How I palmed off potential road rage

My supplication has nothing to do with laws of the jungle, it's about rules of the road but the non-verbal gesture is apparently useful at any evolutionary intersection.

The guy I nearly sideswiped less than a minute ago is a couple of lanes over, raving and pointing at me from his big SUV. We're stopped at the lights, so I can't skive off, leaving my adversary to froth away harmlessly in the mirror.

The whole family is in the car, the kids with a back-row view of their father copping a tirade from a stranger for doing something wrong. They're enjoying it.

We've just been to a LEGO expo, so, understandably, are still coming down from the heady experience of traipsing around the top floor of a gaudy club conversing with grown men about toys and TV.

After the show, as we discussed how each of the 1200 or so Harry Potter-themed builds we encountered varied in quality of design and narrative, I failed to check my blind spot and came close to collecting the Kluger.

My wife's yelp - shrill and always appreciated - saved us from a nasty bingle and I accelerated from the near-accident scene with burning cheeks and a furtive eye on the dark mass of chrome and justifiable rage coming up behind us.

Now, here we are, at the red with nowhere to run. All I can do is roll down the window.

"My fault, sorry," I yell across the line of traffic.

Unsatisfied, the agitated driver continues to curse and glare. I wonder if he's going to get out of his car. I wonder if the lights are broken.

"Sorry, mate," I yell again

Somewhere in the throes of my very public mea culpa, I extend that right arm out the window, that supine hand flared and ineluctable, as if I'm displaying stigmata across the bitumen, a modern-day miracle for these drivers of the sabbath.

And something quite miraculous does occur.

The bodily overture, rather than any sound or shape made by face, placates the aggrieved motorist immediately. So effectively does my capitulation defuse the situation, the driver looks a little surprised himself at his own sudden change of heart.

His chin jerks up in begrudging acceptance, vouchsafing my safe passage. The lights finally turn green and off we all go, forever connected, like superglued blocks of LEGO.

MORE B.R. DOHERTY:

The upturned palm seeking primal forgiveness can be traced through our race memory.

In 2007, John Tierney wrote in The New York Times how researchers believe the open palm is the "gestural by-product" of neural circuitry which protected vertebrates from injury.

"Confronted with a threat, ancient lizards would instinctively bend their spine and limbs to press their bodies closer to the ground, protecting the neck and head and signalling submission to a larger animal."

Not only is this exactly how I used to enter the house after coming home late from the pub, such non-verbal communication is worth pondering as we inch tantalisingly closer to normal socialisation, and, maybe, one day, a world without masks.

For the past couple of years, we've learned we don't really need an entire portion of the face to get by. When it comes to the free-flowing exchange of information, ideas and emotions, the mouth and nostrils have become officially and orificialy surplus to requirements; the chin a gratuitous knob and the cheeks inflatable pouches of hot air.

In the letterbox visage of the pandemic, we've been drawn to the eyes, those straight-to-the-point pools of clarity.

And while the eyes certainly do have it, talking with our hands in the COVID era has seemed, to me, at least, more pronounced, more enunciated.

TV news reporters appear to have become especially prolix with their gesticulations, as if signing their way through their bulletins for the benefit of the deaf; a good thing, too, considering all the qualified Auslan practitioners are otherwise occupied.

Socially distanced conversions in the supermarket have also taken on additional flamboyance. Even when covering the most mundane of topics, we flail about, a little Mediterranean emerging from us all.

"Forty bucks for a leg of lamb? Ah, shaddap-a you face!"

Racial profiling aside, since the 1960s it's been theorised humans possess six basic facial expressions: happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, surprise and fear. Almost a century before we came to this understanding, Charles Darwin wrote in Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, how "facial expressions of emotions are universal, not learned differently in each culture".

Yet, despite such universality, facial expressions are still notoriously prone to misinterpretation.

One of the most cited examples is when you stub your toe. In that unfortunate moment, a passer-by might consider you terribly surprised, or terribly angry, even terribly aroused (anything involving toes in that department is terrible), so it's a lesson we shouldn't judge a book by its fleshy cover.

Not least because it seems to be directed my way a lot in our house, disgust, in my view, is the one facial expression least likely to be misinterpreted and, specifically, the grimace generated by stepping in dog poo is hard to mistake for happiness (even though it does come with much, much sadness).

Lately, the kids have been deploying the full gamut of facial expressions to guilt us in to getting them a dog. We've had dogs in the past, loved them to death (literally, probably) and I don't want another one. They're wonderful and all that, but high-maintenance and expensive. Just this week, Accenture reported spending on pets in Sydney and Melbourne was up to 66 per cent higher during lockdowns than in normal times (when it's still stupidly high) and I know we're the kind of family susceptible to ensuring a Cavoodle would enjoy a quality life on par with that of a Saudi prince.

Selfishly, however, it's the thought of excrement returning to the yard that's fuelling my refusal to surrender to our blackmailers' demands.

The kids think this is cruel, unjust. They beseech me with open palms. They'll care for the animal, take responsibility for it, and, yes, even clean up after it.

Perhaps I am being too harsh?

I ignore what the kids are saying, even their powerful hand signals, and search their beautiful eyes; those ponds of infallibility.

They're lying.