Minding one's P's and Q's" means being adept and punctilious about one's behaviour, especially when dealing with other people. At least six explanations are given for this expression. First, in the old days when printers set up type by hand, it was easy to reach for the wrong one of the two letters, especially because the boxes containing p's and q's stood side by side, as these letters stand in the alphabet. Second, the two letters look very similar anyway, so that learners of the alphabet should note their differences. Third, pints and quarts of beer in pubs used to be written up as "p's" and "q's," and customers were wise to keep an eye on the considerable difference in their quantities. Fourth, the expression has a French origin, pieds and queues ("feet" and "wigs tied back in a bunch at the nape of the neck"): dancing masters warned their pupils to give heed to their feet while executing steps, and prevent their wigs from falling off when they bowed low. Fifth, and alternatively, French women at court were urged to watch their feet so as to avoid tearing and entanglements when wearing a train (queue). All of these explanations stress attention and awareness. But most of us today, I think, take most naturally to the sixth explanation: P's and Q's are Pleases and Thankyous. We know that those who wish to live in ease and friendship with their fellows will be competent practitioners in the arts of observing ("minding"), asking, and thanking. (The sense, however, that this is what we are being exhorted to do by the maxim probably also means that we are in danger of forgetting to obey it.)
Gratitude, like petitioning, has to do with the principle in our culture that receivers and, of course, askers too are normally "lower" than are givers, even when givers insist that the reverse is true. Receivers and petitioners show deference, therefore, in speech—and also through gesture and body postures. In Dante's Inferno, at the bottommost circle of hell, the ungrateful are punished by being eternally frozen in the postures of deference they had failed to perform during their lifetimes: trapped rigid in enveloping ice, they stand erect or upside down, lie prone, or bow face to feet.1
Non-verbal submissiveness is commonly found among animals: cringing and crouching (hanging back and sinking to the ground) are common, as are mechanisms such as the cock's lowering his crest, showing that he has laid aside his belligerence and hopes his antagonist will feel it unnecessary to attack. These actions make the animal smaller. They also inhibit its rage and combativeness, and physically display the fact that this inhibition has taken place. A normally voracious fish floats head down and tail up before a cleaner wrasse, demonstrating its non-aggressive state as it prepares to enter the remarkable "cleaning" symbiosis. But the observing scientist who exclaims that the fish was "just begging to be cleaned"2 must merely have been trying to entertain her television audience. A human bow is a very different thing from that of a fish. An instinctual component remains, but the act is in the main intentional: a performance that is learned, then deliberately polished and perfected through the medium of culture. A bow may be a social obligation, or a cold formality, or sincere and highly emotional, or filled with complex suggestiveness, or used as a disguise for countless seething thoughts, or slyly manipulative. It may also be merely culturally inappropriate.
Lower than a bow and much more intense, prostration is a gesture accepting a great difference in status between the superior, who is usually standing or sitting at the time, and the one at her feet. Prostration means lying on the ground before someone, literally or figuratively "kissing the dust" and perhaps kissing her feet, sometimes three times, as well. The word can be used for lying full length or for kneeling and then bringing one's head to the ground; in the latter case the bowing action can be performed several times. Prostration almost never occurs in public in modern Western cultures. An exception is the intense moment of consecration to God of priests and nuns and bishops in Catholic professions or ordination services: lying face down and at full length before the altar, and in the presence of the congregation, means total dedication and humility in people proclaiming their desire to serve others rather than be served. The word humility comes from humus, earth. When people prostrate themselves, they take the etymology literally and lie level with the earth, sit on the ground, or touch the earth with their heads, and so express their lowliness. Orthodox Christians bend forward and touch the ground with the right hand in ritual prayer; otherwise, prostrations (to God alone) are purely personal Christian practice. Islamic ritual prayer involves repeated prostrations in the direction of Mecca (sujud), but only before God.3
Prostration before human beings is recorded in the Bible; in the main this action signifies profound gratitude. Joseph presents his sons to his father Jacob to bless, and then falls to the ground to thank his father.4 Ruth prostrates herself when she thanks Boaz for taking her under his protection.5 The Shulamite woman, whose son was brought to life by Elisha, falls at Gehazi's feet.6 In the New Testament Jesus heals ten lepers, but only one comes back to thank him, falling at his feet to do so.7
In all these cases the gesture demonstrates awe and wonder—the benefactor is in two instances a miracle worker—in addition to gratitude. Elsewhere, however, a great favour between friends results in prostration. Jonathan loves David, but his father King Saul hates David and wants to kill him. Jonathan, in opposition to his father and his king, saves his friend's life. And David "fell with his face to the ground and bowed down three times. Then they kissed each other and both shed many tears."8 A friend—not a subordinate—who is intensely grateful deliberately lowers himself, in this way honouring the benefactor in a physical action that displays the strength of his personal emotions. Kissing and weeping express love, gratitude, relief, and amazement at the power of love.
