Pinched fingers 🤌

How to read it

Rick Steves calls it the hand purse: palm up, fingers and thumb brought together and pointed upward about a foot in front of the face, held still or moved up and down a bit. He describes it as a very Italian way to ask “What do you want?”, “What are you doing?” or “What’s new?”, which can also mean “You fool.” AFAR gives the same two sides: held still it is a question or a doubt, but moved up and down from the wrist by someone who seems annoyed, it can be calling the other person an idiot. Il Globo lists “are you serious?”, “come on” and “what the hell”. Unicode added the emoji as PINCHED FINGERS (U+1F90C) in Emoji 13.0, due on phones in late 2020.

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Outside Italy

The same hand means other things elsewhere. Rick Steves gives fear in France, “a lot” in Spain and “good” in Greece and Turkey. The 2019 proposal for the emoji quotes a blogger for its use in Israel, where it commonly means “Wait a minute”, “Hurry up!” or “Relax!”. When the emoji was announced, Il Globo reported suggestions that in Nigeria it could stand for “gbas gbos”, a back-and-forth argument, and that in India it could ask whether somebody is hungry.

How Italians read the emoji

The proposal, from Adriano Farano, Jennifer 8. Lee and Theo Schear of Emojination, named it for the Italian “Ma che vuò?”: the hand moved back and forth against the chest, faster for a more insistent question, and both hands for overwhelming disbelief. Its authors also gave a gentler use, modesty after a compliment (“what are you saying, it’s not true?”). Gianluca Bellan, an Italian colleague asked by The Next Web in 2020, said it is the gesture foreigners pick when they imitate an Italian, so many use it as a catch-all for being Italian; to him it belongs only to disagreement.

Look-alikes

The proposal set it apart from the OK hand, which has a similar shape but a different meaning. Unicode’s chart lists 🤏 Pinching hand as a separate character. The fingertips kiss also starts with the fingers and thumb together, but they go to the lips and are tossed into the air: Rick Steves describes it as praise in Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Germany, meaning sexy, delicious, divine or wonderful.