He can survive an hour-long major TV network interview, with pointed questions coming at the rate of one a minute, and never give any real answers, yet leave us all satisfied that he has said something. What he has carefully shunned is self-revealment. The hair around the mouth covers up the critical expression zones, giving the wearer a mask of stoicism. A moustache and bushy eyebrows do something similar, as do squint eyes. An obscure signal, therefore, sometimes insulates or buffers both ends of the status spectrum.
Opaque signals coming from the dominant can also give status merely by being ambiguous.
These forms of behavior, of course, result in accompanying anatomical changes. In comparison to other organisms, human beings have evolved a fantastic freedom of communication, no doubt due, in biological terms, to our reliance on learned behavior and to our occupying an extremely flexible niche. We may give one signal while feeling just the opposite. Precision has been selected for in human communication to such an extent that it forms a striking chasm between us and other organisms. But communication precision is almost independent of the openness, the transparency of the communicators.