Among the Gonja people of northern Ghana, greeting is traditionally used for thanking.9 This is a society that places great store by rank. A song they often sing points out that "the arm-pit is not higher than the shoulder"—in other words, precedence is birth-given and natural, and to challenge it unthinkable. "Greeting" starts a conversation, defines and affirms status, and can be used when entering upon the manipulation of a relationship with an end in view. One phrase this society uses for "thank you" is "Ansa ni kushung!," "Greetings for your work!" But it is more common to say when thanking, "Me choro,""I greet you!" Every day family members greet by saying these words, a junior member of the family having to approach a senior (never the other way round) and crouch at his open door to do it. Twice a week the community's elders have to greet and thank the chiefs. They remove their hats and lie down on their left sides, left arms extended. (This is the male's mode of self-abasement: the female's is to lie down on the right side, right arm extended.) People hesitate to withhold greeting-and-thanking from a superior, even if he is a political opponent. On a famous occasion during the nineteenth century, a chief summoned his rivals to greet him, and provided only a sea of mud as space for their prostrations. His guests did not demur. Only later did they rebel against the man who had humiliated them.
Thanking on less formal occasions may be accompanied among the Gonja by more ordinary gestures of deference: removing the hat, crouching, kneeling, gently clapping hands. Thanking may also be expressed after a lapse of time through return gifts, or actions to please the benefactor, or visits that include the self-lowering that is expressed in physical greeting-and-thanking. The non-verbal expression of respect and deference is in itself a gift to a man's honour. If anyone wants to receive favours from another, he has to visit him and perform greeting-and-thanking many times before making his desire known: relationship is required before giving can begin. At a funeral wake people dance and play musical instruments for those who attend. Afterwards the men of the deceased's family go round to each household whose men had given money and joined in the dancing and gratify them by "greeting" them. This ritual brings the funeral to an official end and thanks others for their help.10 It is instructive to hear that among the neighbouring LoDagaa, a society very different because not hierarchically organized, no abasement gestures are customary, and there are no rules about who is to approach whom. The LoDagaa people also deny that they would prostrate themselves before anyone.
In Classical Greece prostration (proskynesis) before human beings was habitually condemned as barbarian practice, behaviour typical of slavish races ruled by kings. However, the institution of suppliancy (hiketeia) in Greece laid down a gestural ritual, performed as an immensely emotional drama, which recurs many times in Greek epic and in Attic theatre.11 A suppliant, having ostentatiously disarmed himself, could make his plea to a standing figure by kneeling and flinging his arms round the mighty one's legs at knee level, sometimes kissing his knees as well. The knees, in ancient Greece, were strategic points of both weakness and power in the human body: they were sites of the life force. Often the subject of vivid attention in Greek sculpture, they represented the energy of the human form.12
The suppliant would hang on; he was miming aggression even as he inverted it by abject self-abasement. He "attacked" the future benefactor at his most vulnerable points, refusing to let go or to leave. Paradoxically, all this was in its way a gift of honour to the honourable. The honoured man was at once grateful, in his fashion, and appalled. He was caught: he could do no other than raise his suppliant, first physically and then by granting the request, being obliged, and often pressured by the presence of expectant and judgmental onlookers, to break the unbearable tension, redeem the intolerable shame of his "aggressor" and restore the honour—the human dignity—that had been deliberately forgone in the dramatization of needy wretchedness. Suppliancy was an extreme measure, but as long as honour could be counted on to motivate the "victim" of the assault, it worked.
