Bowing to Greet, Etc.

After having poked around the web about bows, and discovering lots of different conventions, I had decided that simple is good. 1) Face the other person. 2) Bring palms together. 3) Bow slightly. Look friendly by making eye contact and smiling during the bow.

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February 29, 2020: I published my article about bowing in late 2015. In light of recent coronavirus (Covid-19) news, bowing to greet seems even more appropriate to consider. My Google news search results for "banning handshaking" shows concerns in workplaces and sports.

Stats, Maps, Graphs: "Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by Johns Hopkins CSSE"

 Another tracking resource (Reuters): "Tracking the spread of the novel coronavirus"

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In the last few years, people have more reasons to bow instead of shake hands, more so in greeting. Note the proliferation of hand sanitizers.

• Avoid physical contact that spreads illness-inducing germs.
  A few months ago (at time of writing this article), I had a bout of digestive illness. Thankfully, the severity lasted only a few days. Web info indicated that contagiousness could last a few weeks. It seemed prudent and considerate to greet people with bows rather than handshakes. OTOH, I haven't quite resolved how to greet long-time friends with whom I've greeted more heartily since forever.
• Avoid awkwardness of the level of appropriate physical contact. Limp handshake? Strong handshake? Strong handshake accompanied by the other hand? Embrace? Kiss? Air kiss, which can resemble a gently blown kiss? Fist bump? Dap? (Eh, should skip the hands-clasp dap during these contagious times.)
• At events where people are eating, exchange greeting bows instead of engaging in food smears or needing to wipe hands first, which tend to be less than cleanly effective.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowing

Bows are the traditional greeting in East Asia, particularly in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. In Taiwan, China, and Vietnam, shaking hands or a slight bow have become more popular than a full bow.

Bows can be generally divided into three main types: informal, formal, and very formal. Informal bows are made at about a fifteen degree angle and more formal bows at about thirty degrees.

While researching bows, I've run across various differences among different nationalities. For example, the "wai" bowing in Thailand involves exhaustive social settings and societal hierarchies.

• How to Wai properly
• Thai culture: How to greet in Thai
• The Wai A Graceful Gesture of Greeting

Some other images share similarities: the slight bow and palms together, some hands closer to the face than others.

• Chinese woman bowing hello
• Japanese women bowing to each other
• Mahatma Gandhi bowing

Team sports, which I sporadically watch on TV, display additional contact, such as high fives and butt slaps, particularly communicating "good job", "congratulations", and "thanks". For more demonstrative celebratory contacts, actions include individual embrace and hoist, all-hands team hoists of the hero, and Gatorade keg hoist and dump onto coach.

For demonstrations of contact and no-contact greetings, watch "20 Handshakes". (Glimpses of bows are at 0:54, 1:00, and 1:07.) Watch "Professional Fist Bump" for an MD's advocacy of fist bump over handshake.

One charming gesture of thanks is Justin Yoon of Notre Dame bowing to two teammates when he successfully kicks a field goal. A video snippet of the ritual is in "FB vs Navy Highlights". The field goal segment starts at 1:08, with the ball clearing the posts at 1:10 (?). The bows and narration occur from 1:13 to 1:15. (Whew! I hunted high and low on the web to find any video that I could cite!)

Alas, Notre Dame's season ended November 29 (2015)—no more field goal bows till the following season. During my searches for images and videos of post-field goal bows, I did manage to scrape up some articles that had such bow pictures. An article that includes a good Justin bow is "Notebook: Kelly getting a kick out of Notre Dame freshman Justin Yoon".

Another article with a good bow picture is "This Guy Plays Notre Dame Football: #19 Justin Yoon":

Justin is known for his bowing celebration with both the holder and the snapper.

More bow info from "Confidence kick-starts Yoon's success":

The cheery freshman quickly built a rapport with his blockers, holder DeShone Kizer and long snapper Scott Daly. They came up with a celebration-Yoon, Daly and Kizer do a Sensei bow after every make.

Hmm, the Flickr Sansei bow seems "deep", with the hands much closer to the face than in the Notre Dame pictures. I Googled "korean bow greeting" for images, thinking Justin"s Korean heritage might exhibit some such characteristics. Well, I see images of lots of bowing, no greeter palm meets, some handshaking.

Century Plant Triplets--6th Week Subtle Continued Growth, Gauging Heights

The pixstrip shows the agave triplets pics from April 2 and April 8. At first glance, they don't seem to have changed much. (Click for larger older/newer side-by-side image.) The shot-put-ball-like blooms seem to show the biggest difference.

Gauging heights seeped into this article from curiosity over another set of century plant triplets.

During a Google search for "century plant bloom", I spotted the image, which also included a man and woman, good for providing relative height comparison. I estimated the century plants' height to be about 15 feet, based on approximately three times the height of the couple.

In my Century Plant Triplets--3rd Week Higher Up article, I'd mentioned using the nearby bike route street sign for a dimensional gauge. For my set of triplets, Righty's height looks to be about 20 feet here. (Click to see my image with 10 signs stacked near Righty.)

FWIW, a few weeks ago, when I went to measure the physical sign height to verify that sign's dimensions, I recalled I had to stretch my arm upward to reach the bottom of the sign. My height and arm totals seven feet, give or take an inch.

While I was playing with this pixstrip composition, I noticed that the distance between the two upper wires happened to be about the height of the street sign. Observations about the previous to newer week:

• Lefty looks to have peaked in vertical growth.
• Peewee grew about another half a foot.
• Righty grew about another foot.
• All three plants' bloom clusters at the end of their "arms" look a bit more robust.
• Peewee and Righty look to be fistbumping at one spot.

My thoughts of the pic for that day:

Barely sprinkly weather. Very similar to the pic from April 2, but branches spread out a little wider, bloomer clusters a bit bigger.

It's apparent that my thoughts on April 8 were nowhere in the neighborhood of heights like my thoughts today. Running across the century plant triplets that I found online nudged me to infer measurements and methodologies for the two sets of century plant triplets and distance between two wires.

Index to my agave posts, from the time I first spotted the set of triplets in early March to mid-June, about 3 1/2 months.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

2025 Slide-show version of the triplets saga-"Revisiting Century Plant Triplets, Weekly Shots Over 16 Weeks" (video | article)

Related: Agave articles search results