The "eyebrow thing"

A few days ago several of the students were walking with me through a crowd. A young man hawking tourist books spotted us and made a beeline straight for us, calling out "Istanbul guidebook. Very detail. Tell you all about Istanbul." He got close enough to pick me out as his first target. As he zeroed in on me, he suddenly seemed to bounce off an invisible force field a few meters away and abruptly stopped, broke his gaze, and veered away to approach another group of likely looking tourists. The two women with me said, "Wait a minute! What happened?" and then, looking at me somewhat accusingly, "Did you do the eyebrow thing?" I confess. I did the "eyebrow thing" as they had aptly named it. The "eyebrow thing" is a Turkish nonverbal gesture for "no." I can't tell how widely it is in use still, but perhaps in some ways this may be to my advantage. While I haven't seen any Turks use it on each other since we've been here this time, it was a major form of communication not too many years ago. The signal is a quick upward jerk of the eyebrows (sometimes including a quick dart of the gaze or a slight lifting of the head). A very skillful practitioner can do the whole gesture just with one eyebrow, and this seems to be particularly powerful (i.e. "I've said no many times before and can do it again, so don't test me!") 20 years ago it was very often accompanied by a click on the teeth (the sound that is often translated into children's books as "tsk tsk), though the click seems a bit extreme now and seems to be used only when a very forceful reply is necessary. In any case the beauty of this little gem is precisely that the average tourist doesn't know it. Using it on someone who is trying to hawk something to you conveys immediately that you have some degree of cultural savvy (you are not a rube and won't get pulled into buying something just because all the tourists must have it). For sellers it seems to immediately mean, "this person isn't worth my time. No sale here, boys. Move right along." All of this is precisely why the "eyebrow thing" is so effective. It turns off the people I don't want to talk to (the ones who want to spend 10 minutes with me arguing about why I really DO want to buy their carpet, book, scarf, evil eye, etc), and frees me up to spend time with the ones I want to talk with (anyone who will talk sincerely with us about their life, their family, experiences growing up in Turkey, ideas about Turkey's future, cultural changes they've observed, etc).