Pappy
Living the Dream
And this proves it. 
Did you ever watch an audience clap their hands. No....? Did you ever wonder why we clap our hands instead of maybe...stomp our feet....stand and do circles...jump up and down in our seats?
I was watching Wheel of Fortune last night and a lady contestant keep clapping little bitty claps all the way through the show. She wasn’t making any noise...just kept clapping. Nervous reaction maybe, I don’t know. I don’t even know why I brought this up, but I can’t quit now...spent to much time typing. Anyway, the following sort of explains it.
[FONT="][FONT="]Why do we applaud a great performance? Why not stand on our heads or click our heels instead? Who started this hand-clapping stuff?[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]Hear, hear! Huzzah! Bravo! [/FONT][FONT="]Excellent[/FONT][FONT="] question. Superb, really. And ultimately unanswerable. As Elwyn Simons, head of Duke University's Division of Fossil Primates, tells AF, "We don't know how far back it goes, not without a time machine. Cavemen and human ancestors — we don't know whether they clapped hands or not. But you don't find primates doing it unless they've been taught to do it. They do clap hands in the wild. It's not to applaud something; it's because they're frightened or want to call attention to food."[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]Yvette Blanchard, a pediatric physical therapist and researcher at the University of Hartford, says that human clappers are made, not born. "I think it's a learned behavior. What I've seen babies do spontaneously, from excitement, is clasp their hands together. But the motion of clapping, I think that's a learned behavior."[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]As to clapping's association with audience approval, Jay Fisher, a classics professor at Yale University, dates the custom to at least the third century B.C. "You see it at the end of a lot of plays by Plautus and Terence, where they have this word [/FONT][FONT="]plaudite,[/FONT][FONT="] which is an imperative [meaning] 'applause,' 'clap.'"[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]It's worth noting that the ancient Romans also demonstrated their approval of a public performance with finger-snapping, and that modern Canadian concertgoers signal delight by screeching at the organ-grinder's monkey.
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Did you ever watch an audience clap their hands. No....? Did you ever wonder why we clap our hands instead of maybe...stomp our feet....stand and do circles...jump up and down in our seats?
I was watching Wheel of Fortune last night and a lady contestant keep clapping little bitty claps all the way through the show. She wasn’t making any noise...just kept clapping. Nervous reaction maybe, I don’t know. I don’t even know why I brought this up, but I can’t quit now...spent to much time typing. Anyway, the following sort of explains it.
[FONT="][FONT="]Why do we applaud a great performance? Why not stand on our heads or click our heels instead? Who started this hand-clapping stuff?[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]Hear, hear! Huzzah! Bravo! [/FONT][FONT="]Excellent[/FONT][FONT="] question. Superb, really. And ultimately unanswerable. As Elwyn Simons, head of Duke University's Division of Fossil Primates, tells AF, "We don't know how far back it goes, not without a time machine. Cavemen and human ancestors — we don't know whether they clapped hands or not. But you don't find primates doing it unless they've been taught to do it. They do clap hands in the wild. It's not to applaud something; it's because they're frightened or want to call attention to food."[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]Yvette Blanchard, a pediatric physical therapist and researcher at the University of Hartford, says that human clappers are made, not born. "I think it's a learned behavior. What I've seen babies do spontaneously, from excitement, is clasp their hands together. But the motion of clapping, I think that's a learned behavior."[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]As to clapping's association with audience approval, Jay Fisher, a classics professor at Yale University, dates the custom to at least the third century B.C. "You see it at the end of a lot of plays by Plautus and Terence, where they have this word [/FONT][FONT="]plaudite,[/FONT][FONT="] which is an imperative [meaning] 'applause,' 'clap.'"[/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="][FONT="]It's worth noting that the ancient Romans also demonstrated their approval of a public performance with finger-snapping, and that modern Canadian concertgoers signal delight by screeching at the organ-grinder's monkey.
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