The Index Finger

Last night in Indianapolis, a man stood up and pointed at A’ja Wilson. It was late in Game 2 of a first-round playoff series at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and Indiana was protecting a lead it would keep, 99-89. Wilson, the Las Vegas Aces’ four-time MVP, had just drawn a foul on Sophie Cunningham and was walking back up the floor. The man rose from the baseline seats, stepped toward her, and pointed, yelling. She told him one thing, twice. “You don’t point at me, you don’t point at me.” She went toward him, pointing back, and they were face-to-face before her teammates arrived to pull her away. The whole Aces bench emptied behind her, team security included, and Cheyenne Parker-Tyus pointed the man out for security. The referees gave Wilson a technical foul. Security walked the man and a woman out of the baseline seats to loud boos, then brought them back a few minutes later to applause. The Fever released a statement that night. A comment had been reported. Security found no violation of the Fan Code of Conduct, the fan was not removed, and the team considered the matter closed.

Wilson named the offense afterward. “You never should step and point at me,” she said. “I don’t give a damn what you said. I don’t give a damn how you said it. The tone, that is unacceptable. Don’t point at shit. At all. Excuse my French, and God bless me.” She apologized to her team for the technical. She also apologized for her language and sent up a short prayer asking forgiveness. Then she said the rest of it. “You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to love me. You can hate me with all your heart. But you don’t know me. But I guarantee you, you will respect me.” She absolved the words first. Whatever the man shouted was irrelevant to her. The crime was the arm.

It has been that kind of season. On June 22, in an 86-77 Fever win over Phoenix, DeWanna Bonner pointed at Cunningham, talking the whole time, and Cunningham answered without a word. She held eye contact and pointed back, and kept pointing, roughly twenty-two seconds by The Athletic’s count, until a Fever staffer who seemed amused steered her toward the bench. Bonner had yelled at her not to point, which is why Cunningham kept pointing. The officials gave Cunningham a technical, one of five players teed up in the scuffle. She posted an outfit photo days later captioned “NO POINTING TODAY,” and by September she was calling the episode dumb and explaining that she had only walked out to talk to a referee. The freight was Bonner’s exit from Indiana a year earlier: she left the team, was waived, landed in Phoenix, and never sent the text Cunningham said she owed. Asked whether an explanation ever came, Cunningham said, “No. And we never will, and I really don’t care anymore.”

Both times, the rulebook came up short. There is a technical for taunting, a conduct code for comments, a rule for stepping off the floor. There is no rule for a finger, because a finger is not speech. The officials could not even settle on a name for Wilson’s technical: the pool report said unsportsmanlike conduct, and her coach was told it was for stepping off the court. Becky Hammon said afterward that disrespect can arrive as a word, an action, or a gesture. The arena’s code covers the word. Everyone in both stories, the players, the officials, the meme accounts, treated the finger as the loudest thing said all night. Nobody has a form for it. In August, on that same floor, Jackie Young had two courtside fans escorted out for chirping at her all game, and the arena found no violation that night either. A team can investigate a comment and close the file in an evening.

What is it about pointing that sets people off? Give the gesture its due. Pointing singles out. Of everything a hand can do, the extended index finger is the one motion that picks one person out of a crowd and holds her there. It turns a person into a location. It also assumes authority. The one who points does the naming. The one pointed at gets no say. A wave offers greeting and an open palm offers direction. The point offers nothing. It assigns.

The Romans named that finger the index. It means the pointer, from indicare, to point out, and the word still runs two ways in English. An index indicates; it shows you where the thing is. And indicate shares a root with indict, both descended from dicere, to say. Showing and charging come from the same old act of saying, one digit doing the work of a sentence. English kept the kinship in the idiom: to point the finger at someone is to blame them. Nobody says that about a wave.

The gesture is older than the word. Children point before they talk, around the first birthday, arms out at the dog or the moon, months ahead of the first sentence. It is the original pronoun, and among the apes it is ours. Chimpanzees and bonobos gesture all day, but their pointing is asking. They point for food they want and leave the moon alone. In one long study of a child and two apes raised around sign and speech, the child pointed 138 times, the bonobo managed 11, and the chimpanzee 17. The apes understand a grab for the food better than a point toward it. The divide sits exactly there, between hand me that and look at that. Pointing to share attention may be the first human move, the hinge that reference, and then language, swung on.

The pointing hand spent most of its career doing kind work. Medieval readers drew little hands in the margins, index finger extended at the line that mattered, a highlighter a thousand years early. The Domesday Book of 1086 already carries them. Scholars named the symbol the manicule, the little hand, and printers set it in type; the earliest known printed one sits in a Milanese book of canon law from 1479. Printers called the character a fist or an index. It pointed readers to the warning and the fine print, and its descendant hovers over every link on every screen you own, the cursor hand, still saying look here. Nobody flinches at a manicule. It points at things for you, and that is the difference.

One kind of point assigns guilt. Every courtroom drama knows the blocking. The prosecutor asks whether the attacker is in the room. The arm rises, the finger finds the defendant, and the jury leans in. American courts are only now admitting how rigged that moment is. Massachusetts and Connecticut have limited in-court identifications, because the witness will predictably point at the one person the state is prosecuting. Judicature, Duke’s journal for judges, calls the exercise highly prejudicial and rather meaningless. The Innocence Project counted the wreckage. By 2017, of 350 DNA exonerations, 71 percent involved eyewitness misidentification, and more than half of those included a wrong identification in court. The pointed finger, in a courtroom, is received as evidence. It ought to be handled as a hazard.

