Mano Cornuto - The Birth Of The Hand Sign?
“The year was 1955. We were coming up on the TCU game. We had to beat TCU in order to have a piece of the Southwest Conference Title. TCU had a really fine team. We had a really mediocre team. So, we were trying to make up in spirit what we lacked in football talent,” head cheerleader Harley Clark, said. He’s the one who claimed to have created the sign.A couple of days before a scheduled pep rally at Gregory Stadium the idea of a hand signal began in the minds of two UT students.
“And I said listen. The Aggies have always had the Gig ‘em sign. I think it’s time for The University of Texas to have [its] own hand signal,” Harley said.
“A fellow student named Henry Pitts came up to me and said, ‘Harley look, if you do your hands like this, you can make your hand into the head of a longhorn,’” Clark said.
And that’s how the the Hook ‘em Horns hand signal was born?. At the end of the pep rally of more than 3,000 students Clark introduced the sign to student body. “They had to be instructed that evening to raise the little finger, raise the index finger. You can do it with both hands. And get them out front like this and that’s how you do it,” Clark said. Clark announced the hand signal as the official sign of the Longhorns.
There was only one problem. He forgot to ask permission from the university and as Clark tells it the Dean of Students was furious.
“He says do you know what this means in Sicily? I said, ‘Dean, I don’t know hardly anything. I’m only 19!’” Clark said.
It was too late and the new tradition caught on. — News 8 Austin
The Sign Of The Devil
In Sicily, much of Europe, and the rest of the world, it’s a gesture of allegiance to Satan. Not to be confused with a sign language gesture for “I love you,” in which the thumb is extended outward, in the Satanic gesture, the thumb is held over the two middle fingers.
President Bush’s “Hook ‘em, ‘horns” salute got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture during his inauguration as a salute to Satan. — Associated Press
