Tapping Your Fingers Together Is a Social Media Phenomenon Now — but What Does It Mean?

If you've seen your elementary-aged, middle school, or high school kids press their fingers together with their thumb and pointer or their thumb and middle finger, then you might have questions about the trend. To be fair, tapping your fingers together is also big on social media, particularly TikTok, so if you're wondering what it means regardless of where you've seen it, that's understandable.

Keeping up with social media trends is hard enough without your kids coming home repeating those same trends. Did tapping your fingers together start on TikTok, Instagram, or somewhere else in real life? Sometimes, it's like figuring out which is the chicken and which is the egg. But there is a history of the finger tapping trend, and once you know what it means, it's kind of contagious.

Some Love Island USA viewers noticed cast members, particularly the ladies, tapping their fingers together to respond to some tea or make their point known during Season 7. At the time, one fan asked in a Reddit thread what it means to tap your fingers together in the familiar gesture. They joked that the show makes them feel "out of touch" because, before Love Island USA, they had never seen the gesture.

Someone commented to clear things up for the fan. They wrote, "Others mentioned what it means above, but just calling out that it originated in the ballroom scene by femme queens. It's a dainty form of applauding, like 'yaaaassss', 'you ate that', 'you carried.'"

The ballroom scene reference they made is accurate, at least according to Gay Times.

The magazine posted an Instagram video about what it means to tap your fingers together and where it came from. Many of us might have seen it for the first time on a TV show or on TikTok. But, Gay Times explains in the video, the gesture was created by drag queens in the ballroom when they wanted to "clock" someone, or make it known that they noticed something they did.

"In ballroom, reading and shade were part of the art form," the video explains. "And clocking someone was about perception. Seeing it clearly, calling it out, and protecting yourself through humor and wit." Later, the narrator in the video adds, "It can be assertive, funny, or even supportive."

Tapping your fingers together often goes hand in hand with someone saying "clock it," which backs up the history of the gesture of tapping your fingers together to get a point across. One woman on TikTok shared a video where she taps her fingers together and says it means to "clock that tea."

Someone in the comments under another TikTok about the trend wrote that they thought the tapping is a "mini clap," and that sort of works too. Sure, you can do one without the other, but tapping your fingers together and saying a sassy, "clock it," is a lot more fun to do at the same time.