Why the elbow bump is the most ridiculous greeting in history
Medical authorities say we must get used to social distancing and that it’s time to rethink personal boundaries. About time.
The runner’s panting could be heard before he rounded the corner of the bush track. There wasn’t time to withdraw, and there wasn’t 1.5m to spare. He loped towards me, and, drawing alongside, said hello. Rather, he huffed hello and, as he was out of puff, his huff was like a gust. His friendliness settled like a cloud around me.
We are redrawing boundaries — globally, nationally, locally and personally on bush tracks — and medical authorities have said we’d better get used to it. So, at last, we get to rethink personal boundaries. About time.
Renegotiating social contact is never easy. Just think of the handshake that became a thing in Ancient Greece, where strangers would proffer their right hand to show they weren’t carrying a knife, and persisted into the 21st century where leaders use it to disarm others on podiums.
The handshake is now in isolation and, while it seems unimaginable that we will discard it, other forms of address might not survive social distancing.
Take the kiss. Until the 90s, only the French kissed everyone. Then, almost overnight, schoolgirls would kiss each other in the playground, friends began kissing and finally it got into offices, where vaguely familiar colleagues would make a lunge before you’d even remembered their names.
By the time it got into the boardroom, people began to question it. If it was spreadsheets at 20 paces, why were they all smooching? If the discussion was about harassment, why did they begin it with a kiss?
While the kiss was uncontained, the handshake also began to break its boundaries. It morphed into the bro hug — a handshake that veers into a bump of shoulders and a pat on the back. It may have started on the footy field but quickly spread into the office.
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As we get a new appreciation for the bugs that exist on others, we’ll begin to appreciate the politeness of a 1.5m boundary, which funnily enough is the space that early Australians inherited from uptight British forebears.
Take the hat tip. This is an elegant form of acknowledgment that performs best with the brim of a hat but can be tweaked for a cap or even an imaginary hat. Then there’s the slow head nod. This is a subtle form of acknowledgment that says I see you, I hear you but don’t come any closer with your bloody bugs.
Women are adept at the mimed hug, otherwise known as hug interruptus. This is a gesture of fondness — open arms, open hands, slight tilt of head — that shouldn’t be read as an invitation to get closer. The wink should also be rescued from its demise into sleaze. It was a perfectly good form of address for passing acquaintances or someone who was across the room and wasn’t going to make the effort to close the distance. And then there’s the bow — not the status-laded Japanese bow but the more theatrical European bow, usually performed by a man to make a woman feel like a princess.
While we reappraise old mores, two new forms of address have sprung up but I’m not sure they’ll make it past the pandemic. The elbow bump may provide a suitable distance but it has connotations of elbowing the other out of the way. Similarly, the ankle tap is a broken bone in waiting. It isn’t allowed on the football field and doesn’t perform well in polite society.
So, let’s rethink social incontinence on the basis it leads to viral contagion. And we might remind joggers they don’t have to say hello while passing, if only because their breath is precious to them but not suitable for public consumption.