From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture

1 Introduction

Worldbuilding in science fiction includes language choices that contribute to the fabric of the fictional setting. One element occasionally integrated is gesture, a ubiquitous feature of communication across human cultures. We explore gestures from two science fiction worlds and their adoption in wider society (see Figure 1). The first is the “Vulcan salute”, a greeting from the Star Trek universe. The second is the “three-finger salute” from the Hunger Games universe. Both are a type of gesture known as “emblems”.

Figure 1:

The Vulcan salute (left) and three-finger salute (right) gestures.

We begin with an introduction to emblems and existing approaches to studying them. We then use two different approaches to corpora to explore the function these gestures have beyond their fictional worlds. First we explore the use of the Vulcan salute emoji on Twitter, then we examine references to the three-finger salute in a global newspaper corpus. This paper draws attention to the effect that gesture in science fiction can have on real-world communicative contexts, as well as the benefits and challenges of using corpus approaches to emblems.

2 Emblem gestures

The two focus gestures in this paper are emblems (Ekman and Friesen 1969). Emblems have standards of well-formedness and a conventional meaning for a particular group, which can have a distribution beyond linguistic boundaries (Payrató and Clemente 2020). Emblems often have conventional names and are perceived as intentionally communicative by users. These properties distinguish them from the more spontaneous and idiosyncratic gestures that are used alongside speech (Kendon 2004). Emblems have been noted in the literature to coalesce around specific functions including greeting/leave-taking as per the Vulcan salute, gestures of solidarity and resistance such as the raised fist used over the last century including in the Black Lives Matter movement (Leverette 2021: 2–6), and the Serbian “three fingers” (using the thumb, index, and middle fingers) used during the dissolution of Yugoslavia (Žikić 2004).

To date, studies of the distribution of emblem gestures have relied on survey, interview, and qualitative methods (Gawne and Cooperrider 2022). Corpus approaches to gesture have been limited by the lack of available annotated corpora of gestural phenomena. But with emblems, we can use their stable form/meaning and nameability as secondary measures to explore corpus data. For the Vulcan salute, we use its encoding as an emoji to analyse a corpus of Twitter messages. For the three-finger salute, we examine a corpus of newspapers to assess the uptake of this gesture in recent years by real-world protesters in South East Asia.

3 Vulcan salute: emoji on Twitter

The Vulcan salute involves the arm bent at the elbow, palm outward with fingers extended. The little finger and ring finger are held together, and the index and middle fingers held together, and the thumb also splayed. This is the gesture of greeting and leave-taking for Vulcans, a humanoid race in the long running Star Trek franchise. The gesture is typically performed with the phrase “live long and prosper” (dif-tor heh smusma in Vulcan), with the addressee reciprocating, sometimes with the less common second pair part “peace and long life”.

The creation of the gesture is attributed to Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, the first and most iconic Vulcan on the show. Nimoy (1975: 104) claimed inspiration from kohanim (Jewish priests), who perform the gesture with two hands as a form of blessing. The handshape is similar to the Hebrew letter shin (ש), the first character in Shadai, one of the names of the God of Israel (Dellon and Rozen 2014). Nimoy’s creative multimodal expansion of the written script has become firmly entrenched in Star Trek canon, becoming a key symbol representing the franchise.

This emblem is commonly used to evoke the utopian futurism of the Star Trek world, used by astronauts and space industry employees in media imagery (Alalinarde 2017; Kim 2018: 181). Rap performer Pharrell Williams used the Vulcan salute instead of gang signs while performing with N.E.R.D., and co-founded a record company called Star Trak (2001–2014), part of a larger Black “nerdcore” cohort that shows that pop subculture boundaries can be removed while racial boundaries persist (Gazi 2017).

The Vulcan salute was encoded as an emoji in 2014 (Unicode 7.0).^[1] The original candidate document (L2/12–275) overtly refers to its function as a gesture in Star Trek, arguing that “the semantic case for is hardly much different than that for or ” (Unicode 2012: 7). We use the status of the Vulcan salute emblem as an emoji to explore a corpus of Twitter data to investigate how it is used in social media communication.

3.2 Analysis

3.2.1 Function analysis

We selected the first 1,000 tweets from our sample and coded them for their thematic context. As these were tweets extracted in isolation from their context, it was often difficult to assign a clear function to the emoji in a tweet as we were missing the initial pair part of the interaction or the larger interactional context. We give an example of each context of use in Table 1.

Table 1:

Different contexts and functions of the Vulcan salute emoji in the first 1,000 tweets, including examples.

Context and example	Total
Fandom  “Why is Star Trek so awesome? ”	125
Greeting/farewell  “@twitterID Goodnight and LLAP, Commander ”	62
Nerdom  “@twitterID May the Force live long and prosper with you ”	43
Superbowl  “HAPPY SUPERBOWL SUNDAY, Y’ALL!!! ”	27
Westside  “Half time show got me saying WEST SIDE!!!! ”	24
India  “#14/19 never forget  Remember our heroes  #JaiHind ”	13
Valentines  “Happy Valentine’s Day  I am so glad I met you.”	10
Raised hand	5
Other	14
Bot	227
Unclear	450
Total	1,000

The raised hand examples are likely from individuals unable to distinguish the Vulcan salute emoji from the raised hand emoji (), or simply mistyping. Some Valentine’s Day usages appear to use the salute as it looks like a V, or possibly to reference genitalia, but this is unclear (however, one tweet in the “other” category was an overt reference to performing cunnilingus). Two other events in the data collection window are represented. The first is the anniversary of the 2019 Pulwama bomber attack in the disputed Indian-administered Kashmiri region. The emoji was used as a salute of respect, possibly having been found through a keyword search for “salute”. The second was the 2022 Super Bowl, won by the LA Rams, who play in the Western Division. The usage around the Super Bowl appears to be an approximation of the “west side” gesture (the middle and ring finger are held together, the little and index fingers splayed to create a “W”), which is not currently an emoji. These examples illustrate the communicative flexibility of handshape emoji, which can have functions beyond the specific intended reason for their inclusion in the Unicode standard (see Gawne and Daniel 2021 for more on this).

