The Hand, III

Mostly Grasping

   We concluded the last installment with a short piece about fists. I suspect that fists play additional roles cultures about which I know nothing, but I will leave that research to others. Instead, I will now move on to consider the hand configured as unclenched, but not yet looked at as the possessor of five individual fingers. That does not quite say what I have in mind, since I want now to consider grasping that makes use of four fingers more or less in unison, with the “opposable” thumb playing its own special role. (I confess that I had never recognized the importance of the opposableness of that thumb to be as important as these reflections about the human hand have revealed.)

   As I see it, grasping is much the most important function of this configuration of the hand. To be sure, many forms of grasping, such as holding a knife and fork to eat, assign particlar roles to individual fingers other than the thumb, a configuration to be considered in the next segment in this series, but that takes nothing away from the importance of what is done by the contestants engaged in tug-o’-war, holding on the rope and pulling for dear life.

   To be sure, that form of play is a trivial example of a mode of action that, consciously or not, is an important instance of everyone’s daily activities. As is so often the case, the hand, holding on, is the tool, while the power is supplied by the arms, just as is the hammer, as earlier described, grasped by a hand and powerd by the arm. But many occasions of holding do not call for much oomph, such as two people holding hand while walking, whether two lovers or a parent and a child.

   Other instances of this configuration require even less exertion of strength (do you know another word of eight letters that has but a single vowel?), such as holding my head either in thought or because of a headache, or supporting it on my hand with the elbow on the table. Surely there are many other uses of the hand that do not separate out individualnfingers. Slapping is not the least of those.