"snubbing your nose"

[Wilson Gray]

My experience is the same as yours, James, WRT to comic books, except
that we never actually did it, in reality. We may have even seen it in
East Side Kids / Bowery Boys movies, but I have no true memory of it,
one way or the other.

-Wilson

On 5/5/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> Subject:      Re: "snubbing your nose"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >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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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens
------
The tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones.

                                           Rumanian proverb

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