He covered everything you said here including the limp fish. He also described something he called the “ring-crusher”. Cathy alludes to it in her comment about men “pinching the fingers” when they shake a woman’s hand. He said this kind of man would “squeeze early” so that he gripped your fingers rather than your palm. He called it the “ring-crusher” because if you have a ring on that hand it can really hurt if you are getting squeezed like that.

Much like Cathy’s comment, my grandfather told me men did this (somewhat pathetically) in order to demonstrate power and dominance. Like Cathy suggested, he advised me to preemptively move in quickly so that the web between my thumb and index finger struck his. I only encountered that a few times before I mastered this technique — what Cathy called “giving the full hand”.

In the mid-80s I worked in an office that was almost all women and for the first time had to adjust all this for a co-ed workplace. Back then, most women seemed to give a variation of the limp-fish handshake which I always characterized as the Queen of England “public greet” — basically taking my hand in their fingertips. Back then, I had a few awkward moments back then when I “gave my full hand” and really startled those women. I haven’t encountered the “public greet” very often in recent years. I still do encounter it from both men and women now and then — but much less often than the limp-fish.

I took a course in paralinguistics back in university (basically non-verbal communication) and they expanded this out thinking out into posture and positioning, conversation flow, interruptions and interjections. I was hooked as soon as they started showing us video of office interactions with the sound off and asked us to describe the power dynamic between the folks in the video. Fascinating stuff!

I can tell you that during my whole working career, I have been able to tell if I had landed a job or a sale based on the closing handshake combined with eye contact, posture etc. during those closing moments of a meeting. I have never been wrong.