S. Harris cartoon "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

The value of gesture is sometimes disparaged with the phrase "handy waving".

Some of this statement is misleading as a hand waving argument relies solely on the movement of the hands as "proof" of something which is neither communicated well with the use of either words or the physical hand movements. The communication fails on both axes, but the blame is placed on the gestural portion of the communication, perhaps because it may have been the more important of the two?

Link this to the example of the Riverside teacher who used both verbal and visual gestures and acting to cement the trigonometry ideas of soh, cah, toa to her students and got fired for it. In her example, the gauche behaviour was overamplified by extreme exaggeration as well as racist expression.