Elbump is another word I made up – that does not matter. I’ve been pushing the elbow bump as a “head the pathogen off at the pass” stratagem for CoVID-19 – people seem to get it but as to whether it will spread or be an effective preventative measure will be difficult to gague.
I’m finding that adorning that memetic behaviour with, rather than what WHO doctors do in the Congo in the face of Ebola, to say that it is what scrubbed up surgeons do. A more convivial memeplex maybe.
I got the idea by watching TV. I can in no way claim credit for this. It is clear that the “elbump” behaviour is amenable to convergent evolution – that is, under similar circumstances, it is likely to emerge from a number of sources.
A letter to the editor in the Times (2020-02-28) “Tackling Covid-19” suggests convergence – I will cite it verbatim:
Sir, It may be high time to abandon the handshake as a greeting (letter, Feb 27), but substituting two hands placed together and a graceful bow will be impractical if the left hand is already in use for carrying something, often a bag. In a networking session at a conference in the City last week delegates were using the right elbow, sleeved, to touch that of the other party. It worked well.
Anthony Rentoul
Twickenham
An outbreak of “elbump”? It’s interesting that my ego kicks in screaming “I came up with that!” of course I did not, I just figured it independently. OK, I dubbed it the “ elbump” but that’s a bit shit really. The point here is, how to spread this potentially protective measure, irrespective of its origin.
Anyway, there is no shortage of salutations that can be cribbed, from the Japanese bow to the Roman salute. Indeed, even a handwave or a simple “hello” would do the job. The situation here is that the handshake -grabbing the other’s hand before they stab you – is deeply ingrained in Western culture; it is an automatic gesture, a fixed unit of behavioural patterning. The task is to adjust that pattern in such a way that hand contamination is avoided, but also to make the gesture something that is not too alien, that it can be easily learned and substituted for a more familiar pattern, that can be understood as a handshake, understood for its value as a means of minimising contamination, and is something that is likely to propagate.
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