Michael And here is our series "English Words That No One Knows." Today: "Jazz Hands." You will probably rub your eyes in disbelief, but even after 12 years of living in the USA, it happens that I come across an English word I've never heard before, which every American child knows. Recently, I was chatting via instant messenger with a colleague who was working from home and was reporting live that a crazy homeless person was wandering around in front of his apartment in sunny San Diego, singing, clapping, and doing "Jazz Hands." Puzzled, I asked what on earth "Jazz Hands" were. My colleague, equally astonished, explained to me that it is a pose where a Broadway actor in a musical shows ten splayed fingers to the audience. Who would have thought there was a word for that! Undoubtedly another shortcoming in the catastrophic English lessons of my English teacher Haueisen at Gymnasium Neusäß, which was not exactly short on catastrophic shortcomings.