Homer's Iliad begins with one such scene and ends with another. In the first of these, Thetis, the mother of Achilles, goes to Zeus to beg for the restoration of her son's diminished honour. She crouches before the enthroned god, touching his knees with her left hand and holding his chin in her right. Zeus nods and gives Thetis what she wants.13 At the end of the Iliad, Priam, the king of the doomed city of Troy, comes to beg Achilles for the body of Hektor, so that he might bury his heroic son. Achilles has killed Hektor, in the wrath—for honour lost and in vengeance for his friend's death—that is the poet's theme. Homer describes how Priam walks wholly unexpectedly into the tent of Achilles, falls to his knees, and clasps the young man's knees: "He kissed the dread murderous hands that had killed so many of his sons."14 This act, which breaks in one stroke the mighty laws of honour, of blood pollution, and of vengeance for kin murder, is the shattering emotional climax of the entire epic.
After a horrified silence, during which Achilles allows the appearance of his enemy, Priam, to call to his mind his own dead father, the hero breaks the suppliant's hold: he gently pushes Priam away from him. (Respect, as we saw earlier, requires distance: it is standing back so as, in the literal meaning of the word, to look at the other.) Both men together then succumb to their endless grief over the deaths of a father, a son, a friend. Priam lies at Achilles' feet, no longer holding on to him, and "the house was filled with their lamentation." Achilles finally raises Priam to a standing position, then invites him to sit down. Priam refuses, and by this limit placed on his generosity, Achilles is pushed almost over the edge, back into his anger: he is tempted to sin against suppliancy and treat his suppliant as the enemy that normally he is.
But Priam sits; Achilles takes the ransom given for the body of Hektor and himself lifts the corpse onto the wagon Priam has brought. The two men then share a meal, famished as they are: for many days they have not been able to eat for grief. All the meanings implicit in a meal eaten together are included in this action: balance and common humanity (for everyone, Homer tells us, even mothers whose children have been murdered, must in the end take food), relationship and agreement, a re-established equality, and resignation and communion in the face of relentless Fate. Now the two men find it possible to appreciate one another: "Priam marvelled at the beauty of Achilles for he was as a god to see, and Achilles marvelled at Priam as he listened to him and looked upon his noble presence." There will be ten days' truce to bury Hektor. And then the fighting and the killing will begin again. All listeners to the Iliad knew that it remained—it was Fate—for both Achilles and Priam to die, and Troy to go down in flames.
Suppliancy was a device that could act as a safety valve to an honour-and-shame culture, and to its related vengeance system. By turning the conventional world upside down for a moment, it could bring about a truce to enmity. Through a formal ritual that relied on the intense emotions and the motivating power that honour itself supplied to a hierarchical structure, it occasionally allowed the weak in their extremity to prevail over the powerful, a crying need to be supplied, transcendence to arise. Suppliancy constrained the powerful to give to the weak in return for the suppliant's two gifts: the first of his own honour, of which he divested himself in order to hand it over, thereby increasing the honour of his future benefactor; and the second of letting go once his point had been made. The powerful one had seen, understood, and now was grateful to be released, while the suppliant mercifully agreed to become an honourable human being once more. The supplicated opened his hand, and gave.
The Chinese k'o-t'ou, (literally "knock head") known in English as "kowtow," involved kneeling, lowering one's head to the ground before one being honoured, and bumping it three times. The rationale was that "when a person so abases himself before another as to rub his head in the dust, the person receiving the honor is bound to save the kowtower's face, that is, restore his human dignity by showing great favor or kindness."15 Reasoning similar to this is often found in societies based on the principles of honour. The practice was adopted in Japan between AD 700 and 900. In 1192 it became official court etiquette.16 Until 1868, one kowtowed to the emperor, to court officials, to the shogun, to government ministers. For kowtowing, like suppliancy except that it was common rather than extraordinary, helped underwrite prestige in the powerful and hierarchy in general; it came eventually to amount merely to a mark of respect. Failure to kowtow, however, when superiors required it, could mean death. People still kowtowed on very formal occasions in Japan until 1945. But today bowing has taken its place, the shift in manners constituting an intentional expression of the changes that have taken place in Japanese society. Bowing is in no way demeaning. It is a sign of polite consideration for other people, nothing more—and nothing less.
