Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Frauchenhändedruckphobia

Frauchenhändedruckphobia is not really a word.....at least not yet, but I'm pushing for it to enter the topics world.

I probably screwed up in not using Latin but for this essay, it'll work fine.

This gets brought up today because of a short news article on Focus today.....discussing the tribal custom among Islamic peoples of men not shaking a woman's hand.  It's one of the first times that I noticed the term "tribe" used but it really does shake up the conversation a good bit when you reach a stage of identifying a group of people with certain tendencies and habits.

In the world of definitions.....a tribe can be described as a distinctive group of people.....dependent on their land, their culture, their religion....for their survival, and generally not integrated into a national society.

Frauchenhändedruckphobia is where you have the irrational fear of shaking hands with only women. 

I like the word because in the true style of making up new German words.....it meets the 24-letter minimum rule.  Germans get all weepy-eyed when you can invent words like this and it takes a bunch of letters to utter.

Where did this rule about not shaking women's hands come from?  Historians are somewhat divided.  Some will cite general Middle Eastern hospitality and that shaking hands wasn't a tradition there until western folks arrived (as in the Roman days).  As for the original handshake tradition?  Most historians will point at Greece around 5th Century BC where it's recorded that men shook hands.

My humble opinion is that eventually....some satirist will pick up this Frauchenhandelruckphobia thing and say they can't shake hands with anyone (male or female) but they can rub elbows with anyone (male or female), and another satirist will come up to say he can't shake hands, but he can rub feet with anyone.  Yet another satirist will stand up to say he can rub noses with other men, but not women.....suggesting that he could shake his butt with a woman's butt but not a man's butt.

When you go back two thousand years ago, there were literally thousands of tribes spread around Europe, and they all had unique tribal customs.  For the last twenty centuries, they've all been working hard to integrate and funnel themselves into a limited tribe of one singularity.   So they've met up now with a tribe of people with differing habits and it's hard to adjust to the fact that it's a two-tribal society in the making....something that hasn't been the norm in an awful long period of time.

And behind all of this.....Frauchenhändedruckphobia laying there as some irrational fear or phobia....which neither group can discuss much in public because it begs questions.

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