finger_to_mouth disambiguation

Our current tag finger_to_mouth appears to be ambiguous, being used for a few gestures I would consider semantically distinct.

One gesture, which I'd propose moving to finger_to_lips is the vertical finger across the lips gesture used to shush someone or call for silence. Examples: post #264561, post #303784, post #520708 .

Another is more of a "pointing to oneself" / "chewing on finger" gesture used to look cute / coy. Examples: post #423140, post #522471, post #484307 .

There might also be a few images in there that fit into a third group, but the vast majority seem to be one of the two above. What do people think about separating these into finger_to_lips and finger_to_mouth as defined above?

Shinjidude said:
One gesture, which I'd propose moving to finger_to_lips is the vertical finger across the lips gesture used to shush someone or call for silence. Examples: post #264561, post #303784, post #520708 .

Already covered by the shh tag.

Another is more of a "pointing to oneself" / "chewing on finger" gesture used to look cute / coy. Examples: post #423140, post #522471, post #484307 .

That's how I've been using finger_to_mouth. Not sure about everyone else.

I *thought* we had another tag for it. I propose we alias it to something more intuitive. I tried shush and hush looking for it, either those which are actual verbs, or finger_to_lips, which is descriptive, sound more appropriate to me. In the mean time I'll work on separating finger_to_mouth.

What's so unintuitive about shh? It gained a bit of traction with over 40 posts (as opposed to hush's 2 and shush's 0), it has a wiki, and it's the exact onomatopoeia you make when shushing someone.

I didn't even know about shh till I clicked a pic the other day that had a girl stepping on a dogs tail.

At least the tag should be more obvious, in gestures sense. Or just keep the shh and have ppl know about it by finger_to_lips.

Part of the problem with onomatopoeia in general, and drawn out onomatopoeia specifically is that they often don't have fixed spellings. Dictionary.com calls out "sh" and "shh" as alternative spellings, and farther drawn out spellings ("shhh") don't look wrong.

It's also simply not the sort of thing that springs to mind to me when it comes to describing the gesture. I know personally I searched for our label for it, and didn't come across it. Others too must have had that issue, being that they ended up using finger_to_mouth.

A full quarter of those 40 posts were added by me in the last 15 minutes or so. And at only 30 posts, you can't say shh was well established, wiki or no. If we do decide to keep it though, we should probably at least alias some of the other terms to it.

shush and hush are far more intuitive tags than the onomatopoeia (which you can use any number of hs with,) voting move those to one of those two tags.

shh is bad thus I've aliased it to shush for now.

We can still discuss alternatives, in which case I can direct the alias elsewhere but I wanted to get this fixed for now.

Then I suppose finger_to_lips can be used for the "coy gesture" Shinjidude described.

The main problem is that it's sometimes ambiguous. Are they shushing you, or is the finger to their lips just coincidentally vertical?

I think that's just something that has to be taken by context.

Wouldn't shush be affected by the verb-to-verbing aliasing, becoming shushing?

T5J8F8 said: Wouldn't shush be affected by the verb-to-verbing aliasing, becoming shushing?

Probably. Aliasing to that for now I suppose.

jxh2154 said:
shh is bad thus I've aliased it to shush for now.

How is it bad? At the very least it's *way* better than "shushing".

I listed reasons above why 'shh' is suboptimal. I still think finger_to_lips is probably the most intuitive and descriptive.

I like shush much better than shushing, but it goes against precedent and consistency, so I won't argue for that.

Onomatopoeic tags should be avoided, of course. I think we have none right now, and for good reason (except if you count yawn, but that's certainly not a strict onomatopoeic word). I don't really like shush because it's an imperative, which is just weird as a tag. hush could be a noun but it would mean something else than what we're going for here. Even shushing is not all that great for some reason, but it'll do for me.

Anyway, I vote for finger_to_lips.

Shinjidude said: I listed reasons above why 'shh' is suboptimal. I still think finger_to_lips is probably the most intuitive and descriptive.

Weren't we trying to separate the two, though? finger_to_lips could be either, which is why I didn't use it even though it's obviously a better tag. The difference between finger_to_lips and finger_to_mouth is, just glancing at the tag names, very unclear.

If we don't want to separate them then I have no problem making it finger_to_lips.

I figured out why shushing isn't great for me, it's something you do vocally.

Anyway, I think you made a good point about the two being too close, and since we're trying to separate finger_to_mouth (as in, a girl sort of sticking her finger in her mouth in a cutesy/sexy way) and the finger-to-shut-someone-up finger, I think maybe shushing is the best compromise.