I went to the Braves game the other night and spotted Leo Mazzone, the former pitching coach turned sports radio host. He was in the booth set up on the Fan Plaza, holding forth as part of a three-man team on the pre-game show. I had interviewed Leo a few times in my career as a sports feature reporter, most recently seven years ago for TBS.

My first interview with him was when he was the pitching coach for the Braves’ triple-A team in Richmond, VA about 150 years ago. (1989 to be more accurate.) It was an extensive sit-down with Leo as he showed me the process by which he tracked the progress of his pitchers, and we hit it off rather well. Check out what 21 years will do to a couple guys:

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Apparently, the piece was meaningful enough to him that he saved a copy, and when our paths would cross over the years, he’d mention it. Not as in, “Wow, you are such an awesome reporter! That piece changed my life and I have you to thank for it!” but more as a point of reference, the way you bring up the one thing you have in common with someone you may see only once every few years.

(An example is the time I played a game of Bocci Ball with the then-County Judge of Jefferson County, KY, Mitch McConnell, for a fluff feature of some sort for the local news. He beat me, of course, and to be honest, I have no recollection of the video that came of it, but I just remember that I played Bocci Ball with Mitch McConnell. He’s now the Senate Minority Leader and a household name among people who actually read those things—what do you call them? Oh, yeah, newspapers. But if I ran into him on the street today, I would remind him—as a point of reference—that we played Bocci Ball together some 30 years ago, and I’m confident he’d remember. Or I may be deluding myself. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Actually, he may really remember. Shortly after that, I was doing a light news piece which featured McConnell, and afterwards, to wrap things up, I did an on-camera stand-up with him in the background. He had finished doing whatever he was there to do and was now seated with a bunch of folks at a round table having lunch. As a joke—not for air—I said, “Coming up, we’ll see the county judge eating at taxpayer expense.” Everybody laughed, including McConnell, and then he played the Bocci Ball card. I happen to have that video, circa 1979, for your enjoyment.)

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But I’ve gotten off the subject.

So there I was at the Braves game when I spotted Leo Mazzone in the pre-game radio booth. We were separated by a pane of glass, so in an effort to get him to recognize me, I smiled a “Hey, remember me?” kind of smile. Leo did a double take, then, eyes wide, to prove that he really did recognize me, he made the universal gesture for video: left hand in a fist just below the chin and extended about four inches in front of the face. The right hand makes a circular motion at eye level and slightly to the right. And regardless that film has not been shot that way since the Coolidge Administration, everyone has come to recognize that as the universal gesture of video.

But we do this a lot. We use hand signals to make ourselves understood whether or not it has any relation to reality.

We extend our thumb and pinky and put that combination up to our ear when we want to tell someone silently to call us. If we mimed what making a phone call really looks like, it would look as though we were preparing to punch ourselves on the side of the head. Go ahead; try it. See what I mean?

When we want to tell the waiter that we’re ready to pay the bill, we spot him across the room and then raise our left hand, palm up, and pretend to write on it with our right hand. Doesn’t matter whether we’re paying with credit card or cash, they get the point. We’re ready to pay up.

We rub our thumb and index finger together quickly when we want to discreetly tell someone that “this is going to cost a lot more than I have at the moment.”

While in Moscow for the inaugural Goodwill Games on TBS twenty-four years ago, I had the privilege of working with the late, great sportscaster, Curt Gowdy. A small group of us were at dinner one night, and Curt was so taken with the food and the service that every time another breadbasket or drink showed up, he gave what we understand to be the universal signal that says, “A-OK:” A circle made with the thumb and index finger. After Curt flashed a few of those, our translator felt it best to advise him, “You probably shouldn’t do that anymore. It doesn’t mean what you think it does.” As anyone who’s traveled extensively overseas can tell you, that’s the first cousin to our one-finger salute that says, in effect, “I highly disapprove of what you’ve done and I find both you and your mother extremely disagreeable in my sight.” Or something like that.

I’m pretty sure that’s what the guy meant when he flipped that to me on the way to the Braves game where I saw Leo Mazzone where he gestured to me and where I got the idea for this entirely-too-long discourse on sign language.

Got any (clean) gestures I forgot to mention?