Today’s Zippy strip offers us a talkative piece of public sculpture in the shape of a hand — actually, a closed fist, upraised — that riffs together with Zippy on the manual, hand-based, lexicon of English:
The hand exclaims, Zippy questions, but their exchanges are absurd
The big topic here is the manual lexicon: lexical items that involve the noun or verb hand. The manual lexicon is enormous. embracing some fixed expressions referring to the bodypart, but mostly composed of figurative expressions etymologically traceable to the bodypart but now semantically distant from it.
The other topic is also sizable, but it’s artistic rather than linguistic: statues of hands, especially fists, especially in works of public art. I’ll start with that.
Statues of hands. I had no idea how many there were. Making it very hard to find the one depicted in today’s Zippy strip. I gave up after half an hour of searching, but there must be a real statue out there somewhere, because Bill Griffith doesn’t make up the art in his strips.
Faces beat hands all hollow in the statuary world — because we use facial expressions more than any other visual cues to read other people socially — but hands are our primary organs for acting in the world (for, as we say, manipulating things: manipulate < Latin manus ‘hand’), so hands have tremendous expressive potential, which has been exploited by sculptors from ancient times on. Their body of work is truly impressive, even if you restrict yourself to closed fists.
I did stumble on something extraordinary in the hand statue universe, because it’s also a (snack) food statue and is entertainingly phallic as well. Irrelevant to the comic strip, but worth a little posting of its own. Stay tuned.
The manual lexicon. In the strip, one item from Griffith’s title, seven from the exchange between the Fisto and Zippy:
a show of hands ‘the raising of hands among a group of people to indicate a vote for or against something’
lend a hand ‘help’
tip one’s hand ‘reveal one’s intentions inadvertently’ [using hand ‘the set of cards dealt to a player in a card game’]
hand over ‘relinquish’ [similarly, hand off, hand down, etc.; all based on: hand something to someone (referring to transfer of possession by hand)]
someone’s hands be full ‘someone be fully occupied’ [contrast: someone’s hands be tied ‘someone be unable to act freely because something prevents it’]
live (from) hand to mouth ‘have just enough money to live on and nothing extra’
all hands on deck (used to indicate that the involvement of all members of a team is required)
know something like the back of one’s hand ‘know something thoroughly’ [contrast: give someone the back of one’s hand ‘reject or rebuke someone’]
This is a tiny sampling of the manual lexicon. For your home enjoyment, a few more (I could go on like this for quite some time):
hired hand [with hand ’employee’]
do something by hand (rather than by machine) [cf. literal hand in hand job, hand laundry]
give/get a hand [with hand ‘applause’]
give someone a hand with something [‘help someone with something’]
have a hand in something ‘have/take an active role in influencing something’
(with) hat in hand ‘humbly asking for a favor’
on hand ‘present, available’
to hand ‘within easy reach’
hand over fist ‘very rapidly’
hands down ‘decisively’
hand in hand ‘with hands joined’
March 13, 2024 at 6:08 am |
I can’t resist telling a story that still delights me, some 15-20 years on (I don’t remember exactly the this was).
My husband John and I have been been participants (and eventually organizers) of an LGBTQ+-focused contra dance series in Boston (contra is a very social form of folk dance). Some years ago, the founder of the series, a man named Chris, had an accident while doing some kind of carpentry project in which he basically ran a power drill through his left hand, which required some elaborate surgery to repair. Chris did not have health insurance at the time, so the dance community put on a special event to raise funds to pay for his surgery. A dance caller who has long a been a good friend of this series wrote a dance for the occasion, which he titled
Give Chris a Hand
I love how this plays on both the third and fourth of your last set of examples, plus a more literal reading.
The event, by the way, was wildly successful; we had more attendees than could dance in the hall all at once, and it brought in more money than was actually needed, which is one of the reasons that I love this particularly community so much.