---
title: Hold the phone! A famous gesture is changing
description: "Quick question: If you want to gesture to someone to show that you’re on the phone, how do your hands look? For those of us who are..."
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---

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# Hold the phone! A famous gesture is changing

[Medical Pharmaceutical Translations](https://aiatranslations.com/blog/topic/medical-pharmaceutical-translations) • Jul 15, 2020 12:00:00 AM

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Quick question: If you want to gesture to someone to show that you’re on the phone, how do your hands look?

For those of us who are currently adults, it’s probably a fist with two fingers open on either end, mimicking a phone receiver or an early model cell phone. But recently, dad Daniel Alvarado realized that his kids make this gesture in a different way: by holding a hand flat against one ear, the way a modern cell phone looks when you’re talking on it. He [shared](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/hand-gesture-phone?origin=web-hf) his findings in a viral TikTok.

That the gesture has changed makes sense, but it’s still a bit mind-blowing. Many of us believed it might be a holdover of the past, like keeping an image of a floppy disk as the “save” icon on computers. And of course, whatever you might have expected, it’s another testament

to how quickly technology changes.

[Read on](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/tiktok-phone-hand-gesture-new-smartphone-daniel-alvarado-a9611066.html) to learn about the evolution of a once-iconic gesture.

[*Image source*](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Hand_Gesture_-_Holding_a_Phone_Vector.svg)

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