Contra Dance Handshakes

September 5th, 2013
calling, contra
In contra dance you'll sometimes hear people talking about a handshake grip. Perhaps the caller says "shake hands with your neighbor, and pull on by" or "take right hands, you balance and box the gnat". Thing is, it's not a standard handshake:
Full Handshake
Finger Handshake
This phrasing misleads new dancers without giving much help to experienced ones. In my calling I've switched to saying "take hands" where I would have said "shake hands".

But now I'm curious: is there anywhere that people shake hands like this, with their fingers? Did people used to do full handshakes in contra? Finger handshakes outside of contra? Where did this come from?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

It isn’t always evil to ally with Steve Bannon

Scott Alexander wrote:

via Thing of Things October 19, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

more     (via openring)