That went right over my head

TIL that a good portion of the subconscious - or even conscious - gestures we use is language-based or location-based and may not translate if speaking to someone whose first language isn’t the same as yours.  It makes Perfect Logical Sense, but somehow had never occurred to me.

Background:

😂 I was in Spanish class and we were (somewhat ironically) talking about idioms.  And I said something about “that went right over my head.”  But since I was having a lazy moment I didn’t bother to say it, just used the hand swiping over head gesture and we continued on.  However after the lesson part, my teacher, who is a native Spanish speaker who is fluent in English and reasonably competent in Korean (random) mentioned it and said he saw someone do the same thing in an English movie the other day but didn’t know what it had meant.

So the rest of the lesson was all about gestures in each language and what they mean which was actually fairly fascinating.