Shaka 🤙

How to read it

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s Kokua Line column found the shaka denoting everything from “right on” and “thank you” to “howzit” and “hang loose”, and said the word shaka is most definitely not Hawaiian. Brigham Young University’s magazine lists hang loose, all clear, welcome and thanks, and says the sign caught on in Hawaiian surfing in the 1960s before going global. Unicode encodes the emoji as CALL ME HAND (U+1F919).

Also searched as: 🤙, call me hand, hang loose, hang loose sign, shaka brah, shaka sign.

Who started it

The prevailing story, the Star-Bulletin wrote in 2002, credits Hamana Kalili of Laie, who lost the three middle fingers of his right hand in an accident at the Kahuku Sugar Mill. His grandnephew Vonn Logan said Kalili became a guard on the sugar train between Sunset Beach and Kaaawa, and children hopping the train used his hand shape to signal that the way was clear. In 1985, the Honolulu Advertiser’s Bob Krauss reported, 550 people in Laie signed a petition crediting Kalili; Honolulu’s mayor Frank Fasi, who used the shaka in his campaigns from 1976, declined to recognise him as its originator and named Kalili’s birthday Shaka Day instead. Others tell of a merchant seaman, George Keoke Matthews, in 1939 to 1940, and Krauss concluded the sign began in several places at once. The TV pitchman David “Lippy” Espinda, who signed off his commercials with “shaka, brah!”, popularised the word.

Shaka or “call me”

Away from Hawaii the same hand can be a telephone. VOA’s Wordmaster described the “call me” sign in 2003 as thumb up, pinkie out, other fingers down, as if holding a phone to the ear, which is the meaning in the emoji’s Unicode name. At Brigham Young University it has a third meaning: head football coach Kalani Sitake, who grew up with the shaka in Laie, adopted it for the team because, he said, “It’s the Y in sign language.”