Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and on these Thursday shows, we talk about things that are just generally interesting about language. And I'm here with Lauren Gonn, who is the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. She is a senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

And she has a new book out called Gesture a Slim Guide, all about gestures, those things we don't

think about that we do with our hands and other parts of our body too. Lauren, welcome to the

Grammar Girl podcast. It is so wonderful to be here. It is so wonderful to have you here. So I was saying most of us don't think about gestures, the things that we do. And yet, they are a really important part of communication. What is it that gesture does while we are trying to communicate with each other?

I'm delighted that you are going through the same process that many of my students do when I

teach about gesture, which is suddenly becoming hyper aware of your hands and how your head is moving.

This is a common side effect of learning about gesture and how it works because we do take it for granted. I think especially

as a literate society, we are very focused on words and how we put words together. But

writing is like a really recent invention.

I know we think of like smartphones as a recent invention, but in terms of human history,

writing has only been around for, you know, a millennia levels of time, whereas spoken language goes back to, obviously, before we have

records, because it predates writing by hundreds of thousands of years. And that means that

the way we communicate in person, face to face, using our whole body,

has been the default way that humans have communicated for the majority of history.

And that involves the words that we use, that also the gestures that we make, and they together

create this bigger way of creating meaning.

One of the tidbits in the book that I loved is that we gesture differently depending on

who we're talking to. So if you're describing the rules of a board game to someone,

you will use gestures differently if they are your collaborator versus your competitor?

This is one of my favorite studies because it kind of gets into the fact that even if we

don't consciously think about gesture, we're always thinking about how it can be used

effectively in communication. And this is this lovely paper from Autumn Hostetta and her team where we might think,

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