Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Bow to your partner . . .
Bow to your partner, bow to your corner, tip your hat, curtsy . . . anything to honor the meeting, but whatever you do, DO NOT SHAKE HANDS. As one doctor put it, kissing a stranger is safer than shaking hands, and shaking hands is more dangerous than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
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While studying in Germany in 1969 I learned that if you are at any formal concert, not a muscle can be twitched, nor an eyebrow raised. Breathing must be normal, and everything must be 'in ordnung' ( in order, English translation, 'ok'). I also learned to bow a certain way, more with the head and, ever so slightly, with the upper body.
ReplyDeleteThe most demanding of rituals was encountered upon meeting a person(s) or bidding aufiedersehen to one or many a person. On that stage of greeting or farewell, the handshake was the most prominent appendage, yes, appendage. One realized, soon after arrival in the Black Forest, or any German forest, that hansel and gretel were awaiting, as disembodied spirits, ready to don the necessary lederhosen, and become real, with a handshake, or two, or three, und so weiter (and so forth).
I was always amazed, and culturally found wanting, after the third or fourth round of handshakes, until I learned that to be accepted, the surest way was that if it moved, you had to shake it.
Interestingly, it was the right hand in which the weapon was carried, as most were right handed. The act of shaking hands was a demonstration of good will, because the weapon hand had to be empty. The Latin word, 'sinistra', from which is derived the word, sinister, means left handed. If a person were left handed and shook with his right hand, as most did, he remained potentially lethal, and thus potentially sinister.
ReplyDeleteI can only surmise, that the Germans, having been dismembered as a people for 300+ years because the sixteenth century thirty years war was fought solely on their ancestral lands! whose restoration as a people! as a nation had to await Napoleon's. Wars and finally consummated by the 'realpolitik' of Bismarck's successful effort at re unification 55 years later, meant that the Germans were especially paranoid about possible I'll will, and the unexpected, unanticipated assault that would have shattered the peace of the meadows that re ached out to the dark and forbidding forests, and could be mollified only by the proffered Han empty of weapon and crowned with a smile.
ReplyDeleteAfter shaking hands with others, I find it necessary to wash my hands at the earliest possible convenience. I would prefer a fist bump or no physical interaction at all when greeting others, but that's not the social norm.
ReplyDeleteThink of it, now. If we had jus stopped shaking hands 100 years ago, the population, no doubt, would be twice what it is today. Shaking hands, clearly, is the best way to save the whales. Thus, to shake not, is to want not.
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