All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Dec. 30, 2025 - Skeptoid
18:50
Skeptoid #1021: The First Middle Finger

The history and pseudohistory of this infamous and ubiquitous obscene gesture. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Ancient Origins of the Middle Finger 00:07:18
You've probably flipped someone off at some point in your lifetime, and chances are that someone else has probably served you in the exact same way.
And the reason is that it is one of humankind's most universal gestures.
And as such, one would expect that the gesture has a very interesting history behind it, and perhaps many different meanings in many different cultures.
Does it?
And in our extended content for premium members, what a Roman historian had to say about its use in one very specific battle.
All about the middle finger is coming up right now on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's HyperFixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The first middle finger.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Call it flipping the bird, flipping someone off, giving them the finger, giving them the bird, or simply the one-fingered salute.
The infamous middle finger gesture is so ubiquitous around the world and throughout history that much scholarly work has actually been done trying to track down its origin story.
Where did it come from?
What did it mean?
And has that meaning changed throughout its long history?
And is its history even all that long?
A quick word of disclaimer.
This discussion necessarily includes phallic symbolism.
Although the language is all clean, the concept is what it is.
So if that doesn't work for you or anyone listening with you, please turn this show off and rejoin us next week.
Let us begin by pointing our skeptical eye at the very most common, false history attributed to the dreaded finger.
The Battle of Agincourt.
This is one of the more popular claims that English soldiers invented the gesture at the Battle of Agincourt to mock the French.
This battle in October of 1415 was one of the greatest victories of the English over the French during the Hundred Years' War, which was over claims to the French throne.
The English, who were greatly outnumbered, yet had the terrain very much their favor, supposedly threatened to cut off the middle finger of any French bowman captured to make it impossible for them to ever draw a bowstring again.
The gesture of showing or waving the middle finger was a taunt over what would happen to any prisoners.
We can be pretty sure this is a false claim.
There is no evidence from the historical period that any large number of bowmen ever had their middle finger cut off by their captors, nor is there any evidence that the English made such a gesture during the Battle of Agincourt, a battle which was thoroughly documented by at least seven contemporary historians, known as heralds at the time, three of whom were present during the battle and included both French and English.
Not one of them recorded any mention of such threats or of excised middle fingers.
There are two more ways in which this explanation is illogical.
First, bowmen were absolutely not the skilled people on the battlefield whom the victors would need to cripple.
Anyone can fire a bow, and it takes very little practice to gain the basic competence needed to launch your arrow up into the air alongside a thousand others.
Battlefield bowmen were a brute force weapon.
There was no need for them to be legoless of the woodland realm.
These were not knights.
They had little value, even for ransom.
And second, cutting off the middle finger would hardly cripple a bowman.
Most used the first three fingers, any two of which would do in a pinch.
I've done a bit of archery, and one day my friends and I competed using only our pinky fingers.
It was really hard, and we had to switch to very light bows, but that was because we had zero practice.
You'd probably need to take the whole hand if your intent was really to prevent this person from ever firing another arrow.
Pluck you.
In a medieval sense, broader than just the Battle of Agincourt, there is a claim that bowmen of the period referred to firing the famous longbow, often made from the wood of a yew tree, as plucking you.
An extension of this holds that bowmen would often have their mothers fletch their arrows with pheasant feathers, giving rise to the phrase, careful with this one, pleasant mother pheasant plucker.
And when you plucked your ewe, you were sending these bird feathers to the enemy, in effect, giving them the bird.
It's almost like a room full of comedy writers riffed on this one for days.
Extending it further, some making this claim assert that the PL of pluck was a difficult sound for Middle English speakers, so it was gradually simplified into an F. Thus we had the combination of the gesture with the modern commentary often delivered along with it.
This is easiest to dismiss, as linguists confirm there is no evidence of such a shift in pronunciation in English.
Moreover, it makes no sense.
When you draw and release a bow, you're not plucking the U, the wooden bow.
You're plucking the bow string.
However, we need hardly debate this, as it turns out there's plenty of evidence of the bird being many, many centuries older.
In Rome, the standard gesture familiar to us all, where the middle finger is extended upward and the curled fingers on either side represent the testes, or in family-friendly terms, one is the frank and the others are the beans, is widespread and is understood essentially worldwide.
This suggests common roots, according to some anthropologists.
This would mean that the middle finger has been part of our nonverbal communication for a long, long time.
Roman Soldiers and Barbarian Insults 00:08:37
And, indeed, we find it as far back as ancient Rome.
Perhaps its most infamous appearance in history is attached to who else?
The Roman Emperor Caligula, 12 to 41 CE, whose surviving reputation is one of depravity.
He had a favorite habit of extending that finger when he held his hand out to be kissed.
One of those he insulted in this way was Cassius Cairia, one of his own Praetorian guards, who later settled this account by leading the conspiracy that assassinated him.
In Rome, they called this gesture the infamous digitus, or digitus imputicus, for indecent finger.
Another time its use was documented was when an actor threw the gesture at a heckler.
