The double-tap
February 13th, 2005
Why is it that the internationally recognised signal for ‘okay, this hug is now over’ is the double tap?
I love you.
I love you too …
I’ve noted it before, and watching Garden State recently (enjoyable movie, slightly too feel-good for me) Natalie Portman proved to me it’s universality when I spotted her giving Zach Braff the old d-t.
Give it a go: Hug your partner and keep it going way past the point it would normally end consensually. How will they signal to disengage? A fiver says it’s the double tap. Keep on hugging and I guarantee that they will articulate something like "okay, I’ve got to get on now". This will prove the meaning of their double-tap (warning: afterwards they may look at you slightly oddly).
Related is the male-male hug. Men who greet each other with a hug will immediately launch into a frantic tapping-bordering-on-slapping procedure. It seems to me that this is not a hearty expression of geniality (as it is usually taken) but rather an indication of both parties’ desire to end the embrace as quickly as possible. Men are uncomfortably vulnerable whilst hugging (‘was that a sabre-tooth behind me?’) and the added overtone of intimacy is enough to make all involved want to get it over with as quickly as possible. Or is it just me?
And why a double-tap? It seems quite an arbitrary choice of gesture. Maybe it’s from the martial arts indication of submission: "this bout is over" seems to carry a semantically similar meaning, but who knows.
tap-tap.