"snubbing your nose"

[James Harbeck]

>James Harbeck wrote:
>>  (nobody thumbs their nose anymore, it seems, although it was common
>>  enough when I was a kid,
>How do you thumb your nose at someone? Is it with the thumb on the nose
>and the four fingers waving, a movement of the thumb outward from the
>nose, or something else? I don't think I ever tried to match that
>expression to an actual gesture.

Well, in the comic books I read as a kid, the hand is put, fingers
splayed, with the thumb at the tip of the nose, and the fingers may
wave, usually briskly as though tinkling piano keys. So when I did
it, that's what we did. In fact, to express greater defiance or
contempt, we would put the other hand in front, with its thumb to the
tip of the little finger of the first one, and might even move the
hands rotationally on the little-fingertip-to-thumbtip axis in
opposite directions (which means the arms would be moving with the
elbows going in and out sort of like in the bird dance). This was
considered impolite but not a spanking offence -- certainly not taboo
like giving the finger, which is what we graduated to.

But I think there's also a version where the hand moves outward
starting at the nose.

There's a guy doing it in
http://www.mosquitocurtains.com/images/jpg/low_res/adams-small.jpg .
The motion involved, if any, isn't depicted.

I guess the youth of today go straight to giving the finger. Perhpas
there are other gestures that are also used. No doubt adolescent boys
in particular prefer the wanking motion (i.e., gesturing to indicate
masturbation), which expresses contempt towards a person or topic; at
least one kid I knew, when wishing to express particular strength of
opinion, would do it in a grand gesture with two hands in different
directions, as though handling two separate sesquipedalian organs
with a common root.

James Harbeck.

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