Wink, wink, nudge, nudge

It began with a wink. As Janine sat in the fast food drive-thru line, her car's engine idling, the smell of old grease and hot concrete pouring through the air vents, she caught the eye of a woman leaning against the brick building. The woman — skin the color of cocoa, hair plaited to her waist — looked away. Looked back. Winked. Janine balked.

The next day, propelled by her junk food cravings, Janine again waited in her car for a burger. The same woman lounged against the outside wall. She picked at her nails and scanned passing cars. She tossed her hair over her shoulder, dropped her gaze to the parking lot, then turned her face to Janine. She gave another wink.

"Every day, it went like this," Janine tells the story. By the end of the week, the woman made her way to Janine's car. "Hey, baby," she said. She leaned against the open window. "You need some company tonight?"

"And that's how I got solicited," Janine says to us in the break room, eyes wide, somehow still shocked. We laugh and shake our heads. She should have known with the wink.

That devilish eye gesture — quick, unobtrusive, and weighty with meaning — dates back at least two millennia. In his book, "The Naked Woman," human behaviorist Desmond Morris points to a reference made by Roman satirist Martial in the first century. Martial writes, "Still you wink at men under an eyelid you took out of a drawer that same morning" (here, mocking women's use of eye make-up). Speaking from the 21st century, Morris devotes an entire chapter to eyes, where he chronicles the visual cues women give. "The wink is a deliberate one-eyed blink that signifies a state of collusion between the winker and the person winked at," Morris writes. "Performed between strangers the gesture usually carries a strong sexual invitation regardless of the genders involved." (Take note, Janine).

The Bible, too, weighs in on winking, usually casting the gesture in a dubious light. Proverbs 6:12,13 reads, "A worthless person, a wicked man, is the one who walks with a perverse mouth, who winks with his eyes." Not clear enough? Proverbs 10:10 spells it out: "He who winks the eye causes trouble."

New York City residents in the late 19th apparently carried little regard for the Biblical prohibitions. A New York Times article published in 1881 acknowledged that, among the wellbred, winking in general and "especially winking between the sexes" was inexcusable. Yet, a New York resident developed a Morse code system of slow

and fast winks that quickly spread among the younger generations. "At our theatres, on the street, and at church young men and young women are now constantly conversing in the language of the eyelid." Once gauche, winking became de rigueur among in-the-know New Yorkers.

As with many things in our modern, over-sexed culture, the wink has begun to lose its allure. "I got winked at by a scandalous-looking sub-14 year old girl in Wal-Mart today," a post on a message board populated by males in the 20-25 range reads. "I was appalled." Another poster commiserates, "It's a lost art."

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