There are different kinds of bow in Japan. A light one is used by superiors to inferiors, or for casual occasions among equals: greetings, farewells, as signals to draw attention, to ask questions, to indicate that one has understood directions, and to accompany many other strategies of daily converse. A medium bow is for extremely polite, formal occasions and for inferiors to superiors. A deep bow is kept for expressing strong emotions: great sincerity, respect, sorrow, and (crudely to use a Western word) gratitude. The Japanese have begun to adopt the Western habit of hand-shaking—in addition to light bowing—for everyday occasions. They point out, however, that a quick bow is in fact easier and much more convenient than is shaking hands.
Japanese children start learning non-verbal expressions of apology (which, as we saw, commonly takes the place of our thanking) at the age of eighteen months.17 They rub each other's heads (Japanese children are taught to be comforted by this gesture) and also bow, though only when prompted to do so. At two to three years of age they apologize spontaneously, provided that they are absolutely sure they are to blame. (The article chronicling this behaviour does not speak of thanks.) The word the children use for "sorry" is first gomen and then, at as young as three, the more formal gomennasai: the complex "public" term, sumimasen, is introduced later. By three and a half, Japanese children apologize without having to be prompted. They appear to say they are sorry not only when they know they have done something to make life difficult, but also because they realize that other people like to receive an apology, and that a continued good relationship with them depends on it. In other words, they know that apology not only repairs but also enhances a relationship. They are also fully cognizant that words are not enough: one has to make restitution; one has to give something back.
In our own culture bowing gradually replaced kneeling. In the Middle Ages men knelt on two knees to God and on one to their superiors; women knelt on both knees to both God and human beings. Ceremonial kneeling to other people was known in the sixteenth century as a courtesy, which was behaviour refined enough to be the habit of courtiers. Bowing (the word rhymed with rowing) meant gracefully lowering the body by bending one or both knees.18
By the nineteenth century the bow (now rhyming with bough) came to require rigid knees and bending the torso forward from the waist only. "Courtesying," shortened to "curtsying," now meant lowering the body by bending both knees—with adjustments contributed by the feet—and simultaneously increasing one's width by spreading one's skirts. This gesture became the female equivalent of a bow. A curtsy is an unstable posture that needs to be learned through practice because it is a movement difficult to achieve with poise and dignity. It has been suggested that curtsying is inherently more submissive than bowing because it lowers the whole body.19
Respect is an attitude, provided that it is reinforced by emotion, that lies very close to gratitude and may overlap with it. Many of the gestures expressing gratefulness also show respect. For us, respect is formally expressed by stiffening as opposed to relaxing one's posture, which is why people rise from their seats when a superior person enters the room. But physically lowering oneself remains appropriate. Men, for example, should they be wearing hats, must still take their headgear off and bow slightly. Curtsying has almost disappeared in recent times: modern women's clothing would in itself have seen to this. The bow has now been reduced mostly to a nod, an inclination of the head alone; its use is extremely common, and women nod as well as men. Nodding is a signal of agreement and encouragement.20 It is also used for recognition and acknowledgement; as such, it is employed when thanking and may suffice for the purpose.
Bowing and nodding have the advantage that they can be done while sitting or kneeling, and do not require moving towards the object of one's esteem, as hand-shaking does. Bowing can therefore be frequently performed during the constant give-and-take during meals in Japan, where bowing is the norm.21 On arriving as a guest, a traditional Japanese gentleman in 1908 would bow low, one hand holding his knee; to express his emotion he might simultaneously suck his breath rapidly and audibly in through his teeth. A woman would fall to her knees, her head almost touching the floor.22 The Chinese Li Chi (first century BC) pronounces that: "Guest and host bow on the guest's arrival, as the cup is washed, when the cup is received, when it is presented in return, when the drinking is over. This prevents quarrels ... Every act of courtesy requires a bow."23
It has often been the custom that hosts expressed their esteem by passing delicacies to certain guests, who were bound to accept and eat them. In eighteenth-century France Jean-Baptiste de La Salle writes, "One must receive with thanks whatever one is presented: this is done by bringing the plate towards one's mouth as if to kiss it, and at the same time making a polite bow ['une honnête inclination']."24 The Li Chi advises the guest to whom a piece of fruit was offered as a token of esteem to show appreciation by bowing first, eating the fruit, and then sucking the pip clean and slipping it down the front of his robe, to show that he was not throwing any of the gift away.
