Ben Schott

And the two-hour wait face is the look of kind of stricken horror when they realize how long they have to wait for a table.

So each little restaurant has its own little slang.

And I was talking to one restaurant and the general manager goes, we don't really have any slang, really.

And I'm like, I bet you do.

And he's like, no.

And then over a course of 15, 20 minutes talking to him, he gave me five really great terms that were specific to his restaurant.

But because people use it every day, they don't think of it as real or significant or it's just normal.

I mean, it's so instinctive to them.

They don't think as an outsider that it's special or interesting.

And I'm here to tell them that it is and to try and extract it from them and to really kind of dive in.

So they then think...

what they do every day is actually curious and strange and fun.

Exactly.

One of the things we haven't talked about, which I really enjoyed, is there's a whole sort of number of sections on hand signals and gesticulations.

Because, so for example, there's the hand signals of open outcry oil traders.

Now, you may not know what that means, but when you see on TV, the guys in the pit and they're shouting and they've got their hands and they're making all these wild, odd gesticulations, that's called open outcry trading.

And it's essentially disappeared.

So I photographed an open outcry, an oil trader explaining how all the hand signals work.

So, for example, for heating oil, you draw your hand across your forehead because it's hot in here.

For gasoline, you pinch your nose because of the bad smell of gasoline.