Why is pointing your middle finger bad

Long before punk rock and eight-lane highways, the middle finger was known as the digitus impudicus or digitus infamis indecent or infamous digit by Romans and medieval Europeans. Augustus Caesar once booted an entertainer for giving a heckler the finger.

And the lunatic emperor Caligula -- famed for such crimes as wearing women's clothes and murdering indiscriminately -- was said to have habitually offered his digitus infamis to be kissed by his enemies, just to flaunt his imperial disdain. Until, of course, one of those enemies stabbed Caligula in the neck. Even before the Romans, an Athenian playwright and comedian named Aristophanes created a feisty character who gives Socrates the finger.

It was a unique way to respond to all those irritating questions. Nobody can say Socrates didn't ask for it. Some consider the fist below to serve an essential role in this resemblance to genitals.

I guess people think that's answer enough, since everyone's supposed to know already what a penis "means," and it's supposed to be bad. I can't say I fully understand. The finger is somewhat universal, and yet, as with most things, different regions have their own variations: two of the most enriching, I think, are from the Arabs and the Russians.

In Arabian lands, the equivalent gesture consists of an outstretched hand, palm down, with all fingers splayed except the middle, which sticks downwards. Perhaps it's a little more ambiguous than the standard American finger, but I find it wonderfully evocative.

The Russian version twists our anatomical expectations by bending the middle finger of one hand back with the forefinger of the other in a gesture they call "looking under the cat's tail. Another old favorite is the fig. Try this one out for yourself: make a first, then stick your thumb between your middle and index finger.

In the United States, this gesture has become innocuous, even child-friendly, as part of the nose-stealing game we all know and cherish. That's why you won't see the fig in movies or music videos, and why it's useless on highways. In other places and other eras, however, people have tended to see less of a nose, more of a vagina.

After 23 years, I am horrified at the prospect of the Communists returning to power and of Mr. Zeman helping them to do so. During the Occupy Wall Street OWS protests in and , many middle fingers were thrown in the general direction of the Wall Street establishment, and more directly at individual police. Two OWS protesters were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for doing the latter on a train car in While middle fingers are sometimes looked down on as vulgar or indecent, vulgarity and indecency are at the heart of why we give the finger.

A raised middle finger reflects something detestable, and shows whoever committed the offense just how awful we think it is. All Rights Reserved. Nipplegate makes me think of John Cooper Clarke's poem on prudery, in which he noted that you'll never see a nipple in the Daily Express. Maybe Americans are more puritanical than Express readers. It's possible. Adele's apology, after all, was conditional.

Is offence always something that implies offender was morally wrong in upsetting the ickle sensibilities of offendee? In the US, certainly, the history of flipping the bird is one of offence taken, hackles risen and, often, police time wasted. In Louisiana in , a contractor was arrested painting a 30ft-high image on a supermarket wall of Mickey Mouse flipping the bird with the caption, "Hey Iran!

In , eight states banned Bad Frog Beer because its label showed an amphibian with a webbed finger raised. The brewery I love this retorted that because the frog had only four fingers, it couldn't be raising the middle one.

US law professor Ira Robbins in pondered whether flipping the bird is speech protected under the first amendment in a law review article entitled, Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger and the Law : "The US Supreme Court has consistently held that speech may not be prohibited simply because some may find it offensive," he noted, adding that most such cases, where there was no other criminal behaviour, collapsed.

So what was MIA up to? Trying to widen her fan base Stateside by scandalising a nation? Expressing fluency in the international language of stupid? Sticking it to the man, old school? Or new school? Perhaps the London-born rapper didn't realise that in the US, flipping the bird is offensive, coming as she does from Hounslow, where extending the middle finger is a mild, sometimes even jaunty, rebuke. Oscar Wilde suggested that Britain and America were two nations divided by a common language; now we're two nations divided by a common finger.

They don't have any other gesture like that. Over here it's become quite accepted and doesn't carry the same meaning. Most people under the age of 50 don't find it offensive. It didn't even exist in this country until about 30 years ago. Phipps argues that Adele's gesture will even be hailed by her fans as an expression of her no-nonsense persona. She wasn't behaving provocatively to plug the brand, she was impulsively rebuking the organisers, not her fans.

It's her consciously saying: 'I don't like this. I want it to show. In a paper for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility , University of Michigan psychologists Jesse Chandler and Norbert Schwarz test the idea that extending the middle finger can make other people seem more hostile.

Let's try that in plain English: "Making the middle-finger gesture brings hostile thoughts to mind," Chandler told Time in Where did flipping the bird come from? One account contends that English longbowmen invented it in at the battle of Agincourt.