L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish doctor, bemoaned the lack of a global language, so he made one up. He called it Esperanto and he published it in 1887. It never caught on. And anyway he needn’t have bothered. A world-wide language already existed and you are fluent in it.
Try this. Raise your left elbow as if you were a one-winged chook and let your left hand dangle below it like a pendulum. Your left shoulder will hunch in sympathy. Now, keeping the fingers of the left hand tightly together, retract the finger tips a little towards the armpit. What are you doing? There is no need to ask. The posture you have assumed is instantly recognisable in a dozen or more regions of the world. The initiated will know. The uninitiated will never know.
You are discussing cricket. To be more precise you are discussing batting technique. You might be describing an innings you have played, or an innings you have seen. By turning the wrist and flicking the fingers away from the armpit you can indicate in physical shorthand every shot in the coaching manual, You can do the drives off front or back foot, the square cut, late cut and French cut, the pull, the hook, the glance, the nudge, the squirt, the work, the squeeze and the punch, the ugliest shot in cricket known as the sweep and even that elegant non-shot, the leave. Any cricketer will understand you. Any non-cricketer will think you handicapped.
And the language doesn’t just deal with batting. Fold the little finger and ring finger of your right hand into your palm and keep them there by closing the thumb over them. Now raise the hand in front of you as if giving a Churchillian salute. Unlike Churchill, however, you do not spread the first two fingers into a V. You keep them straight and together, like the feathers on the back of a brave’s head. But you are not a brave. You are the seam. You can duck the fingers down and round in a curve to illustrate the way you swing the ball, or you can nip those fingers down and up like quickly sipping chickens to illustrate the nipping movement off the seam. In either case you’re probably lying. Most unspun deliveries in cricket go straight through. Despite the gasps of the bowler and the oohs of a kindly keeper, they travel as straight as the trans-Siberian railway. But it is possible to lie in any language.
Spin is different of course. To illustrate the off spinner you twist the hand away from you as if twisting a door handle. At the same time you flick the thumb audibly against the middle finger and keep the index finger raised. And then there’s the legger, that most cavalier of cricketing deliveries, the one that can make fools of us all whether we try to bowl it or to bat against it. Appropriately to illustrate the legger the rules of cricketing mime prescribe a form of contortion. The fingers of the right hand curl towards the inside of the fore-arm and then defy anatomy by flipping away from the body while the wrist revolves as far as it can. The legger mime screams freak and clown.
Put together the bowling mimes and batting mimes form a physical vocabulary that crosses cultural and continental barriers. It’s an Esperanto without words, understood wherever cricket is spoken. Which, sadly for L.L. Zamenhof, did not include Poland.