The Middle Finger

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The Middle Finger

The other day, I was doing my daily scroll through Facebook and came across a post that showed an article about the history of the middle finger. Well…of course that caught my interest because I love researching history, especially oddities or origin stories. And what is more fascinating than where profane gestures came from? For Italians like myself, we love gesturing. We do it with our hands all the time when talking. It’s all about the passion. And, of course, Italians have a much more dramatic gesture for f%&k you. We use our entire fist and both arms to demonstrate our displeasure. But…that is getting off the track.

According to the article, before the battle of Angincourt in 1415, the French decided it was a good idea to cut off the middle finger of the English soldiers. Why? Because without a middle finger, the soldiers would have difficulty drawing their famous longbow, making it difficult to fight. Drawing the longbow was known as “plucking the yew.” It didn’t quite work out for the French and the English began to taunt their foes by waving their middle finger and saying, “pluck yew.” Since “pluck yew” was apparently difficult to say, it evolved to, “f%&k you.” Now, of course, I had to do research on this to make sure this is really the origin of the middle finger and its universal meaning. And low and behold, there are numerous other versions, so definitely not an agreement on this. In fact, in 1999, Snopes declared this plucky story (pun intended) false. Here are the alternatives:

The middle finger represented a phallus (no surprise there) and thus, in the 1800s, gained increasing recognition as a sign of disrespect used by artists, musicians, politicians, and other celebrities. Again, the Italians have the middle finger beat by a mile since we use an entire fist!Dating back to ancient Rome, scholars call the English Soldier story complete bollocks. They insist that, once again, it originated in 400 BC, again representing an erect phallus and sexual aggression and a threat to whomever it was directed to. “The decorative use of the image of Priapus matched the Roman use of images of male genitalia for warding off evil. The Roman gesture ‘made by extending the third finger from a closed fist,’ thus made the same threat by forming a similarly phallic shape.”The gesture first appeared in ancient Greece. There are a couple of instances cited, including, according to this article, the first known use in 330 BC in Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers. The philosopher and critic Diogenes presents his middle finger to demonstrate his disdain for Demosthenes, a prominent Greek statesman and orator. Then it appears again in 419 BC in the bawdy Greek play, The Clouds by Greek playwright Aristophanes’s 419, where Strepsiades extends the finger towards Socrates and then proceeds to waggle his penis at him.Back to Rome…where it was referred to as the digitus impudicus, or “indecent finger.” The emperor Caligula supposedly mocked his subjects by forcing them to kiss his middle finger. Cassius, one of the subjects, got him back, though, when he assassinated the emperor. Another story from ancient Rome is that Augustus Caesar punished an actor who flipped the bird to a heckling audience member by banishing him from Rome.

One of these days, I’m going to research the origin “not giving a f%&k” or double the insult, two f%&ks. Ironically, I believe that the kind of badass character I might write would give the middle finger and have the cavalier attitude of not giving a f%&k. But isn’t flipping the bird doing just that…giving some a f%&k? My Asset Management series is full of characters who both don’t give a f&%k and present the middle finger to their adversaries, both metaphorically and literally. You know the drill if you want to read about those characters…just click the links below!