The state learned the gesture’s power during the world wars. In 1914 Alfred Leete drew Lord Kitchener, Britain’s war secretary, pointing straight out of a recruiting poster above the words “Your Country Needs YOU.” James Montgomery Flagg borrowed the pose for an American magazine cover in 1916, then for the Army in 1917: Uncle Sam, eyes level, finger out of the frame and into yours, “I Want YOU,” four million copies by the Armistice. The trick of it is simple. In a crowd of thousands, every person feels the point land on them alone. Set it against the other famous pointing hand in Western art, God’s index reaching for Adam’s on the Sistine ceiling, passing life across a gap of inches. The same finger, carrying the opposite thing. One hand summons you to the trenches; the other hands you existence. The gesture is a courier. What it carries decides everything.

Most of the world calls the gesture rude. Across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, pointing the index finger at a person reads as aggression, and the polite forms route around it, the open palm in China, the thumb in Indonesia. In Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the Philippines, people point with the lips or a tilt of the chin, anything to keep the finger out of it. Every American child hears the rule before kindergarten: don’t point. A rule that old and that wide is telling us something. Aimed at a person, the finger’s first meaning is accusation. Cultures that needed to indicate people without accusing them built workarounds. Ours scolds its children and keeps pointing.

I used to teach literature and drama. Two students told me, separately, that I must never point at them. If I did, they said, they would cry. I did not understand that trigger. I understand it better now. Look at the transaction from the desk side. A teacher’s point is the only licensed pointer in the room, the state’s smallest sheriff, and it does two jobs with one motion. It calls on you, and it calls you out. You cannot tell which is coming until it lands, and when it lands, the room turns. Everyone who sat through school carries one memory of the finger coming down the row. Researchers have a name for the feeling underneath: the spotlight effect, the conviction that the room is watching. In the classic experiment, students wearing an embarrassing T-shirt guessed that half their classmates would notice it. The true figure was a quarter. We feel watched twice as much as we are watched, and a pointed finger turns that feeling all the way up, on purpose, in front of everyone. My students had never read the study. Their bodies had run it. What they were asking for was mercy.

The finger itself is innocent. The proof is American Sign Language. In ASL, the pronouns are points. ME is a finger to your own chest. YOU is a finger at the person facing you. HE, SHE, THEY: a finger at the person, or at a spot in the air where the signer parked them a sentence earlier. Linguists gloss the sign IX, for indexical, and the grammar runs on it. The signer puts each person at a spot in the air and goes back to that spot, the way English goes back to he and she. A signed conversation points at people all day, at their faces and their empty chairs, and nobody cries, because in ASL the point does different work. It refers. It is how the language says you. Plains Indian Sign Language, the old hearing lingua franca of the Plains nations, made the same move with a local accent: point to the nose for me. If pointing itself were the insult, a language that cannot stop pointing would be a fighting language. ASL is a grammar. The charge comes from the claim riding on the finger, and from the direction it travels.

That same claim moved through Gainbridge Fieldhouse last night. A fan’s ticket buys speech, the boo and the heckle within the code, old arena customs. What it does not sell is standing. When the man rose, stepped toward Wilson, and extended his arm, he claimed a right no ticket sells, the right to select her. He was a stranger in the seats. She was the name on the floor. The nameless get to aim at the famous, and Wilson answered the way the pointed are never supposed to answer. She pointed back and walked toward him, turning the point around, and for a few seconds the selector became the selected. The leagues have seen where that reversal can go. On November 19, 2004, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, a thrown cup hit Ron Artest in the chest, and Artest went into the stands after the man he believed had thrown it. The brawl that followed injured nine spectators and cost players 141 games of suspensions, 86 of them Artest’s, and the NBA rebuilt its security and its sense of where fans end and players begin. This one was bloodless. The fan came back to his seat to applause, high-fived his neighbors, and dapped up the mascot. Wilson got the technical. In the hallway afterward, she said the quiet part to her coach: “No way he does that to LeBron.” And beside her at the press table, Cheyenne Parker-Tyus offered her only words of the night. “Just be a fan.”

Should we be triggered by pointing? The trigger is earned. Courts made the finger a verdict, and armies made it a summons. Classrooms keep it as a means of selection. Two thousand years of that word taught all of us what an extended index aimed at a person usually means, and Wilson’s answer last night was written by that history before she acted it out. Is the point an insult or an accusation? An insult describes you; an accusation assigns you. The point assigns without describing. That is why it works like a charge and stings like an insult. If the finger itself were guilty, ASL would be the rudest language on earth, and instead it is a pronoun system. Same finger, different claim. Everything rides on the direction of the claim. The point that shows you something is a courtesy, the manicule’s career. The point that shows everyone you is a selection, and people answer being selected. Teachers have the easiest fix, the open palm. It calls on a student without calling her out, and whole cultures point that way for the same reason. I keep my hand open when I call on anyone now. Those two students were right before I knew why. The finger is a pronoun, and pronouns make poor weapons.

On the screen in front of me, the cursor waits over this sentence. A little hand, an extended finger, centuries of practice behind it. It points at things I asked to see. It has never pointed at me.