Neologism time!
We’ve all been there– you meet someone and stick your paw out– thumb up, fingers forward– for a handshake. The other person does the same, but theirs is a fist. Suddenly you both freeze. Your friend extends their fingers to match yours (because let’s be honest, handshakes are classic, respectable, and universal). You close your fingers to match them (because let’s be honest, fist bumps are cooler). Then, seeing the change, you both simultaneously change your minds and go back to your initial choice. Then back again. Eventually, as the gap closes little by little, the hands somehow touch somewhere near the knuckles, and you land in an unintentional and contorted bout of rock-paper-scissors. Or, luck strikes and you successfully shake hands or bump fists.
As evidenced in Reddit threads, TV history, and oh so many GIFs, it’s a phenomenon that has existed for quite some time. In 2014, some smart people spent time researching how fist bumps are more hygienic than handshakes. Then (stop me if you’ve heard this before) the information overload spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, when alternate greetings like the elbow thing and even the toe tap came into vogue. With all this information overload, we hesitated. What was once instinctive and perfunctory became cognitive and awkward.
The comedy even surfaced during Super Bowl LIX, where an ad for Google Gemini shows a guy trying to impress people about football. The priceless cringey moment happens at 0:48.
Seeing as this is now a thing, I propose a new word that will allow us to avoid having to call it “the awkward handshake-fist-bump-confusion thing”. Let’s call it a handpsych.
As in: “psych!”
