Just wondering. Something of such important relevance I am sure it was discussed somewhere.
Funny thing was, I remember my home ec teacher who did not know about it and would countdown to it for reasons. Brought the house down as she stood there with a upraised bird and a mystified look on her face.
So who was the genius? Do we know? Someone important?
If not…I invented it. Where is my royalties?
It was Aristophanes according to this, which was the best guess I could find with a quick google search. Who woulda thought the ancient Greeks influence went that far?
I watched a History channel documentary a couple years ago on seige warfare, and it made mention that archers were (for good reason) the bane of castle defenders and were highly sought after prisoners. When catching one, they would cut off their middle finger, reducing them to foot soldiers as one could not pull a 150 lb draw wt. bow without a middle finger. It also was to instill fear to the other archers when the prisoner, lacking a finger was released. It was a common taunt among archers then, to prominently display the middle finger at the defenders. It was referred to as showing the bird, in reference to the turkey feather fletching used on arrows at the time. I thought it was a very cool sidenote to an interesting documentary.
Tequila The History Channel isn’t always right. See pluckyew over at the snopes site.
Didn’t say I believed it, just that it was an interesting documentary:) But it does make me wonder who to believe. The History channel, or Barbara “Bowfinger”. 
Maybe we should ask Cecil
Hi,
How far back does “the finger” go?
And in what culture or part of the world did it originate?
Now, there’s a difficult question.
Best wishes,
Berdollos
DUH!! Ask Cecil! I think I will. I’m sure that it originated far before then, and for different reasons, but it is a very interesting question:)
I bite my thumb at you, sir.
The ‘Car Talk’ show (on NPR) with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers have a feature called the ‘Puzzler’, and their most recent ‘Puzzler’ was about the Battle of Agincourt. The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, threatened to cut a certain body part off of all captured English soldiers so that they could never fight again. The English won in a major upset and waved the body part in question at the French in defiance. The puzzler was: What was this body part? This is the answer submitted by a listener:
Dear Click and Clack, Thank you for the Agincourt ‘Puzzler’, which clears up some profound questions of etymology, folklore and emotional symbolism. The body part which the French proposed to cut off of the English after defeating them was, of course, the middle finger, without which it is impossible to draw the renowned English longbow.
This famous weapon was made of the native English yew tree, and so the act of drawing the longbow was known as “plucking yew”.
Thus, when the victorious English waved their middle fingers at the defeated French, they said, “See, we can still pluck yew! PLUCK YEW!”
Over the years some ‘folk etymologies’ have grown up around this symbolic gesture. Since ‘pluck yew’ is rather difficult to say (like “pleasant mother pheasant plucker”, which is who you had to go to for the feathers used on the arrows), the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative ‘f’, and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute are mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter. It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows that the symbolic gesture is known as “giving the bird”.
Dunno either way, myself. Don’t use the symbol much, but I feel that anyone who does should really know something about it.
~
Much as I like “Car Talk,” Click and Clack’s area of expertise is cars, not etymology.