Groucho's eyelid semaphore seemed to me to mean "Am I not right?" But I can't think of a name for it.
We had a prof who looked like Groucho, and deliberately used that bon mot signal.
I took advantage of it once. In his bacteriology class, the girl in front of me would never let me look at her notes which she typed from her shorthand. But she constantly interrupted me to ask me to tell her what was in her microscope's field. One day when we were looking at preparations from our own throat cultures, she did it once too often. I took one look, and said in a congratulatory tone: "Why, Annie, you have the Mycobacterium smegmatis in your throat culture!" Just as I knew she would, she dashed up to the prof to brag about this. And just as I knew he would, he gave her his best Groucho leer, and inquired archly: "My dear young lady, are you inviting comment concerning your extra curricular activities?" (Eyebrow semaphore) His tone told her she had been had. She slunk back to her seat, and looked it up. The back of her neck got very red, and she never bothered me again. The "botanical epithet" is in every dictionary.