Gesturing, of course, is done mainly with the hands. In Mediterranean cultures people famously feel incapable of talking without accompanying their words—or even replacing them—with hand movements, and various head and body movements as well. Arabic gestures are generally confined to the hands. Out of 247 Arab gestures catalogued in one study, 66 of them are confined to the right hand, with an additional 75 involving the right hand and some part of the body; where both hands are used, the right is privileged. Indeed, the left hand in this culture is inappropriate for communicating feelings.25 Arabs gesturing in order to express gratitude will use the right hand almost without exception: thanking must convey sincerity.
Kissing among Arabs is offered as a sign of loyalty and status, lower to higher. People of inferior standing may express extreme respect by kissing a superior on the forehead, nose, feet, right shoulder, or right hand. A plea for mercy once involved kissing a dignitary's right hand or foot. Gratefulness is expressed to another by kissing the back of the right hand, then raising it with the palm up. When the eyes are also raised, this gesture expresses thanks in the name of Allah. In the give-and-take of small intimacies such as someone's lighting another's cigarette, the receiver touches the back of the benefactor's hand with the tips of his right fingers, then places them on his forehead in a sort of salute, and bows the head slightly forward. When the palm of the right hand is placed on the chest, sometimes with the head bowed and the eyes closed, a person is expressing thanks—a matter of the heart.26
In our culture, one clear demonstration of gratitude used to be clasping one's hands together, raising them, and even moving them both back and forth, to express emotion and possibly to draw attention to the action. This was so insistent a gesture that it came to be suspected of insincerity or even thought worthy of ridicule, particularly if another extravagant movement was added to it: "You have given me life, Madam, said I, clasping my uplifted hands together, and falling on one knee."27
A widespread stricture is that one should not, when being given something directly by another person, simply hold out one hand. Even in our own culture we tend to compensate for the minimalism of this gesture by adding words of thanks, bowing slightly, smiling, and so on. (The rules do not apply in very intimate circumstances, or if people are concentrating on working together.) When a person receives Communion in the hand in Catholic churches today, the correct way is to hold out both hands, open right palm up and cradled in left, to show reverence and gratitude. In Mediterranean countries, thrusting out one hand to receive something without any mollifying word or sign such as a bow is the behaviour either of the arrogant, or of beggars of the "shameless" type: taking without thanking is offensive, almost aggressive, behaviour. In similar fashion, Africans were shocked by the habit of northern European colonials, who habitually took things in one hand. For the Zulus, receiving in one hand was a rude suggestion that the host's generosity was small. A Malawian riddle, collected in 1939, asks what this object might be:
RIDDLE: Even the Mzungu (European) respects this. What is it?
ANSWER: A peanut.
(Even a European takes it in both hands to shell it.)28
In Burmese myth, lapet, or tea salad, a plant eaten in the sealing of all bargains, was a gift originally given in gratitude for saving the life of a drowning boy. But the tiny tea salad seed was taken by each of two planters in only one hand—and therefore they remained poor, despite the riches the plant would otherwise have brought them. The plant's name, derived from let-tit-pet, "one hand," reminds all those entering into exchange relationships to remember respect and gratitude.29
It is speaking one's thanks that is most common in modern Western cultures, and we have seen that we are not, on the whole and at least for the time being, parsimonious about offering this simple form of respect. We do occasionally bow and nod our thankfulness as well. On emotionally charged occasions among intimates, we hug and may also kiss one another to express gratitude. And we shake hands, in a physical embodiment of the mutual appreciation that links two persons. This gesture has since Classical times symbolized honour, solemn alliance, the forming of a contract, and confidence generally between the two people performing the action. Using the right hand for it is sometimes said to have arisen as a "disarming" gesture: showing that one had no intention of seizing a weapon. In Europe people used to kiss each other formally in public far more than they do now. (It was always a practice liable to be condemned for reasons of health or purity: ancient Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to refuse to kiss Greeks on the mouth because they thought Greek food unclean.)30 During the nineteenth century in northern Europe, public kissing began to be discouraged. People stood back from one other, and started shaking hands if they wished to make their point about connectedness.
