Middle Finger Gesture: He Flipped Me the Bird
Posted: Friday, July 01, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
I was driving to work the other morning. I’ve been traveling the same route for almost twenty years so I have a tendency to daydream, to pretty much put my car and my mind on auto-pilot. I was going about eight miles an hour over the speed limit and was in the process of slowly easing past another, slower vehicle when an angry looking guy in a big pick-up truck zoomed up behind me. He flashed his headlights and tooted his horn. I accelerated a little, passed the other car and pulled over into the right hand lane so he could get by. The guy slowed down, pulled up next to me, glared, and ‘flipped me the bird’ before speeding off at twenty miles an hour over the limit.
“Hey, I didn’t deserve that!” I thought. It kind of hurt my feelings. I convinced myself that he was totally unjustified in ‘giving me the finger’. Sure, I was daydreaming and didn’t see him until he was right on my bumper, but I was going at a reasonable speed. I was executing a relatively safe traffic maneuver and acted in what I thought was a courteous manner. He was the one speeding and zooming in and out of traffic to get ahead of everybody. I pondered the guy’s behavior, wondered what his problem was and why he was in such a hurry. I hoped the cops nabbed him for speeding. I soon got back to daydreaming; about the gesture, about what it means, about how it made me feel, and about its origins.
The gesture flashed at me by the enraged driver of the pick-up truck is, of course, one of the most familiar and generally understood ‘hand signals’ in the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is one of the oldest, too. One scantily supported story is that the Two Finger Salute, was first given on Friday, October 25, 1415, by archers in the bedraggled army of Henry V, King of England and Aquitaine. When the greatly out numbered English invaders were forced to battle at Agincourt in France, they were offered safe passage to Calais then back home if the famous English long-bowmen submitted to having their index and middle fingers cut off so they could no longer “pluck the yew”. They refused and held up their two fingers in a defiant gesture when the French knights lined up for battle. The long-bowmen were instrumental in the ensuing massacre and Henry’s improbable victory that day. The gesture supposedly soon mutated into the familiar Middle Finger Salute.
However, more solid historical evidence suggests that the middle finger gesture originated over 2,500 years ago. In, The Clouds, ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes used the middle finger gesture as a phallic symbol:
Socrates: Polite society will accept you if you can discriminate, say, between martial anapest and common dactylic--sometimes vulgarly called "finger rhythm."
Strepsiades: Finger-rhythm? I know that.
Socrates: Define it then.
Strepsiades: [Extending his middle finger in an obscene gesture]: Why, it’s tapping time with this finger. Of course, when I was a boy [raising his phallus to the ready], I used to make rhythm with this one.
In the 330 b.c. Greek book Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ‘giving the finger’ was referred to. After a meeting between Diogenes and Demosthenes, Diogenes expressed his disdain for the pompous orator by extending his middle finger and saying, “There goes the demagogue of Athens.”
The Romans adopted the gesture from the Greeks and it became a very popular ‘figure of speech’. Romans referred to the middle finger as the digitus impudicus (the imprudent finger), and ‘showing’ it came to be understood as an abrasive, insulting expression. When Emperor Caligula offered his middle finger rather than his hand for subjects to kiss, watchers considered the act scandalous and offensive. The gesture became so abhorrent that Augustus Caesar exiled from Italy an actor who responded to hissing during his performance by ‘giving the finger’ to the audience.
Though ‘showing the stork’ (as it was called by Romans), seems to have been common in ancient Greece and Rome, the gesture nearly vanished during the Dark Ages. It is speculated that the far-reaching influence of the Catholic Church was responsible. The conservative moral values promoted by the Church discouraged people from telling other Christians, to go….Well, you know what it means. Nevertheless, the gesture did not completely disappear from use.
An article in a 1712, London newspaper indicates the gesture was known in England at the time. The writer explained that “The Prentice speaks his Disrespect by an extended finger and the Porter by sticking out his tongue.” One of them ‘flips the bird’ and the other one gives the ‘Bronx cheer’. There are two guys that I work with who do exactly the same things-behind the boss’s back, of course.
The first recorded use of the middle finger gesture in the United States (though it was undoubtedly already part of the nation’s free speech tradition), is seen in an 1886, professional baseball team photograph. A pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters ‘gave’ the middle finger while posing for a joint picture with the New York Giants, indicating his opinion of the traditional rivals. Since then, ‘the finger’, ‘the bird’, ‘the finger wave’, ‘the stork’, ‘the bone’, ‘the one finger salute’, ‘the expressway digit’, ‘the prodigious protrusion of pent-up frustration’ is more often ‘given’, ‘raised’, ‘shot’, or ‘flipped’ than any other gesture in America. It is used to communicate a variety of messages (none of them complimentary), and is recognized and understood throughout the world.
A few miles down the road I was still stewing over the insult ‘shot’ at me. I’d gone from hurt feelings to anger by then. I have to admit it; I was distracted, was daydreaming again. I didn’t react when the light turned green. I just sat there, wrapped up in my thoughts. The woman behind me blew her horn waking me up and ticking me off. I glared at her in the rear view mirror and ‘flipped’ her ‘the bird’. Okay, she was right. I was asleep and holding up traffic. But, I didn’t care. It made me feel better, expressing myself like that, communicating with perfect clarity, non-verbally. As the old saying goes “When in America, do as the Americans do.” ‘Giving the finger’ to a fellow motorist is certainly an expected (and often very satisfying), demonstration of free speech in America.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)My, my, so scholarly!Thanks for reading and commenting
Well written article Sir...Regards,ChiradeepThanks for reading and commenting.
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