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Chinese restaurant in my neighborhood has a new hire. The youth apparently takes to heart advice from some books or from some waiting schools: every time he checks on a table, he would brace himself with his arms, one on the stomach, one on back, 45-degree, and bow slightly. He even keeps that way when he turns.
I feel so sorry for him I try to look away hoping he would notice no, no, no. But I commit conflicting feedback by leaving a big tip just because I feel sorry for him.
But my wondering is: is there a name for it -that gesture to show respect with the bracing arms? Is it not a standard but outdated thing that you often see in movies about the old English aristocrats? A life theater's curtain thing? Another question: am I all wrong to feel weird about it in restaurant?
It's telling that this is happening in a Chinese restaurant, because the term that comes to mind is kow-tow, from a mostly obsolete Chinese custom. The original, though, involves kneeling and bowing forward so far that the forehead touches the ground, so the version you observe is a highly stylized adaptation.
I vaguely associate that gesture with life performers at curtain. Perhaps that is where school children pick it up to do with their school plays .
There are many images like one below that come up with "English butler." "Kow tow," the ancient Chinese style prostration, could be either a predecessor or successor, or neither.
Perhaps there is no specific name to that body language. Though it is pretty distinctive and recognizable, it's just a thing done instinctively cross-cultures for "at your service."
I've been a stage actor (and singer and instrumentalist) for more than fifty years, and I've never known a serious performer to bow in this fashion. I've performed in shows with inexperienced actors, children and adults, in the cast who bowed that way when first rehearsing the bows, and invariably someone took them quietly aside and they never did it again. I'm not sure where they've seen it, though I have, too, somewhere. I think there's a mixture of believing it's right and not knowing what to do with their hands.
A similar phenomenon occurs when people pose for photographs by standing with their hands clasped low in front of them. My favorite director and long-time mentor calls this the fig-leaf position, and cautions his actors to use absolutely never – it telegraphs insecurity.
tromboniator said
A similar phenomenon occurs when people pose for photographs by standing with their hands clasped low in front of them. My favorite director and long-time mentor calls this the fig-leaf position, and cautions his actors to use absolutely never – it telegraphs insecurity.
The only public speaking class I have taken (loosely based on Toastmasters) taught the same thing.
The picture reminds me that I sometimes see older men walk with one hand behind their back, the other swinging naturally. It always seems an old timey, perhaps more European thing. If this is a gesture at all I'm not sure what it means. Google has a "list of gestures" but they all seem to be deliberate communications; I don't know if this is. But it does seem rather formal and respectful...
Of late at the restaurant at top, that waiter is all swinging easy now. All's well with him on that account.
tromboniator said
pose for photographs by standing with their hands clasped low in front of them. My favorite director and long-time mentor calls this the fig-leaf position, and cautions his actors to use absolutely never – it telegraphs insecurity.
The human anatomy the way it is, makes it hard to not look like we are doing something with our genitals. Take the humanoid robot in this pict (the woman; she's Chinese made, named Jia Jia) : with all the billions of permutations of choices available to her robotic mind for where and how to repose those hands, she's still but doomed to that one aesthetic destiny.
(The man appears to be holding forth on that very philosophical point, albeit philosophy alone would seem inadequate to account for such rapturous bliss.)
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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