Flipping the bird is a funny gesture expressed in a number of amusing ways. Some people, for instance, like to blow into their closed fist as the middle finger slowly rises as if it is being inflated. Whichever way strikes your fancy, you should know you are not alone. The Greek philosopher Diogenes, born in Sinope in BC, was one of the founders of Cynicism—and a bit of a troublemaker from the start.
As he got older, Diogenes developed a flair for irritating others with stunts such as the time he walked around with a lit-lamp in broad daylight. According to anthropologist Desmond Morris, the gesture is essentially phallic, with the curled fingers on either side representing the testicles and the raised finger you are presenting to your foe is the penis.
In Rome, the middle finger was not only a nasty gesture, it was an outright threat! It even had a cool Latin name: the digitus impudicus , or unchaste finger. Apparently, flipping the bird even played a role in our foreign affairs, according to Yahoo :. Crew members were held and interrogated for months. Photographs of supposedly docile and well-treated crew members were released to the world press.
In the photographs, many of the crew flipped the bird. Eventually, the North Koreans inquired why this hand gesture was in so many photos. The imprisoned crew explained it as the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign. For sometime, this satisfied the North Koreans. Most importantly, it shows even in , flipping the bird was not a universal sign.
What does the gesture mean, and when did it become offensive? A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: "This is the great demagogue.
The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian. The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.
Ancient Greek philosophers, Latin poets hoping to sell copies of their works, soldiers, athletes and pop stars, schoolchildren, peevish policemen and skittish network executives have all been aware of the gesture's particular power to insult and inflame. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture. It is saying, 'this is a phallus' that you're offering to people, which is a very primeval display.
During Sunday night's broadcast of the Super Bowl, America's most-watched television programme of the year, British singer M. The gesture is widely known to Americans as flipping the bird, or just giving someone the finger. The Romans had their own name for it: digitus impudicus - the shameless, indecent or offensive finger. In the Epigrammata of First Century AD by the Latin poet Martial, a character who has always enjoyed good health extends a finger, "the indecent one", at three doctors.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that German tribesmen gave the middle finger to advancing Roman soldiers, says Thomas Conley, a professor emeritus of communication and classics at the University of Illinois, who has written about the rhetoric of insults.
Earlier, the Greeks used the middle finger as an explicit reference to the male genitalia.
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