Unfortunately for him, Augustus Caesar was also in the audience and banned the actor from Rome for life.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Malaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast, and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
There is an origin story for the gesture coming from Roman soldiers, in which they always wore a gold ring on their middle finger, and when marching into battle, they liked to taunt their enemy by holding up that finger to flaunt their comparative wealth.
While this appears on the modern social media internet in any number of places, I found no published instances of anyone putting it forward as an actual hypothesis.
Moreover, there was no middle finger gold ring worn by Roman soldiers.
They wore whatever rings they pleased on whatever fingers they wished, same as anyone else.
It is recorded, however, that Roman soldiers were on the receiving end of the middle finger in at least one battle, it having been delivered to them by Germanic barbarians.
There was no pretense of cutting off archers' fingers or showing off gold rings.
The barbarians were simply telling the Romans where they could go and what they could do to themselves.
However, the source of this is a 2010 book by Thomas Conley called Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, in which he attributed to the Roman historian Tacitus.
Evidently, Conley failed to fact-check himself.
Nowhere in the writings of Tacitus is there any mention of such a thing, or even anything close to it.
In Greece, it turns out that the bird goes back even centuries further, with a number of instances of the gesture having an obscene connotation in ancient Greek writings.
It famously appears in the play The Clouds, a comical satire written by Aristophanes.
First published and performed in 423 BCE, it features a character giving the finger to Socrates, then following it up by lifting his cloak and undergarment and waving the real thing at him.
In the 330 BCE book, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, the critic Diogenes gives it to the Athenian statesman Demosthenes, as he calls him, best cover your ears for this, a demagogue.
Variations In his 1994 book, Body Talk, the eminent public anthropologist Desmond Morris collected variants of the middle finger gesture from all around the world, and as you can guess, they all mean basically the same thing, and represent the same anatomical structure.
In Egypt, the gesture is mostly the same, except rather than the back of the hand facing the subject, the hand is extended palm up and the middle finger is bent upward at the middle joint, and the meaning is basically exactly the same.
In some Arab cultures, the hand is held the opposite way, palm down, and with the same bend in the finger at the middle joint.
Then the hand is spanked down, for lack of a better term, several times, miming the actual action.
In Lebanon and Syria, they might add smacking that hand into the other hand, indicating a more forceful version.
In places like Spain and Italy, they do it the familiar way, but often jerk the whole forearm upward, with the opposite hand pressing down into the elbow.
I was first on the receiving end of this in Milan, and it was by a cop.
We were driving the wrong way down a one-lane one-way street.
Accidentally, of course.
Driving in Italy is not for the faint of heart.
A cop car was coming straight toward us, but rather than deal with us, he simply drove up onto the sidewalk to get past us.
As they went by, it was the partner in the passenger seat who flashed me the salute, though it wasn't quite on point as he was holding a cigarette.
The British Isles have their own version of the middle finger gesture, unique only in that it adds the index finger to form a V, back of the hand facing the person so insulted.
It's the same as when a person from North America indicates a quantity of two, opening up the possibility for confusion and misinterpretation.
There does not appear to be any consensus view on how or when or why this gesture got its start.
Researchers in the aisles have come up with lots of different stories.
The one that's by far the most common is the bowmen at the Battle of Agincourt, who were allegedly taunted by the English with this gesture as if to say, we're going to cut off your first two fingers, so you can't shoot arrows anymore.
But as we know from more thorough research, this is false.
It also doesn't make any sense because an archer would hold those fingers together, not spread into a V. And so the origin of the V remains elusive.
Its reverse, with the palm facing outward instead, was popularized by Winston Churchill, who signaled the word victory in this way.
He got it from a Belgian lawyer named Victor, who had always used it to represent his own name.
And in a radio broadcast, Victor suggested a propaganda campaign to signal victory over the Nazis.
Evidently, Churchill was listening that day.
So, we may have debunked a few false explanations, but it can't be said that we nailed down a true point of origin for the bird.
It would seem likely that it precedes written history, although its meaning has apparently remained remarkably consistent.
We continue with what the Roman historian Tacitus actually did say about what Germanic barbarians actually did do to Roman soldiers in the ad-free and extended premium feed.
Skeptoid Support and Calendar Events 00:02:50
To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.
A great big skeptoid shout out to our premium supporters, including Mark, I Lack the Wit to Say Anything Cool, Greenwood, Paul and Shoko in South Carolina, Car Mastic, and Graham from Adelaide, South Australia.
My public speaking and appearances calendar is actually getting pretty full, so rather than just list the next couple events, I'm just going to say, hey, go look at the calendar at skeptoid.com slash events.
And as always, to book me for your own event, come to skeptoid.com slash speaking.
Get the Skeptoid books.
They make great bathroom reading and they're awesome gifts for people who don't listen to podcasts.
Get them in our online store at skeptoid.com slash store.
And while there, you'll also see all the other cool stuff to show off your skepticism to the world.
Skeptoid is a production of Skeptoid Media.
Director of Operations and Tinfoil Hat Counter is Kathy Reitmeyer.
Marketing guru and Illuminati liaison is Jake Young.
Production management and all things audio by Will McCanpless.
Music is by Lee Sanders.
Researched and written by me, Brian Dunning.
Listen to Skeptoid for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeart.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrian Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection