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.

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.

[Catullus, V.]

quote:

philematologists (people who study kissing)