Hand-shaking still accompanies meetings and leave-takings, congratulations, and also formal thanking. It is an egalitarian gesture, carried out by women and men; though formal, it is also intimate, since it involves direct contact with another's clasping hand. Importantly for the expression of gratitude, the action requires two persons to perform it and is limited entirely to these two. The French are particularly punctilious about shaking hands, insisting, for example, that every time someone joins a group or leaves it he or she should shake hands with every single person present. Kissing—or miming doing so—on both cheeks has been maintained in Latin countries generally. North Americans and northern Europeans have recently taken up polite kissing again, using the Latin manner of doing it, after more than a century of normally refraining from the practice.
Applause achieved by striking our hands together means in our culture appreciation and agreement; it is a reward, granted by the group, for a performance they admire. The word comes from the Latin plaudere, "to beat," with an attempt (the Latin vowels rhyme with pow!) to imitate the sound of loud clapping; clap is a similarly echoic word. To explode originally meant "to make someone leave by loudly clapping the hands"; we still speak of an idea being exploded. Plausible, which meant at first "worthy of applause," came to signify "specious, ingratiating, and (merely) fair-spoken." (Only very recently the word has come mainly to mean "possibly acceptable to the intelligence.")
In Spain people often clap their hands at a funeral, which can be quite shocking for Anglo-Saxons, who take clapping, as in the Bible, to be a sign of delight, or at least of pleasure. The Spanish, however, are showing respect—which almost certainly includes gratitude—towards the deceased person and their togetherness in grief at this death. An audience in a theatre unites itself in one group with an artist, whether actor or musician, by applauding at the end of a work. In our culture art, despite the high prices it may fetch, is carefully distinguished from commerce. The artist—a "gifted" human being—has "given of himself" in any dramatic performance and is pleased if the audience members—the receivers of his gift—do the same in return at the end of the work. This they do by applauding, and on occasion standing up for an "ovation" (from Latin ovare, "to utter cries of joy"),31 shouting and stamping and begging for more.
Speech givers often elicit applause deliberately.32 To do this, they make signs, understood semi-subliminally by the audience, that they are saying something that everybody should think admirable, and therefore they expect applause; the audience, surprisingly often, complies, thus showing that "we all agree." For applause gathers a group together; a speaker angling for applause says "we," and so claims to be the spokesperson for everybody present. The word for an oratorical sign that the audience should now applaud is a claptrap; advance information is supplied to warn the audience that it is about to be swept up into applause. So cliché-ridden are these devices that claptrap is now synonymous with a series of worthless though rousing remarks. Modern examples of claptraps in the original sense, found, for example, in political speeches, are the mention of predictable, obviously desirable goals such as "peace," assurances that things are getting better, expressions of relief that obstacles have been overcome, and expressions of gratitude towards people—they must be named people—who have helped in an enterprise.
A speaker prepares for applause by the way she phrases sentences, or by making a pause for clapping before she introduces a new subject, or both. Given the right signals and timing, a supportive audience will clap almost automatically. A practised speaker can evoke applause at the end of every paragraph delivered. An audience in the swing of things will quite commonly start to clap before a speaker's applause-readying sentence is complete. When she has successfully provoked applause, the speaker may give a fond look around at the listeners, waiting for the applause to die down. People apparently tend to desist from clapping for a group of people who are thanked by name at the end of as opposed to during a speech: such a peroration is presumably too long and dull to arouse applause. In any case the audience is gathering itself to applaud the performer standing before it. Applause resembles thanks in being directed to specific persons who are, if possible, present on the occasion. Like thanks, in formal circumstances clapping is dutifully supplied at moments, even "set-up" moments, that seem because of the conventional rhythms of speech to require its interjection. Applause also declares a link, as we have seen, between performer and audience.
Being a kind of praise and often a form of gratitude as well, applause puts on a pedestal the person being applauded, and those thus raised tend to respond with grateful nods and bows. Nowadays theatrical performers often "equalize" at the end of the show by clapping the audience in return, showing gratitude and appreciation to the people for coming and for being responsive. Finally, applause marks the end of proceedings in much the same way that thanking closes a conversation. At a recent theatrical performance in London the audience was explicitly forbidden to applaud, "because the situation depicted in the play was still going on."33