Thread:Trigger009/@comment-995426-20150603232758/@comment-995426-20150606222418

Huh, something just occurred to me. What did you think I meant when I said "body language"? Did you think it sounded dirty or something? I'd never really thought of such a thing until right now, as I was trying to understand what you were finding risqu&eacute;.

"Body language" is one of those unified non-verbal communication concepts I couldn't really think of another word for. But when I realized what you might have been thinking, I decided to look up the term in a thesaurus. Apparently, "gestures" often describes the same thing. But it seemed inadequate, because I guess I usually think of "gestures" as just the plural of individual gestures, and "body language" as all meaningful visible gestures read at once. Like the difference between saying "words" vs. "language", or "foods" vs. "cuisine", or "characters" vs. "ensemble". Some vs. all. So I went back to the thesaurus, and found another term&mdash;"kinesics" (the study of [body] movements as communication), which is apparently a truer synonym of "body language", but isn't as well known a word. The drawback of using such obscure words is that it may completely obfuscate what I'm trying to write. (Hell, depending on the audience, even words like "obfuscate" can be obfuscatory.) Which brings me back to my original choice of words&mdash;"body language". People generally tend to know exactly what it means, even if the inclusion of the word "body" may possibly make it sound risqu&eacute; to some people.

The English language is really frustrating sometimes.