Home > Flirting

Flirting is often described as casual conversation with a romantic touch. But it need not be spoken interaction at all.

Flirting is a way of treating serious things (such as sexual attraction) with an almost mocking or self-mocking air of ease. It can be either pleasantly diverting or wildly exciting, depending on the context.

People who flirt can speak and act in a way that suggests greater intimacy than is appropriate to the relationship (or to the amount of time the two people have known each other), without actually saying or doing anything inappropriate. One way they accomplish this is to communicate a sense of playfulness or irony.

Flirting consists of stylized gestures, language, body language, postures, and physiologic signs, some of which are also part of foreplay. Among these are (the Cultural bias here is specific to Western society):

• Winking
• Dilation of the pupils
• Slight, casual touches
• Smiling
• Sending and receiving notes, poems, or written musicMusic often an art/ entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture," according to Jean Molino. 1 It is often contrasted with noise. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and no
• Singing or playing a musical instrumentA musical instrument is a device that has been constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that somehow produces sound can serve as a musical instrument, but the expression is reserved generally to items that have that

The etymology of the verb "to flirt" is an interesting one: it comes from the old French "Conter fleurette", which means "to (try to) seduce". This expression is no longer used in French, but the English "frenchisism" to flirt has made its way back over the Channel and has now become an anglicismAn anglicism is a word borrowed from English into another language, but considered by a fair part of the influential speakers of that language to be substandard or undesirable. Anglicisms in French Occasionally governments of both Quebec and France have u in French. A nice example of two cultures flirting with one another ...