Childhood thing: did you do this or something similar?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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At least one person in my adult life demonstrated to me, without any preparatory comments of any kind, that at least she had a similar way of expressing if not disgust, then at least disapproval of somebody who had “stepped over the line” as far as being cool went.

The thing is done this way: you smack your lower lip several times silently. The accompanying disapproving look helps but isn’t required. Just the lip move connotes to the other(s) nearby something to the effect: “Wow. This asshole is really a goob.”

My brother and I and a few of our friends had this signal and we continue to use it when the occasion calls for it. He and a buddy of his even had some semi-words they would say when it just wasn’t enough to do the lip thing. They’d say something like “uzzy buzzy” or “woolly woolly” to indicate the same sort of displeasure with how somebody else was coming across.

The best example of when its use would be in order, taken from real life, would be:

Cousin: I’m thinking of sending away for this telescope I saw in the back of this comic book.

One of us: Oh, yeah. What does it do?

Cousin: It’s able to pick up the rings of Saturn and the four larger moons of Jupiter and even differentiate the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.

One of us: “Differentitate?”

Cousin: Yes, silly, pick them up as separate stars.

One of us (to the other): << lip move >>

This adult I mentioned before was in the same long-winded meeting I was and we were sitting near each other while this dweeb droned on about some high-minded “initiative” that was going to be “brought onstream” or some other corpspeak drivel. Without a word, she just looked at me and did the lip move. I broke out laughing and called unwanted attention to myself.

You had to be there.

But, did you and your playmates have similar “secret message” types of gestures or moves you would do to indicate similar feelings?

Do you do the “lip move” or something like it?

They can be for other purposes. The idea of the “secret gesture” is more what I’m wanting to explore here.

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I see 162 views and no responses. Is this too trivial to comment on?

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I was just checking to see if this was going to be a companion to the “Doesn’t everybody pick their nose and eat it?” thread.

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How do you smack just your lower lip?

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What is the sound of one lip smacking?

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“buh”

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Seriously, though, I have no idea WTF the OP is talking about.

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I think the OP is talking about all the little things we used to do as kids that grown-ups never understood. Secret codes, secret gestures, secret places, etc etc etc, but most specifically secret words or gestures. The long-winded beginning about the flicking of the lower-lip was just an example.

I used to write in code with a friend of mine, but I cant think of anything other than that. I’m an only child and didnt have many childhood friends, so my opportunities for “buh-buh-buh” or secret gestures like it were pretty limited :frowning:

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my best friend and I have something like that

We were once upon a time making fun of someone for having a soul patch (it looked really stupid) and somehow decided that forcefully putting your index finger right where the soul patch would be was hilarious and looked vaguely obscene.

So now we do it as a signal for just about anything. If we’re sitting apart in church or somehow separated in some kind of assembly, we can catch each other’s eye and do the lip thing to say, “this is STUPID.” and make each other laugh.

It doesn’t work quite as well in one-on-one conversations though. We use it the same way as the OP most of the time. catch each other’s eye and more subtly put an index finger to our lip to say, “are you hearing this? this chick is a moron/snob/something” … but my best friend isn’t very good at keeping her composure, so she usually starts laughing and ruins it.

We also do it as a fake obscene gesture. We have pictures in the yearbook of both of us with our fingers on our “soul patches” and we occasionally do it if we’re together and we want to confuse someone.

Yeah, we’re kind of juvenile. But we have fun.

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We had abbreviations for everything. If someone entered the room, we’d say something like:

“TMM” (too much makeup)
“BHP” (bad hair piece)
“NNJ” (needs nose job)
“NAS” (needs a shower)

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[goldiehawn] buh buh buh buh buh buh buh [/gh]

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Okay. I guess the smacking of the lower lip may be less commonplace than I would have thought.

Keeping your upper lip as still as you can, play like you’re making the sound of a P several times without actually saying P. You’ll find it hard to avoid any sound at all, and that’s okay. It’s the moving of the lower lip that’s the key.

That any better?

I can’t remember Goldie doing the “buh” thing but it could be the same move, just with some sound. I can’t confirm or deny that one.

But Autolycus has it as I meant it. This particular gesture or signal or whatever was just one that I was pretty sure my brother and I had invented and were the only ones to know about. It was only after the co-worker pulled the same trick that I suspected other kids must have done the same or similar things to communicate with each other.

That’s the real point to the thread.

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I can only think of one that my brother and I used that might fit. When we were fighting, Mom would come along and separate us and tell us to hush. If one of us got yelled at more, or appeared to be catching the blame, the other one would catch the eye of the “guilty” one and give a single violent nod. I still remember how much that used to piss me off. :smiley:

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Your post, SurrenderDorothy, convinces me that you have not just the gist but the entire feel of the OP’s intent. For a full-grown and “serious-minded” adult to revert to childhood gimmicks and “secret codes” as a putdown to some pretense is the ultimate comment. I suspect the reason that this device isn’t seen more in movies and TV may come from the idea that if the gesture or “code” used in the show is like ours was/is, its meaning wouldn’t be as obvious as it should for the effect to work. That, in a way, is the beauty of these things: not many people know what they mean, or at least to the depth that the “inner circle” would know.

My main point to this thread was to see if “our thing” was really all that unique, and I’m sensing from some of the replies that even if the precise gesture might have been unique, its intent and how and when it would be used most surely wasn’t unique. That is reassuring.

Analogous observations apply to the “secret codes” and “inside jokes” we see so often here at SDMB. Saying “Hi, Opal” as a case in point.