Literal translation
to touch the five sardines
Meaning
to shake hands
Explanation
This expression means to shake hands, a familiar, vivid variant of the plainer phrase to touch the hand. The image rests on a playful comparison between the five fingers of the hand and five sardines lined up, a cheap fish widely eaten on the Provençal coast, associated with an elongated, regular smallness that lends itself well to a metaphor for fingers. Touching the five sardines thus means shaking a whole hand, finger by finger so to speak, in a phrase that personifies each finger by comparing it to an individual fish, so that the hand stops being an undifferentiated whole. The register is familiar, cheerfully playful, used in a context of warm sociability where one seeks to brighten an ordinary polite gesture with a touch of local humour. The expression illustrates a common Provençal device of drawing comic or affectionate images from the very concrete repertoire of the sea and fishing, anchovy, sardine, and other humble fish regularly supplying material for familiar comparisons. It coexists in use with its plainer variant to touch the hand, the sardine simply adding a popular colour to the same social gesture.