On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Gametech wrote: #I have never thought about shrugs, most of the other descriptions especially #David's nail it as far as I'm concerned. One of my most common shrug is a #combinational gesture when I'm at disbelief at having talked about or seen #something rampantly moronic or annoying, it includes, a rolling of the eyes, #the gesture for no with the head, followed by a lifting of the shoulders ******************************** #inward towards my neck. To emphasize my earlier point... Since you're American, I assume that you mean some form of rotation of the head from side to side in the horizontal plane. In some other cultures that same gesture means "yes", while some form of vertical motion of the head means "no". It can cause enormous confusion and trouble even to those who have been told of it, because so much of our production and input processing of these gestures is unconscious. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel