![]() ![]() Other anti-establishment artists, from Joe Strummer of The Clash to Tupac Shakur, have pointed a middle finger at the ruling class in their work - and, in famous photos, literally.īut the “bird” is also a sign of someone reaching their breaking point. (It wasn’t Cash’s first performance at a Golden State prison.) Johnny Cash flashed a defiant middle finger during a 1969 performance at San Quentin State Prison in California after a photographer reportedly asked him what he thought of the prison warden. It’s since become a beloved gesture for anti-authority rebels. When the middle finger’s popularity grew once more, it became known as a wordless version of the goose-like honks and hisses of displeasure preferred by Brits and other Europeans. Birds had apparently been synonymous with taunting long before the mid-20th century. ![]() The “finger” didn’t become the “bird” until the 1960s, writer Brian Palmer reported for Slate. Morris has said that the middle finger landed in the US with Italian immigrants in the late 19th century. ![]() The middle finger’s popularity faltered, but did not entirely disappear, during the Middle Ages, likely due to the growing influence of the Catholic Church and its disapproval of sexual gestures, researchers have concluded. ‘Flipping the bird’ is perhaps even more offensive today “In the end then it is perhaps best to keep ‘the finger’ to ourselves,” Nelson wrote. Nelson wrote that while ancient people did likely use their middle fingers to make obscene gestures, they may have pointed them horizontally or in other directions – a bit different from the typical “finger” we know today. It’s not clear, though, whether the ancient Greeks and Romans extended their middle fingers vertically in the air. “It is saying, this is a phallus that you’re offering to people, which is a very primeval display,” Morris told BBC in 2012. Morris has said that the middle finger we know today – the digit hoisted high in the air, other fingers bending to its will – represents a penis and testicles. The Roman historian Suetonius reported that the emperor Caligula forced his subjects to kiss his middle finger – per anthropologist and leading middle-finger historian Desmond Morris, this was a demeaning gesture that represented the ruler’s member. The gesture eventually made its way to ancient Rome, where locals likely called it “digitus impudicus” – the indecent digit. Whatever the intent, the Socrates character responds with disgust. Translators of the text usually conclude that Strepsiades gesticulates with his middle finger (or, in some translations, reveals his privates) to refer to masturbation, said Nelson. Strepsiades makes a crude joke about using a different finger to create rhythm. In his comedy “The Clouds,” written in 419 B.C., a caricature of Socrates attempts to instruct the debtor Strepsiades about poetic meter. The Greek playwright Aristophanes was also purportedly a fan of the gesture, referring to “the long finger” in several of his plays. A few sources from ancient Greece reference middle fingers being used to prod or poke people’s persons, from nostrils to, well, nethers. Proudly displaying a middle finger was usually a joke, an insult or a sexual proposition, Nelson and other classical researchers posit. The cheeky Greeks “probably relied on the use of the middle finger to represent an erect penis,” wrote Max Nelson, who teaches courses on classical civilizations at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, in a 2017 piece on the gesture’s origins. The middle finger originated as a phallic gesture Here’s how it became the human hand’s most obscene digit. The middle finger has since become a frequently used emoji, an unintentional guest during a Super Bowl halftime show, a surprise live sign-off on the BBC and a crude gesture wielded by angry motorists. While throwing up a middle finger today clearly communicates a resounding “f**k you,” in classical society, historians say a middle finger was more of a ribald sexual reference. It was around 2,500 years ago that the naughty Greeks developed a phallic gesture to offend, taunt and literally poke each other. If you’ve ever “flipped the bird,” you have something in common with ancient Greeks. ![]()
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