The One-Finger Salute

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sam calling from San Diego.

Hi, Sam.

You’re calling from San Diego and not Mars?

You sound like you’re in a space capsule.

I’m in a semi.

You’re in a semi.

All right, so you’re battling white line fever by thinking about language,

And what would you like to talk with us about?

Well, a few weeks ago I heard you mention that nobody really knows

Where the middle finger insult came from,

And I have thought that it was related to the British two-finger insult.

And I was curious if you had any words on that.

The British two-finger insult meaning the peace sign turned backwards, right?

Basically, yeah.

There’s a story that it started with the English archers insulting the French

Because supposedly the French would chop off the English archers’ fingers during the Hundred Years’ War.

Mm—

And where did you hear that story?

I first heard it on a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell.

And then I’ve done some research and found out it’s a very common myth, but no one’s been able to prove it.

Yeah, myth being the operative word here, right?

That’s what I read.

There’s a great debunking of that story at Snopes.com, S-N-O-P-E-S.com.

Snopes is the long-running site on the Internet where every little bit of nonsense that the world produces is either proven or disproven.

And they’ve done a really good job of taking this story apart, basically saying there’s no reason they would ever take the fingers off of archers because they would want to ransom those archers.

And you can’t – you’ll never get ransom money for an archer that you’ve captured if you’re taking off his bow fingers.

But weren’t most archers peasants and then therefore unransomable?

There’s no historical record of it.

The historical record of –

Right, that I did find out.

That’s the thing is there’s no historical record of widespread defingering of bowmen and archers in order to somehow punish them or stop them from fighting again.

There’s no record of it at all.

And besides which, there’s another thing happening here.

The middle finger extended looks like the male genitals, and that’s what’s happening in there.

You’re basically – it’s the same as like flashing your bits to somebody as a way of offending them.

I mean, I don’t know how to put that any more delicately.

It’s just, you know, it’s the physical resemblance of one part of the body to a particularly male part of the body, you know.

And nobody wants to see that except your special ones.

Right.

That’s very interesting because I’ve often heard that the British two-finger, they will often insert the thumb between the two fingers.

Oh, possible?

That’s creating the same effect.

Well, that’s the fig in medieval Italian literature.

Dante talks about that gesture, people making that gesture.

I wouldn’t know. I’m not often on the receiving end of any of them.

Well, Sam, I guess you don’t cut people off in traffic and get that, do you?

I do my best not to, but unfortunately I have been given it once or twice.

Oh, I see.

So it’s hard to trace the history of gestures, but I think we can cross the Archer story off the list.

Yeah, the Archer story. Forget about the Archer story.

That whole Archer thing, forget the whole thing.

It’s not the origin of anything except a lot of radio time that’s needed to debunk it, that’s all.

All right, well, thank you.

But thank you so much for giving us a ring, sir.

Yeah, keep your hands on the wheel.

Thank you.

All right, Sam. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, gestures are kind of a language, aren’t they?

A little bit of semiotics there on the radio.

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