The Handshake Agreement

[d_aulnoy]

When I was young, my father shared with me an important philosophy: Always shake a man's hand.  Kick him in the balls afterwards, if you need to, but always shake his hand, and always shake it right.

I was about seven.

It says a lot about dad that, a) he thought that it was important that I know how to shake hands properly, even at an early age, and, b) acknowledged the bottomless depths of my rage, even then, and approved of them, so long as they were coupled with a basic understanding of the societal courtesies, if not of the penalties for assualt in the first degree.

My Father's Rules For Shaking Hands Properly:

Always with the right hand: doesn't matter if you're smoking, drinking, or carrying heavy objects.  Always with a clean hand: if you've been engaging in heavy physical labor of one sort or another, you wipe your hands on your handkerchief.  (The fact that most modern members of society do not, in fact, carry handkerchiefs, has not actually penetrated with my father - but, then again, when I was six, dad flipped on me for attempting to eat a piece of pizza with my hands, so ... yeah.  My penchant for creative anachronism is fully heritable.)  Always with a firm grip: to do anything else is to imply a gentle contempt for the shakee, and a certain untrustworthiness about the shaker.  Not, mind you, in an attempt to crush their hand (unless they do it first, in which case he instructed me to apply a gentle pressure on the first phalange of the thumb for unbeatable results), but to convey a sense of firmness and reliability.  And, last and perhaps most importantly, to look them in the eye.

Now, I've gotten some bad handshakes in my life.  There's the Knucklecrusher, usually delivered by men, who tend to hit you with some jovially condescending variation on the That's a might fine grip you got there, purty lady! theme.  There's the Dead Fish, which is usually delivered by individuals of either gender who have already decided not to like you, regardless of whether it's because you're getting the Eye from their partners or the last crab cake off the server's tray at a cocktail party: you will also, occasionally but thankfully infrequently, get the Dead Fish from men, specifically, who are scared of crushing your fragile digits in their meaty grasps.  The Dead Fish, in both instances, is marked by a limp wrist and the faintest of squeezes.  It implies that your hand, and, by extension your person, is somehow distasteful, and that the entire chore of introductions simply too, too onerous.  There's the Cuff, used by people who think it's cute to get the come-on out before the exchange of names, and the Stinkpalm of Kevin Smith fame, which, luckily, I don't actually think I've ever experienced personally.

Recently, I had the worst handshake of my life.  Seriously, if it had been sex, I'd be entering holy orders right now to avoid the potential threat of ever encountering such a horror again.  The gentleman in question managed to give me some kind of an exaggerated version of the Dead Fish while looking off to one side, and I don't think that anyone's ever managed to establish their inherent lack-of-being-worth-interacting with ever before.  I mean, really: anything worth doing is worth doing well, so why on earth bring yourself to the notice of an individual in a way which will have them thinking less of you forever after, hallelujiah and amen?  It brings a new resonance to my father's advice from the days of yore, because, not only did it break every single one of the painstaking instructions which managed to stick with a little lass of seven, it also made me understand that the two clauses were actually related.

When you shake wrong?  It makes people want to kick you in the balls, because anyone who would bring that much contempt to one of the most basic signifiers of the social contract for no damn good reason obviously doesn't need them much, anyway.

Friends don't let friends get their testes introduced to their tonsils: for the love of god, people, hand the knowledge down.