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The gesture

Fuck you without words

Two hand signals carry the word. One is at least 2,400 years old and has a Latin name. The other is British, considerably younger, and comes with a myth about archers.

The middle finger

The raised middle finger is a phallus, and everyone who has ever used it has understood that. The Greeks called it the katapygon; Diogenes the Cynic is said to have used it to indicate the orator Demosthenes, and Aristophanes jokes about it in The Clouds (423 BC). The Romans called it the digitus impudicus, the shameless finger, and the poets Martial and Juvenal both mention it as an insult. It went quiet in the written record for centuries, as gestures do, and reappears in the modern era in a photograph: the Boston Beaneaters' team picture of 1886, in which the pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn is giving it to the camera, the first known photograph of the gesture.

Its American nickname, "flipping the bird" or "the bird", grows out of a 19th-century theatrical expression, "to give the big bird", meaning to hiss an actor. By the 1960s it had acquired the finger. In the US it is now the standard obscene gesture, and the courts have treated it as protected expression: several drivers have won damages after being arrested for giving it to police officers, and the Second Circuit ruled in 2013 that "the ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity".

The gesture has its own emoji, 🖕, added to Unicode in 2014, which is discussed under Online. Nelson Rockefeller gave it to hecklers in 1976, Johnny Cash gave it to a photographer at San Quentin in 1969 in a picture that later became an advertisement, and M.I.A. gave it to a Super Bowl audience in 2012 and was sued by the NFL for $16.6 million.

The V-sign

The British version is two fingers, palm inward, sometimes jerked upward. It means the same as the middle finger and is confined mostly to the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; elsewhere, palm in or out, it is simply "two" or "peace", which has caused misunderstandings for British visitors and, famously, for George H. W. Bush in Australia in 1992.

The myth is that English archers at Agincourt (1415) waved their two bow fingers at the French, who had threatened to cut them off. There is no evidence for any of it: no chronicler mentions the gesture, no threat to cut off fingers is recorded, and the story does not appear until the 20th century. The earliest firm record of the gesture is a piece of film shot by Mitchell and Kenyon outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham in 1901, in which a workman gives it, quite clearly, to the camera. Its origin is unknown, and it is possible that it is simply a doubled middle finger.

Winston Churchill used the V for Victory with the palm outward from 1941, after being told that his early palm-inward version meant something else to the working men he was addressing. The story is well documented and he was, by all accounts, delighted.

Other places, other fingers