Here’s a social phenomenon I find fascinating. We all seem to know the same handful of gestures for car-to-car communication. And when I say “car-to-car communication,” I’m talking about the ways you can get something across to other cars while you’re zooming by each other at 60 mph.
Here are the only things you can communicate in a car that I can think of offhand:
| Gesture | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The friendly one-handed wave | Thank you. |
| The window roll-down | Can you roll down your window so I can ask you something? |
| The bird, the shaken fist, long horn beep | I’m angry and annoyed at you. |
| Turn signals | I’m going to turn or change lanes. |
| The one-handed go-ahead | Go ahead, I’ll let you go first. |
| Quick flash of headlights | (1) Go ahead. (2) There’s a police car ahead. (3) You’ve got your brights on when you shouldn’t. |
| Short beep | Pay attention. |
| Hazard lights on | Use caution, I’m having a problem with my car. |
So what’s so fascinating about these gestures? First off, nobody ever really teaches them to you. I can’t remember anybody ever showing me the gesture to get someone to roll down their window; I simply learned it in context.
Even more interesting is the fact that the official hand gestures that the government does teach you — left hand extended to turn left, left hand up to turn right — are hardly ever used. The few times a year I see somebody stick their hand out the window to make an official hand turn signal, it takes me a few seconds to actually remember which gesture translates to which direction.
But there’s a problem in that certain necessary communications just aren’t a part of the common lexicon of driving. We don’t need to communicate angst at the state of the Dow Jones to other drivers on the highway, but there are certain basic concepts it would be helpful to be able to communicate. How do you indicate to someone that you want to go straight and not turn, for instance? You can’t. (Not easily, at least.) And here are some more simple gestures that I think should be a part of our driving vocabulary:
- Follow me.
- Please move over a lane and let me pass you.
- Stop tailgating me, I’m going to move over and let you pass as soon as I pass this group of cars.
- You seem to be having a mechanical problem with your car.
- You’ve got your brights on and you’re right behind me.
- You’ve been driving with your blinker on for the past 3 miles.
But the most crucial omission from this lexicon is that there’s no way to say you’re sorry. Sometimes you can use the friendly one-handed wave, but unless you do it just right, this gesture can be mistaken for arrogance. I remember once a number of years back I was driving along a highway paying too much attention to the radio, and I almost sideswiped a church van with a dozen people on it that had crept into my blind spot. We both swerved and caused half a dozen cars around us to swerve too. Luckily everything came out okay and nobody was hurt. But in that two-second interval before we moved off to different lanes and parted forever, I couldn’t think of any way to indicate to the occupants of the van that I had made a mistake. They had plenty of ways to communicate their anger with me — honking, shaking fists, yelling — but how could I say I was sorry? I couldn’t. These people reached their destination angry and scared, I’m sure, and there was nothing I could do about it.
They say you can tell a lot about a culture by studying their language. The Eskimos have a gazillion words for snow. There’s a hunter/gatherer tribe in Brazil that only has three words for counting: “one,” “two,” and “many.” So what does it say about driving culture that we have no way of saying we’re sorry? It’s a cycle that only leads in one direction: we have no way of expressing calm and measured politeness on the road, therefore people interpret this as hostility, and therefore people are angrier and more reckless on the road.
(Of course, now that I look up on Wikipedia about the Eskimo words for snow, I see that this idea is really just an urban legend. Lots of fascinating reading on Wikipedia about this topic in the article on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if you’re interested.)
I read an article recently about the debacle in Iraq that demonstrated just how deadly the communication barrier can be. (Wish I could remember where it was — The New Republic, maybe?) Apparently the common gesture that we Americans use for “stop” — holding your hand up high, fingers open, palm out — doesn’t mean that to Iraqis. That means “hello” or “come here.” You can imagine where this leads. A confused and frightened eighteen-year-old soldier standing at a checkpoint with an intimidating M-16 raises his hand and yells at an Iraqi to stop where he is. The confused and frightened Iraqi doesn’t understand English and misinterprets the hand gesture, thinking the soldier is demanding that he come here right now. Iraqi runs towards the checkpoint as quickly as he can, soldier thinks he’s a suicide bomber and sprays him with bullets. This isn’t just a hypothetical; soldiers say it happens all the time.
Update 8/29/07 12:30 PM: Found the article in The Nation (“The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness”). It’s really sobering reading. Here’s the passage in particular I was remembering:
A few veterans said checkpoint shootings resulted from basic miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted signals or cultural ignorance.
“As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky,” said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. “That means stop to most Americans, and that’s a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That’s a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they’re saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they’re saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you’re shooting pregnant women.”
***
Here’s something else I think about before I judge other drivers on the road. A few times a year, I’ll purposefully skirt traffic laws because of legitimate emergencies. When my dog’s been attacked and he’s bleeding to death in my passenger seat, I’m going to drive on the shoulder and zoom around people if I need to. If my wife’s about to have a baby, I’m going to veer in front of other cars and make illegal U-turns in the middle of the street if it’s the quickest way to the hospital. I’m not saying this is always a wise thing to do, but once or twice a year you don’t do the wise thing.
According to these statistics, there are at least 131,000 cars that drive along my route to work every day. If one in 1,000 people are having some kind of emergency like that every day, that makes 131 drivers just along my route who are driving like frickin’ maniacs for legitimate reasons. Even if the number of people in a crisis any given day is one in 10,000, that’s still 13 drivers driving like Donald Duck on some really bad acid. Statistically speaking, then, there’s a very good chance that some of the idiotic drivers I pass are in the middle of some kind of crisis that makes them throw out the rulebook.
Again, I’m not saying this is excusable driving behavior. But it really pokes a hole in the perception that the road is full of angry, arrogant drivers that are just cutting ahead of you to be assholes, doesn’t it?