Up yours. Screw off. You suck. Shove it. Get lost. But mostly: Eff you. These are the unmistakable meanings of the simple, crude, and highly effective middle finger gesture. It can be delivered as a sign of anger, frustration, disrespect, derision, rebellion, rejection, or general insult, and may be displayed forcefully, slyly, ironically, gleefully, or jokingly.
The use of the middle finger as a rude expression dates back thousands of years; it may be the “most ubiquitous and longest lived insulting gesture in the world”, maintaining its shocking and controversial nature long after whatever symbolism actually inspired it faded into history.
419 BC: An Aristophanes play includes
a character who gestures with his middle finger.
300s BC: Greek philosopher Diogenes
allegedly gives the finger to a crowd waiting to see the statesman and orator
Demosthenes.
1415: According to legend, the
finger is displayed at the Battle of Agincourt.
1886: The middle finger is captured
for the first time on camera in the US, displayed by baseball player Charles
“Old Hoss” Radbourn in a team photo.
1928: The Academy
Award-nominated Speedy features silent film star Harold Lloyd
giving himself the finger in a funhouse mirror, likely the earliest known
appearance in a motion picture.
1968: Crewmembers of the USS Pueblo,
a US Navy ship attacked by North Korea, ruin propaganda prisoner-of-war photos
taken of them by giving the finger.
1974: MAD magazine replaces its
usual cover image featuring the character Alfred E. Neuman with a hand
extending the middle finger; the controversial edition becomes a collector’s
item.
1976: US vice president Nelson
Rockefeller flashes the finger at a group of student hecklers on the campaign
trail, giving rise to it becoming known for a time as “the Rockefeller
gesture.”
1995: Chinese dissident artist Ai
Weiwei begins a series of photographs, taken over two decades, featuring him
giving his left finger to various cultural landmarks, starting with Tiananmen
Square.
2015: A middle finger icon is
officially added to the emoji lexicon.
The middle
finger is not universal—around the world, other gestures carry a similar
meaning. For
example, thumbs-up in Mediterranean countries, the OK sign in Brazil, the palm-back
V-sign in Great Britain are the equivalent of the raised middle digit.
So if you
find yourself wanting to insult someone nonverbally, just be sure you’re speaking
the right local body language.
From Quartz (edited)