Although we have probably under-attributed the usage of the Vulcan salute as a greeting or final interactional turn because of the way the data collection isolates tweets from their interactional context, we also see that over 16 % of tweets with a clear function are used to signify Star Trek fandom or “nerd culture” more generally.

3.2.2 Frequency analysis

We also used the /2/tweets/counts/all endpoint to collect frequency data for the 30 days preceding 28 February 2022 across the 20 most common languages on Twitter. This endpoint allows authorized users to provide a search query and returns the number of tweets which match that query within a specified timeframe. We focus on the 20 top languages on Twitter for the time period, and collected data on a range of 22 emoji that we thought were likely to show cross-linguistic variation in frequency; the table with the full set of emoji is in Appendix.^[3] Table 2 represents the results for nine emblem emoji, indicating the frequency of occurrence of each emoji in tweets in each of the 20 languages as a percentage of the total number of occurrences of all 22 emoji. Cell values are normalized by row sum. Cell colours are determined relative to column rank – darker cells indicate that an emoji is especially prevalent in a particular language, relative to other languages. Skin tone modifiers are neutralized.

Table 2:

Frequency of use of the nine emblem emoji, including the Vulcan salute, used in tweets across 20 languages in early 2022, as a percentage of the total number of occurrences of the 22 selected emoji.

The Vulcan salute emoji exhibits low frequency even in languages where it is used, corresponding with Unicode frequency data (Daniel 2021), where the Vulcan salute was the least-used hand gesture. Using language as a broad (and limited) proxy for culture, we can see that this emoji has particularly low uptake beyond the languages of Western Europe, challenging the original proposal for this emoji that the Vulcan salute is “universally recognized” (Unicode 2012: 7).

4 The Hunger Games salute: use in global protests

The “three-finger salute” is used in the Hunger Games books (Collins 2008, 2009, 2010) and films. The gesture is initially performed with index, middle, and ring fingers extended and held together. In the Hunger Games universe, the emblem gesture’s first use occurs after the inciting incident, when Katniss volunteers as tribute to save her sister, and the crowd reacts: “almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means goodbye to someone you love” (Collins 2008: 24). Over the course of the books and films, the emblem’s use evolves from a gesture of respect and poignant farewell, to one of resistance against the fictional world’s centralized government, with the touch to the lips dropped. In the narrative, the emblem moves from one noted emblem function (leave-taking) to another (protest gesture). This use has been taken up in recent years by real-world protesters in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar.

The three-finger salute is commonly recognized as having the same form as a sign of Scout and Guide organizations internationally (Baden-Powell Scouts’ Association 2012: 9). The gesture has a different form from the Serbian three-finger salute but an associated meaning, and it is not unreasonable to consider that Collins was inspired by the broad history of protest gestures when writing The Hunger Games. We have not been able to locate anywhere that Collins has publicly discussed her inspiration for the gesture. The three-finger salute has been proposed as an emoji at least twice,^[4] but never encoded.

5 Conclusion: science fiction emblems in the real world

This paper employed two different corpus methods that draw on secondary measures to analyse the use of two different emblems. The emoji data exploits the stable form/meaning nature of emblems and demonstrates that the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to both Star Trek and broader nerd culture – the gesture’s meaning collapsing into rather than broadening beyond its originating media. In contrast, the Hunger Games three-finger salute has found an extension of its function to contexts beyond its fictional universe. The newspaper corpus exploits the fact that emblems often develop a conventional name, allowing for text search. The use of the three-finger salute in different protest movements allows us to watch the spread of a modern emblem to new contexts. Why it is the South East Asian or East Asian context where the three-finger salute has thrived is unclear, but it speaks to a more international uptake than the Vulcan salute. This wider usage of the three-finger salute, not tied to any one political context, means the emblem would be a good candidate for inclusion as an emoji. Currently, emoji proposals require evidence of usage in writing, which does not capture prevalence or popularity of gestures. This corpus data hopefully adds support to the need to consider alternative evidence in emoji proposals for gestures.

These methods are replicable for emblems with similar distribution, either as emoji or in news media. The replicability and use of public corpora is an important step forward in emblem research, but we acknowledge that each method does have its limitations. Emoji studies are limited to the subset of emblems with emoji forms. In news corpus or other text studies, the information gained about the meaning and distribution of the emblem provided a detailed picture across multiple sources, but in our study, the gesture was almost always non-central to the substantive content of the news piece. This corpus approach captured traces of reported meaning, compared to the emoji corpus method where there was substantial evidence of the gesture in use. Focusing on journalists’ descriptions of emblems offers insight into how the meaning and function of such gestures is perceived by the general public, and avoids analyst-imposed interpretations. However, this method is also limited to emblems with clear names and a usage that generates news coverage. While each method has limitations, both have shown that corpus approaches support the study of emblem functions. This enriches the sociopolitical literature on emblems used in popular culture.

Creative language use is one element of worldbuilding in science fiction, but how these languages and worlds live on is in the hands (pun intended) of their fans.