Aever notice the buzz surrounding Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the heptathlon or Noah Lyles’s Covid bronze. Another battle is being waged in Paris among the TikTok obsessed and it’s all about which hand gesture will win the summer.
Will it be the peace sign, as shown by the rapper Snoop Dogg while carrying the Olympic torch to the opening ceremony? Or will it be the “hand heart” so sweetly simulated by the American gymnast Simone Biles to her husband, Jonathan Owens, last week?
If the key to victory is frequency, the hand heart has it, thanks to many other Olympic observations, from the French ambusher Alice Finot who followed her heart before the race to her “Al-eece! Al-eece!”-sing home crowd with a new European record and a marriage proposal for her love, to Team GB skateboarding medalist Sky Brown, table tennis players, canoeists, footballers and rugby players. Add to that virtually all celebrities, including Taylor Swift, who claimed in 2011 that they invented it: “It means something between ‘I love you’ and ‘thank you’,” she said at the time.
This is a helpful gesture. “The hand heart is an effective way for athletes to show their affection and connect with their fans,” said the Australian linguist and podcaster Lauren Gawne. She wasn’t convinced Swift pioneered the gesture. She admitted: “Trail [the origin] is often very difficult. But Taylor certainly popularized it to this level of visibility.”
Before you fold your hands to leave, the battle gets a little more complex, as gen Z and gen Alpha — all under the age of 27 — argue that millennials have the hand heart wrong. Apparently, the way to do this is not to touch all fingers, but by just twisting the index and middle digits together into a heart shape.
“This is the only heart that makes physical and logical sense,” says one TikToker in the video “Millennial vs Gen Z Heart Sign“. “You cannot convince me of this nonsense [the millennial heart] is better than that.”
Another one, captioned “Guess the millennial”, shows a Zoomer (a very gen Z way of saying gen Z) doing their version with her cafe co-workers until she runs into a millennial colleague, who – gasp – gives a thumbs up instead. Boom, grandma!
The gen Z version is clever because it requires youthful dexterity – you only have to Google “Benedict Cumberbatch trying to do finger heart” to realize how difficult it is for adults to coax fingers into place on demand. “Gen Z and Gen A are no different than when we were kids,” said Rachel Richardson of the newsletter Highly flammable. “We didn’t want to be like our parents. We thought everything our parents were doing was very uncool – they were reinventing ways to differentiate themselves.” So, yes, it’s warfare, but, she added, “like you’d laugh at your dad for getting a cute new pair of trainers”.
Indeed, the desire for young people to put distance between themselves and their elders has produced a steady stream of hand gestures such as “finger hearts,” “cheek hearts,” and even “biting hearts.” “The thing about hand gestures is that they’re wonderfully ephemeral,” Gawne said. “There’s the combination of different cultures and generations, plus social media, so things can just shoot off in different directions. It makes for a very interesting space.”
And what about the peace sign? Despite many appearances in Paris, via double-medal-winning Indian shooter Manu Bhaker, judoka Hifumi Abe of Japan and Palestinian Fares Badawi, and, of course, Snoop, Zoomers consider it “shrinking”, according to Richardson, because it “ associated with their parents and the Spice Girls”.
But what do Zoomers know? Wikipedia lists 17 different political and social connotations for the V sign, from Argentina to Iran to the Philippines — and that doesn’t include the “up yours” version or its original intent, an emblem for Allied victory in World War II . Its modern cultural heartland is East Asia, where it is not just a photographic pose that indicates camera-readiness (apparently from a moment of spontaneity during a Konica TV advertising shoot in 1970s Japan) but, as Fiona Harkin , a director at the outlook consultancy The Future Laboratory, “It’s also about happiness and fun – it’s the culture of cute and kawaii.”
So peace and joy versus love and gratitude – which gesture wins? And who decides? “For sure, it’s gen Z,” Harkin said. “They are the ones who care about that codification. We must have our codes to bend against the previous generation. And thank goodness for that – that’s how we get the friction that creates change.” Time to relieve those fingers?
