travel back to the best day of his life, the day he messed around and got a triple double, and then later used it to travel back to the 16th century and influence the late Renaissance... but here I am speculating)

Hitler also had the same hand gesture in his portrait by Heinrich Knirr

More than one evidently.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Hitler+portrait+by+Heinrich+Knirr&...

Most likely the artist referencing the style of the earlier paintings.

This reminds me of Korea's progressive feminist hand gesture [0]. For some reason, a video about Korea's gender war [1] ended up in my YouTube recommendation and somehow I decided to watch the 47-minute video (and another 110 minutes for part 2)...

Basically, aggressive feminist groups use a hand gesture as a disrespect against men (or misogynists), but the gesture is so general and anti-feminism is so large in Korea, that a lot of people mistook the otherwise normal picture in anime/games as a hidden attack against men. It caused riots and several people lost their jobs or sometimes the entire projects/companies went down.

I think it's not a good idea to associate a very natural gesture with horrible intentions...

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/02/business/south-korea-busi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74

> I think it's not a good idea to associate a very natural gesture with horrible intentions...

I imagine it's a very good idea, if you have horrible intentions.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ok-sign-wh...

This entire thing is a hoax.

> It has become an extremist meme, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL maintains a "glossary" of every random meme and inside joke from 4chan and claims that they are all somehow connected with Nazis.

The ADL itself is in fact considered a hate organization by many people.

>Under the guise of fighting hate speech, the ADL has a long history of wielding its moral authority to attack Arabs, blacks, and queers.

https://droptheadl.org

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/emmaia-gelman-anti-def...

> This entire thing is a hoax.

While the usage of the ok sign likely began as a LARP hoax, it has since become adopted as a high sign/shibboleth by actual white supremacists and adjacent fringe groups like Boogaloo Boys, similarly to Hawaiian shirts.

That’s the entire point of these types of signaling behaviors - they’re plausibly deniable, innocuous or not obviously offensive or aggressive, and they’re usually inscrutable or indecipherable to the out-group while being effective as signifiers of the in-group.

It just sounds like a conspiracy theory. The right has tons of theories about "elites" using secret hand signals and gestures meaning all kinds of satanic things.

Both are conspiracy theories for the same reasons.

"Just a joke, bro"

I hear that a lot.

If people are attacking women and destroying companies because they think they might be associated with women's rights, it's not a hand gesture that's the problem. "Horrible intentions"?

I am confused why this appears on NIH.gov

A division of the NIH (NCBI) maintains a repository of open access publications in life sciences called PubMed Central (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed_Central) and this article was in a qualifying journal.

Specifically, this journal: https://mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/actabiomedica

One of the proposed explanations was that lots of people actually had fingers which naturally posed like that, which, if true, would be of interest to people in biomedicine. The paper was published in Acta Biomedica, an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, reviews, and case reports in the field of biomedical sciences. It then got slurped into various journal indices and online libraries, including the National Library of Medicine at the NIH.

Syndactyly is a medical condition; paintings seemingly display this as being more prevalent than reported in medical records of the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndactyly

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