An Endorsement: The Traditional Handshake

Last night, I went to a friend’s college house party in Pittsburgh with a few of my buddies from high school. Once we arrived at this party, our friend who was hosting it immediately introduced us to his five roommates. Then, throughout the rest of the night, he would periodically introduce us to more people he knew at the party that we’d never met, and we also met some people by way of our own assertion. I would say, roughly estimating, that I met about 20 new people that night. Add that to the number of people that I meet and talk to for the first time on any given night that I go to a party or a bar at my own school, or interview a stranger for my job, and I think it’s safe to say that I meet a lot of new people. I’m not saying this because I think I’m some kind of social butterfly (because a lot of nights I like to just stay home by myself and watch television (porn) or read books (Penthouse), or because I don’t like meeting new people (because I love it). The reason I’m saying this is because you probably meet a lot of people, too, or have at least gone through a phase in your life where you were often in social climates and were meeting a lot of people. I want you to think about this, and see if you feel the same way I feel about what I’m about to say: Meeting new people can be very fucking confusing. Not because people are complex (because most aren’t, myself included, and if they are you’re probably not going to know it immediately upon seeing them for the first time), but because the initial greeting can be very confusing. I mean, the whole, “Hi, nice to meet you” thing has many variations that are all socially acceptable and interchangeable, and that part doesn’t confuse most people unless they’re extremely shy and/or nervous. The part that confuses me is the physical greeting you engage in with a person you’ve just met for the first time. It’s something I think has gotten unnecessarily complex through the years, and for no real beneficial reason. It used to be a person would introduce you to another person, and you would give them a verbal greeting and a simple handshake. It was fucking easy, and didn’t ever really result in an awkward moment unless there were certain extenuating and/or unique circumstances (like you’d heard of who the person was, because you’d been boning their sister and they knew damn well you had been, or if, for some reason, you have been friends with this person on Facebook for the past three months without really knowing them, etc.). Now, though, the whole dynamic has changed.

You know what I’m talking about. You’re standing there with a friend, and they want to introduce you to some other person they know. This should be good. It’s a way of networking that doesn’t involve technology. They bring you over to said person and say something like, “Scott, this is my friend, Brandon,” and you exchange pleasantries. It used to be that you would immediately just reach out your hand and do a traditional handshake with this Brandon character, but now you could potentially get really confused. Now there are so many variations on the handshake greeting that, if you don’t put some time in to analyze this person (that you don’t even know to begin with), you could reach out and engage in this bizarre hand-to-hand collision that’s weird for everybody involved. For example, Brandon could be one of those white kids that like to wear flat-brimmed New York Yankees hats (despite being from someplace in New Hampshire), Enyce sweatshirts and pencil-thin goatees. Sometimes they also wear high-topped Air Force Ones and those really shiny jeans. You get the idea. If he is, then chances are he might come in for the “hip-hop generation” shake, explained below:

Hip-Hop Generation Shake: Like I said above, this is the kind of shake favored by the kids that really enjoy rap music and have immersed themselves in a strange urban culture that (usually) severely counters the way they were raised. (I actually have an Introduction to Creative Writing Class with a white dude that really digs rap, and fancies himself a rapper. Whenever we have to write poems for class, he always comes in with some of his own rap lyrics that he likes to read to everyone. A lot of the time it has to do with guns and projects--the ones you live in, not the ones you do for class--and stuff like that, and I don’t really buy that he was raised in that kind of environment. When he reads these rap songs, all I can think is “This guy’s a gangster? His real name’s Clarence.” Yes. That was an 8 Mile reference, and I don’t think he’d come at me with a normal handshake under any circumstances.) You’ll approach them for a handshake and they will come at you with this handshake wherein you tilt your hand upward a few degrees from the normal position and join hands with your counterpart at the space between your thumb and forefinger. (As far as I can tell this maneuver was originated by older men that listen to rock n’ roll, then these hip hop dudes just took it and ran with it, adding more and more moves to the original product, probably sometime in the 90s. It’s kind of like the abuse of marijuana or the tendency to get into a lot of fights. The two cultures are more similar than one would think, I guess.)

This shake could be the most complex of any of them, because after you get your hand into position for the initial phase, this one has the potential to take all kinds of turns, none of which are predictable. You simply have to feel it out with this person, which is fucking difficult because you’ve never met them in your life. They might lean in for the one armed hug while keeping the hands clasped together. Then, after that, they might go to release the hand, but do so in a sliding motion that ends with the fingers clasping one another and then pulling away in an effort to make a dull snapping sound (and this almost never really works, at least in my experience). This phase of the shake resembles two people getting ready to engage in a thumb war. Any combination of these moves can be employed, and they’re interchangeable. So you can see how this would be fucking confusing.

There are many other newish ways to greet a person. So many, actually, that Budweiser recently came out with a commercial detailing quite a few of them (http://admusicdb.com/ads/budweiser-greetings-commercial.html). There’s the fist bump, also known as the pound or daps, and it was made famous by Howie Mendel. You know, the completely bald guy with a soul patch that hosts Deal or No Deal, the television game show that requires absolutely no real skill whatsoever. Mendel is notorious for being a germophobe that is completely frightened of shaking other people’s hands, and so he does the fist bump instead. There are variations on this one too, that include pulling your fist back after touching your counterparts and making an exploding noise (they love to do this on the office). Also, you can bump fists, keep them together, turn them sideways and then reach your hand up your acquaintences arm (while they do the same). This is called locking it and putting the chain on it (a favorite between my 10 and 8 year old cousins and me). There’s also the high five, the point and go and the simple head nod (which comes in handy if you’d like a hip way to greet someone from across a room). It takes a certain gall and weirdness to greet a person the first time you meet them in any of these ways, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that it does happen and is at least partially acceptable in normal society, which baffles me.

Now, I’m not saying that for every occasion people should simply shake hands, because that would be slightly boring. I’m glad there are these other means of greeting, and as far as I’m concerned you can daps the fuck out of somebody if they score the number of the Mandarin hostess you had at P.F. Changs, and you can high five the germs right off of your friend’s hand if the Pens score a goal. Hell, make up a secret handshake with one of your best friends and do it all the time, because that impresses some people. All I’m trying to say is that somehow, someway, we need to get a hold on this first meeting greeting etiquette. Someone needs to step up, like the President or Oprah or someone else that people will blindly follow, a real trend-setter (Lady Gaga maybe, but I don’t think she’d endorse anything as normal as the handshake), and just regulate the whole thing. Someone needs to just say “Alright, no more of that flashy weird shit. Let’s revert to our old ways and just do the traditional handshake on the occasion of a first meeting. We don’t need that awkward moment where you fuck up the hip-hop handshake, or one person goes in for one thing and another is trying to do another. That kind of analysis is not necessary for that whole deal. I mean, you only get one chance for a first impression, and you don’t want to ruin it by fucking up the hand greeting, right?”

So, if you see me any time soon, and we either haven’t seen each other before or are just meeting face-to-face for the first time, let’s just go with a handshake. If things work out, and we’re at the bar watching a sporting event or something, we can go ahead and daps it out following successful happenings. Hell, if we hit it off, maybe we can even do a quick bro-hug if our team is victorious. Maybe, at some point, we can bust out the “feed the chicken” maneuver. I don’t know. Let’s just keep it simple at the starting point, though.

If you’re a female and you just read all of this, I apologize, because you probably don’t really shake hands or do pounds or any of that shit nearly as often as guys do. I think, though, that maybe we should bring back the whole “guy kisses the girl’s hand” greeting. That shit is classy, and very underused these days. Actually, I’m definitely going to start doing that.