Hands tell me a great deal and would do even more for me if I were tuning an engine or gardening. But eyes reading and ears listening put ideas in my head much faster and more satisfyingly. So, I keep being drawn to books and talk.
I guess it was because of the endless human drive to impress others with their own status or magnificence. I'm not sure why we developed the stereotype that the person who uses hands to work is somehow lesser than the person who thinks and speaks. In today's world and maybe the earlier worlds that have been available to people, hands really matter. In fact, I think I have read that walking upright and freeing the hands to do a greater variety of things may have, in the opinion of some theorists, lead to the human brain being enlarged. Of course, speech and eventually writing much later, also changed the mental landscape for humans.
But aside from fashioning tools and using them in manufacture or farming or fighting, today's hands are always typing or texting or clicking and again the hand turns out to be a major tool for people. The newer touch interface makes great use of the finger tips and more often these days, hand gestures like swiping a finger across a tablet surface communicates with the machine. Simply tapping two smartphones together may cause them to exchange contact information such as email address and phone numbers. Again, the hands emerge as important.
"The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture" by Frank R. Wilson is a good book on the subject of our important manual appendages. I think it was in that book that I learned to respect the ring and little fingers since, unique among primate hands, they can collapse around something like the handle of a tool or sword, greatly increasing the grip strength. Our thumbs are very important but the other fingers matter, too. I read a book on boxing that emphasized that it is the little finger, on the outside of the clenched fist, that makes the important part of a punch, since that is where the power of the blow lies.
Even in cooking, hands matter, not only in mixing and handling pans but as intelligence organs. Feeling is very sensitive in the fingertips and they sometimes provide information about a fruit or a butchering operation that gets to the mind more clearly and faster than any other way of understanding materials and tools being used.
I can't omit speaking with the hands both instead of voice, and as a supplement to voice. The right gesture can clarify a remark or indicate the strength of the feeling being expressed in a way that words can't.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
