Spit and Style
The only time I spit these days might be when I’m brushing my teeth. I hadn’t thought of that until the other day when I saw someone spitting on the ground in a restaurant. I guess spitting isn’t much a part of my life anymore, but when I was a teenager, we all spit all the time. It’s true we spit beautifully — we had a certain defiant style down pat — and I wonder about its execution and purpose.
Of course, there are different ways to spit just as there are different ways to do any physical thing. Still, it strikes me that its spectrum of meaning is slightly more restricted than that of some other acts. I think part of this has to do with the fact that spitting is more voluntary than something like walking, for example. Many of us walk to get to where we’re going, though we rarely need to spit to do anything.
How one walks can communicate how one feels about others, as in the case of an angry stride or seductive saunter. It can communicate how one feels internally or about oneself, as in the case of a contemplative stroll or anxious plod. The place one chooses to walk can add another layer of meaning, as in the case of a march on the capitol.
I’m not convinced spitting is quite so versatile when it comes to style. This isn’t to say spitting can’t be done in different ways or to communicate different messages. The clinical spit done at the dentist’s office is certainly different from the panicked spit triggered by eating something soiled. Still, in many cultures, spitting is seen as unhygienic and disrespectful. This varies, of course, and I’ve been in settings where spitting was seen as more neutral — akin to a sneeze, I guess. There’s not much room for style when it comes to sneezing; it’s too reflexive and monochromatic. It is not particularly amenable to style, though there’s some wiggle room there. I’m not sure if cultural tolerance of spitting gives it more or less latitude in terms of style.
At least in Western settings, part of what gives spitting its strong but relatively narrow band of meaning is that it’s frowned on. This makes spitting an excellent choice for those looking to be disrespectful. The most violent case would of course be the symbolic and literal pollution of spitting on a person.
The punk rock movement has a long history of spitting — both on things and on people. In the case of punk, given that the culture is premised on being offensive, the choice to join in on the spitting is a way of respecting the culture by disrespecting everything else. I suspect this was more revolutionary in the 1970s. At this point, it’s quite stereotyped and ritualized.
I remember seeing the band Kill in Your Idols in the 1990s and the singer requesting that the audience stop spitting on him. “Do something new — figure out your own thing,” he’d exhorted the audience. “Maybe try spitting in your hand and rubbing it on your face.” A few concertgoers willingly or unwillingly missed the irony and took his advice. As a viewer, I felt that in terms of style, what that strategy gained in innovation it lacked in zeal: dousing yourself in your own spit somehow just isn’t the same as dousing other people or things in it.
As skateboarders in the ’90s, we all spit constantly. This might have been a vestige of the punk rock influence on skateboarding culture, though the cultural antecedents don’t need to be that direct. If anything is egalitarian, it’s spitting. It nicely complemented skateboarding’s outlaw aesthetic. Still, I think many of us wished we would spit less. Falling on concrete was painful and annoying enough without having to avoid pools of spit or have insult added to injury when unsuccessfully avoiding those pools after bumbling a tre flip.
One of my weirdest and creepiest memories of spitting comes from those skateboard days, when a quasi-homeless guy with vaguely pedophilic vibes who always insisted on being called “doctor” attempted to negotiate with a group of us to allow him to video tape us spitting. We rejected the offer, as appealing as it was. Afterwards, I’d spit as I was walking away, which he then scraped up with a folded business card he’d had in the pocket of his soiled shirt. He delicately folded the card before returning it to his pocket. I suppose spitting had a very different meaning for him, though I’d prefer not to give a ton of thought to what that was.
Style aside, one obvious physical explanation for why we spit would have been chewing tobacco, but I don’t remember that being particularly popular when I was growing up. Smoking was, though, and that seemed to correlate with spitting. I’m not sure if that was because we were always spitting and would have done it anyway or because smoking encourages spitting. I do remember the sound my friend Ian’s cigarette made when he put it out in a pool of his own spit, though I suspect the gesture was more utilitarian than symbolic in intent.
As with Ian and his cigarette, maybe we spit just to spit. At the time, I doubt any of us gave thought to what it meant. Still, the stylized and exaggerated manner of our spitting would make it seem more than just a habit. It was often as auditory as visual, and the conspicuous turn of the head and force that accompanied it made clear that we were spitting. I’m convinced you could tease out a subconscious cultural imperative to the performance. We spit because it felt good, sure, but we also spit because it said something about how we saw the world. The message might not have been subtle, but the execution had remarkable panache.
Unlike spitting, I never really cursed much. But even now I have to admit that it does feel good as a release and to punctuate a point. Similarly, maybe I should take a page from my youth and reincorporate spitting into my communicative repertoire. It’s not the most versatile gesture, but it can have a certain blunt flair when done well, and I’ve had enough practice that I could probably still pull it off with finesse.
*Spit*