In England, I noticed that they have a version of the finger that involves making a peace-sign-like V, except you have the back of your hand towards the person, and you make an upwards motion. It was explained that this sign came from the ancient archers, just like in today’s question. They would cut off the archer’s two fingers instead of taking them prisoner. The gesture meant sort of “up yours, I can still fight.”
Anybody know of this gesture and from whence it came???
Thanx
JessicaBabe
According to Desmond Morris, this symbolizes the open labia: like the phallic finger, a more basic and, to me, a more believable explanation than archery.
BTW - I’ve read two versions of Churchill’s expropriation of this gesture for his “V for victory” salute: one is that upper-crust Winston had no idea of its vulgar connotations; the other that he knew full well and was using the “V” as a cover for flipping off the Nazis.
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What’s the origin of “the finger”? (04-Sep-1998)
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Sure… it was pretty common as a vulgar gesture here in New Zealand when I was growing up – call it the 1970’s – but has more recently been supplanted by the “finger”, no doubt reflecting the influence of US movies and TV.
We would have got the gesture from England (where most of the NZ colonists hailed from), and I had always understood that it dated back to the Yeomen archers of England and the Hundred Years War… but that is hardly a cite. 
But you seem to have missed the fact that his V-sign was with the palm facing outwards.
Well the British seem rather proud about the archer explanation, I guess it’s a little cooler than the female body parts explanation!
In Japan they make an obscene gesture by making a fist and pushing the thumb out between the middle and index finger. I’m quite certain this also has female anatomy links. When I was in Brasil, I found this symbol to be a good luck charm, and you could purchase wooden carvings of it everywhere. I wonder what the Japanese think of this, seeing how Brasil has a large Japanese population?
BTW, if you visit Brasil, don’t make an OK sign with your hand. An inverted OK sign is equivalant to giving the finger over there. Don’t find out the hard way!
As a British archer, I have to say, I’ve heard the Agincourt explanation for the two-finger gesture. It was explained to me by an elder member of my archery club (but not old enough to have served at Agincourt himself, and no, he didn’t have any cites either).
It strikes me as not altogether implausible, though… the two-finger gesture is regarded as vulgar over here, but not explicitly sexual. Also points to take into consideration: cutting off the first two fingers will do a lot more to damage your archery than just the middle one (the traditional English draw uses the first three fingers, with the nock of the arrow between index and middle fingers); the French nobility really loathed the English yeoman archers in the Hundred Years’ War, and might have felt quite happy with imposing a sentence of mutilation (after all, they were noble and the archers were common - it might even have been legal under the system at the time); finally, even if it never actually happened, that’s no reason why a rumour about it couldn’t get started…
The “pluck yew” cod etymology, though, strikes me as nonsense. Any archer is perfectly aware you pull on the string, not the wood, and “plucking at the loose” - setting up vibrations in the bowstring as you release - is a notorious beginners’ mistake, so no practised archer is going to admit to “plucking” anything. (You see, the vibrations in the string can be transmitted to the arrow itself, which will affect its flight, so you run the very real risk of hitting a Frenchman you weren’t aiming for, or, even worse, failing to hit a Frenchman at all…)
So: I have no documentation, but the man who told me the story was an Englishman, a gentleman and a toxophilite, so, personally, I believe him.
Well the British seem rather proud about the archer explanation, I guess it’s a little cooler than the female body parts explanation!
In Japan they make an obscene gesture by making a fist and pushing the thumb out between the middle and index finger. I’m quite certain this also has female anatomy links. When I was in Brasil, I found this symbol to be a good luck charm, and you could purchase wooden carvings of it everywhere. I wonder what the Japanese think of this, seeing how Brasil has a large Japanese population?
BTW, if you visit Brasil, don’t make an OK sign with your hand. An inverted OK sign is equivalant to giving the finger over there. Don’t find out the hard way!
Sorry, didn’t mean to post that one twice. My system crashed, so please don’t send any obscene gestures my way.
JessicaBabe is apparently more clued into these things than George Bush (Sr) or Maggie Thatcher.
http://natsci.ucsc.edu/acad/scicom/SciNotes/9601/Gestures/Mismatched.html
As this topic seems to be leaning towards hand gestures in general, I’ll throw this one in:
I recall being told a story about a couple of tourists (I think in some middle-eastern country) who got into difficulties while swimming in the sea, but the lifeguards(or was it the police?) didn’t do anything because the gestures the unfortunate swimmers(drowners?) were making (presumably some sort of desperate waving or ‘come here’ gestures) meant ‘leave me alone’ or ‘I am OK’ in that particular culture.
Sounds like an urban myth, anyone heard of it?
Desmond Morris talks about the hand gesture you describe, often called “the fig”. It shows up in his first big book, The Naked Ape as well as in Gestures. Morris is fascinating, but frustrating. The man doesn’t believe in citations, and that has caused more than one scholar to curse him out.
Morris also claims that in many places – Sicily for instance – the “OK” sign is an obscene gesture meaning “asshole”
I’ve heard of the fig sign, in mediaeval Italy… to the best of my recollection, it’s the only obscene hand gesture to feature in Dante’s Inferno (Eighth Circle, I think, the bolgia of the Thieves).
An introductory lecture in my linguistics course (20 years ago, I don’t remember all the details…) warned about misleading hand gestures. The lecturer mentioned someone whose car broke down while visiting (I think) Iran; some friendly Iranians helped him get his car going again, but then he signalled his thanks by giving them a big “thumbs-up” sign - and was surprised when their mood rapidly changed… as if he’d given them a gesture a couple of fingers over…
Jessicababe, the two-fingered salute, an English gesture, is generally thought to derive from English longbowmen displaying the fingers with which they drew a bow, as a gesture of threat, contempt and defiance. It is commonly believed to have originated in the Battle of Agincourt, against the French, as a response to the practice of cutting off those fingers when English longbowmen were captured. It’s distinctly different to the one-fingered salute.
Archery was extremely important in the English army at the time. I’ve read that there was even a legal requirement for Englishmen to practice archery and that the law still remains on the books, though it isn’t enforced.
Incidentally, I’ve also read that the one-fingered salute was a derisory comment on the size of the penis of the man it was directed at (i.e. “Your dick is this small”). Anyone else heard this?
angilion thanks for stopping by.
The Agincourt story has pretty well been discounted by most serious observers.
here is an earlier thread on the subject.
But then why would people use the middle finger, the largest? Wouldn’t it be more insulting to use the index, or at meanest, the pinky?