Whho knew that kissing was a language? From the New York Times, a few days ago (ellipses omitted):
Richard Gere violates a cultural taboo by kissing a woman in public. When Mr. Ahmadinejad, the ultraconservative president of Iran, kissed the gloved hand last week of an elderly woman who had once been his school teacher, at a ceremony for a national teachers' day, he, too, received sharp rebukes from clerics. But anthropologists and philematologists (people who study kissing) say the harsh reactions to Mr. Ahmadinejad's and Mr. Gere's kisses underline a certain cultural and political mystery about the seemingly simple act of kissing.
Vaughn M. Bryant Jr. said that contrary to the lyrics of "'As Time Goes By," a kiss is almost never just a kiss. It is a language with a grammar all is own, which is as strict as the syntax of international diplomacy, he said. "When people kiss, there are all kinds of hidden rules in play," he said.
Kissing is more or less universal. People in all but a few, tiny cultures do it. And wherever people kiss, they practice the same categories of kissing that the Romans first identified: the "basium," for the standard romantic kiss; the "osculum," for the friendship kiss; and the "savium," the most passionate kind, sometimes referred to as a French kiss.
Since Wordnerd's original post referred to publicly visible behavior, it seems quite likely that people study it, as they study most other forms of behavior. (Darn! My serious streak got the best of me again.) After all, with all of the political intrigue going on throughout history, such things could have far-reaching effects.
Osculum is a double diminutive of os, oris, 'mouth', basium is just a plain old kiss, and sāvium (suāvium) is a 'love kiss' (from suāvis 'sweet, agreeable, grateful'). From basium comes the French verb baiser which has shifted in meaning from 'to kiss' to 'to screw'. In a Languagehat blog entry, the difference is thought not to be semantic but one of register.
quote:
da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum. dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus inuidere possit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred. Then, when we've made up, many a thousand. We shall confuse those, so we may not know them, nor any bad person give us the evil eye, when he may know how many our kisses to be.
Aren't Eskimos (or the Inuit, or similar tribes) supposed to rub noses rather than kiss, or is that another old wive's tale? I can see the logic there, as it is possible that the couple could find themselves frozen together.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I have usually told people that if I weren't a librarian I'd want to be a lounge singer, but this profession of philematology sounds much more interesting.
******* "Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. ~Dalai Lama
My phonetics professor loved to say that the bilabial click was a kiss
I like to point out to people (who mention the linguistic factoid that there are exotic languages in Africa that use clicks) that most English speakers use clicks, too. As goofy mentions, the bilabial click means 'kiss', the alveolar click usually transcribed as tsk is a disapproving interjection, and the lateral click, or giddy-up, is how you get a horse to go forward.
While one usually thinks of a "French kiss" as having to do with, for lack of another term, oral intercourse, I've noticed that a friendly labial connection on one or both cheeks is much more common among the French that I know.
And which was Judas's's's' kiss? (I still get confused on these darned possessessives)
