Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The other day Adam Katz, who has kindly read over my draft of the new edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL2), questioned my use of the term “aborted gesture,” since the gesture that becomes the sign is not itself aborted, but only its appropriative element. Thus he suggested I call it a “gesture of aborted appropriation.” This recalled to me that many years ago, Andrew McKenna had made a similar point, although I can’t recall exactly what emendation he proposed. Given that Andrew and Adam constitute perhaps 20% of my readership, I can’t afford to neglect their comments. Yet whichever way you put it, there is really no totally coherent way of describing the originary sign. It starts out as a gesture of appropriation, and I insist on the appropriateness of the word gesture, since had the Alpha been able to maintain his precedence, his gesture of appropriation, that is, the indexical sign of his action, would have served as a signal to the others to wait their turn in the pecking order. Such a signal is not at all the same as a sign in the human, that is, symbolic sense (to use Peirce’s still-helpful terminology), but it is a kind of sign nonetheless. But the question is really what the gesture is “trying to do,” and in the case of the originary sign, it functions very differently at its conclusion than at its beginning.”

— Eric Gans, The Aborted Gesture · Saturday, November 11th, 2017 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment