Ademán is a concept with a very interesting etymological origin. The term comes from a classic Arabic word that referred to a legal guarantee. When a person tried to replace such a guarantee, they would appeal to promises or oaths accompanied by bombastic gestures. In this way, the sense of gesture was changing until it was associated with the movements that an individual makes to transmit a message or imply something.
For example: "The old man made a gesture with his hand to indicate to the young man not to continue speaking" , "In the stadium nobody understood the gesture that the footballer made after scoring the goal" , "A dog must learn to interpret the gestures of his master ” .
Take the case of a person who wants to take a taxi. To do this, you will stand at the curb to wait for one of these vehicles to approach. When you detect that a taxi is coming, you will need to wave your hand to tell the driver to stop as you want to get on. The gesture is usually to extend the arm with an open hand.
In this context, we can also use the word sign to refer to a gesture with which a person intends to imply something in particular, generally performed with one or both hands. It is important to clarify that in each Spanish-speaking country there are different uses for these and other terms, such as gesture , which usually speaks of a characteristic position of the eyebrows and lips, among other parts of the face, although it can also describe an action with your hands or legs.
When used in the plural, the term gesture serves to refer to the manners of a person, that is, to all those actions that he uses to be noticed and distinguished from those around him, demonstrating his level of education. In this way, just as we can talk about someone's good or bad manners, it is also possible to describe their gestures as rude or outgoing, for example. It is important to clarify, however, that this use is not very common in everyday speech, but is especially found in the written language.
A gesture, on the other hand, can be a body posture or an action that reflects a state of mind, an emotion or an intention. Suppose a police officer intercepts a man who was walking suspiciously, with his face covered. This man first stops at the officer's call but, while the policeman asks him some questions, he makes a gesture to escape, turning his body sharply. Then the policeman decides to stop him and immobilize him to prevent him from fleeing.
As can be seen in the previous example, this use of gesture serves to describe an action that does not materialize: the suspicious man tries to escape, but the police officer stops him in time, preventing him from fulfilling his objective. We do not very often find the term gesture with this meaning in everyday speech; To express this type of situation, it is more common to use the verb hitting : "the man managed to escape, but the policeman caught him before he could start running . "