We’ll shake hands again, won’t we?

Clearly some people wouldn’t touch the new ‘‘social distancing’’ etiquettes with a 10-foot pole.

On the positive side, it’s not hard to notice cases where people are, perhaps with rueful cheerfulness, keeping their distance and taking particular care about not gratuitously invading one another’s (now expanded) personal space, and are being scrupulous about personal and environmental hygiene.

Neither is it hard, regrettably, to see people who are cosying up to others, and rubbing against their environs, as though nothing significant has changed.

Well, it has. Some of life’s little intimacies that are so familiar to us are now best avoided. Clearly this takes an act of will and is, in some cases, counter-intuitive. Handshaking is proving a hard habit to break, even for those who might wish to.

It’s been around since ancient Roman times and, as body language guru Allan Pease is fond of pointing out, there are more connections between our brain and the palm of our hands than any other body part. So it’s a highly sensual thing to do. (Take that look off your face, fellas).

The suggested alternative elbow-bump is still a self-conscious act even for the comparatively few people who try it.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s suggestion more people adopt the already established ‘‘Westie wave’’ – the raised eyebrow, raised chin, ‘‘chur’’ gesture – won’t be for everyone but at least it’s friendly. Frankly, it’s a variant of a nod and there are a bunch of ways for us to expand this aspect of our unspoken vocabulary.

Actually, eyebrows already work hard in this respect. Harder than we might think. Pease (again) notes that the flash of raised eyebrows is a truly ancient act of human recognition, a benign signal that we hardly recognise even though we do it a lot. In fact if people don’t raise they eyebrows upon seeing us, we register something about them as unfriendly, even if we can’t immediately pin down what it is. (This, he says, is why people who have had Botox injections, which paralyse the eyebrows for a spell, find that others seem to think they’re suddenly being unfriendly.)

Maybe we could get by with a grin and a nod. And who knows, maybe sociologists will one day mark this as the time when the handshake started to fall from use. Not everyone would celebrate that, but not everyone would lament it either. As long as we don’t have to replace it with the Chicken Dance.

Much of etiquette has its basis in simple good hygiene. There are sound health reasons why it’s not considered couth to pick our noses with uncovered fingers, or to double-dip into the communal bowl, or to present guests with musty towels.

Social distancing is not social isolation, exactly, and Dame Anne Salmond is entirely right that it mustn’t mean leaving frightened, vulnerable people to fend for themselves. But kindness, friendliness and social support now, in some cases anyway, need to find expression in a slightly different physical dynamic. Which we can do with the right effort.

For those in the particular situation of needing to self-isolate, the physical implications are spelt out clearly enough in sites like Covid19.govt.nz.

And for all of us now it’s entirely appropriate to recognise and encourage good conduct. It’s not an easy or a happy task to scale back social gatherings, but there remain many ways we can connect safely and agreeably.

As for those places where we will continue to show up and move around one another in significant numbers, such as supermarkets and stores, it’s a pleasing sight to see counters being conspicuously and frequently cleaned. It’s in places like these that our willingness to treat one another respectfully will be conspicuously evident. As will a lack of effort.