What the F Read online

  To understand how humans communicate, we have to tackle gesture. And many of the same things one might want to know about words are also important to ask about gestures. What do they mean? Where do they come from? Why do we use the gestures we do? How similar and how different are they across cultures?

  Taking a cross-linguistic, cross-cultural view—the same strategy we adopted when asking questions about words—most clearly reveals the answers to these questions. The trick is to find gestures that do roughly equivalent work in each language—that have largely homologous meanings. When we applied this strategy to words, we noted that the word fuck translates into foreign words that are as different as they can be; nothing about the sound or spelling of French baiser or Chinese cào makes them better or worse words for that particular meaning than any other sequence of sounds or letters.

  But with gesture, finding these equivalents is more challenging. Take just the earlier examples. Many cultures don’t have a specific gesture for calling a waiter—because this act is so dependent on a particular type of social interaction. Same with the A-OK gesture. And the list goes on. There are few equivalents around the world for familiar North American gestures like the Loser (an L on the forehead) or the Chicken (bent elbows moving up and down to depict chicken wings, among various other manifestations).6 Likewise, it’s easy to find examples of gestures native to other cultures that would be unfamiliar in North America. For instance, in France there’s a gesture called Quelle Barbe (“What a Beard!”), in which the backs of the fingers rub the side of the cheek (in the beard location). It means something like “boring.” The closest American equivalent might be Whoopdeedoo, where an upward-pointing index finger describes a circle in front of the body. Or the best approximation might be Twiddling-Thumbs. But neither is exactly right. Whoopdeedoo generally indicates the unimportance of whatever’s under discussion rather than boredom experienced by the gesturer. And my sense is that Twiddling-Thumbs indicates inaction and impatience more than pure boredom.

  Another French gesture without a clear local analog is On Se Tire (“Let’s get out of here”), which also appears in Italy and elsewhere in southern Europe. You can see it on the next page. There’s not really much in North America or, as far as I can tell, in most places around the world to compare this to directly. The closest thing here to On Se Tire might be Round-’Em-Up, which actually looks a lot like Whoopdeedoo—index pointing upward, describing a circle.b But Round-’Em-Up appears to be much less widespread than On Se Tire.

  It seems to me, from scattered observations, that Round-’Em-Up is generated by rotation at the elbow, whereas Whoopdeedoo comes more from the wrist. But this is only a hunch.

  We can already see that the conventional gestures in languages convey diverse meanings. This starts to answer the question about how universal gestures are. In absolute terms, they aren’t universal in either form or meaning. This diversity of gestures around the world also makes it hard to answer the second-order question: In those cases where you do find gestures with similar meanings across languages, how similar do they look?

  To answer this question, we have to find meanings that gestures are more consistently deployed to encode in the world’s languages. Gestures get used for a small set of very common things. One of these is pointing. People point differently in different places; in Japan, you point to yourself by putting your index finger to your nose;7 in parts of Papua New Guinea, you point with your nose!8 But pointing appears consistently. Another of the usual suspects is using the hands to depict space—to show the size or relative locations of things. People across cultures also gesture to greet and beckon to one another. And finally, around the world people use gestures to offend.

  French gesture On Se Tire. Source: Sylvain LeLarge, www.talenvoortalent.nl/englishspeakers.pdf.

  Naturally, we’re going to focus on the last of these. And so we ask, how do people around the world use gestures to insult, to demonstrate disdain, to deprecate? What movements of the body are offensive and why? How similar are the profane gestures of the world’s languages? And do any universal principles govern them? To answer these questions, we go on a tour of Birds of the world.

  # $ % !

  Let’s begin with the basic facts. The Bird (or the Middle Finger) is of course a big deal in North America. It’s our most censored and most disputed gesture because it lives at the intersection of high frequency and high offensiveness. The Bird has varied uses, but these largely track with what the expressions Fuck you and Fuck off can do. Like these, its linguistic analogs, it can be aggressive or dismissive, but it can also be used jocularly.

  The association in people’s minds between aggression and extending this one particular finger is strong. We know this from experimental work. One study asked people to extend either their middle finger or their index finger while reading a passage.9 The passage ambiguously described a made-up person, Donald, who could be interpreted as either aggressive or justifiably assertive (for instance, he refuses to pay his rent, but only after his landlord fails to make repairs—aggressive or assertive?). People extending their middle finger rated Donald as significantly more aggressive than did people extending their index finger. So one finger—as long as it’s the correct finger—can change how aggressively you interpret people’s behavior.

  The Bird has spread throughout the world, at least in part through the penetrating cultural influence exerted by American media. And yet, if you take a trip beyond our borders, you’ll find that in many places the Bird won’t fly. In some regions, the middle finger is just another digit to count or point with. For instance, in East Asia, the middle finger has traditionally had no notable profane association (although in recent years the Bird has been spreading its wings there too).

  Instead, around the world, there exist local Birds with different colors and plumage—gestures that convey aggression and disdain differently from the Bird. Some of these endogenous analogs look like close cousins of our Bird. For instance, the British equivalent uses both the middle and the index fingers in a V-shape. (Why the Brits need two fingers where we need just one is beyond the scope of our consideration here.)

  You can detect a family resemblance to the Bird in the Up-Yours gesture (also known as the Bras d’Honneur, French for “Arm of Honor”) used in southern and western Europe, among many other places. In it, the fist of the dominant hand rises, palm inward, often emerging from under the nondominant forearm. This gives it a similar overall shape to the Bird but using different body parts on a larger scale.

  Source: David Bergen.

  And if you want to stretch the comparison, you might find some similarity between these gestures and a profane one used in Iran and Afghanistan,10 among other countries, which looks a lot like our Thumbs-Up. Like the Bird, it uses an upward-pointing digit, although instead of the middle finger, it’s the thumb. This gesture is usually interpreted as indicating a thumb up somewhere very specific, a place where a thumb could be surprising and/or uncomfortable.

  And also in the realm of plausible similarity is a Russian gesture (used elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe as well) that looks a lot like what Americans do when we pretend to steal a child’s nose. This, the so-called Fig, with the thumb sticking out between the curled index and middle fingers, is a slightly milder version of our Bird.

  But as we continue our tour, we find gestures that are less and less similar in overall shape and detailed morphology to the Birds we know—gestures that don’t extend a finger or fist upward. Brazil has a gesture that uses the handshape of our A-OK (thumb and index forming a circle, with other digits extended) but orients the palm toward the gesturer’s own body, with the outside of the thumb-index circle pointing outward. You can see an example on the next page. This gesture is a profane analog of our Bird—it’s the rough manual equivalent of Fuck you. Or take the Mountza, an offensive and denigrating Greek gesture formed with all five fingers extended and the palm exposed. It looks a lot like the Talk-to-the-Hand gesture in Nort
h America but has the referential force of the middle finger.

  These differences in the ways people around the world use their bodies to communicate are important. In practical terms, as a visitor to some foreign country, you generally don’t want to accidentally give someone the local equivalent of the Bird. Conversely, you do need to know how to manually convey forceful meaning even when you don’t speak the local vernacular, whether it’s to a cab driver who tries to overcharge you or a maître d’ who refuses to seat you. That’s when a finger (or two) really proves its worth. But the world’s remarkable diversity of profane flicks of the wrist also starts to reveal—as we’ll see in a moment—why gestures take the particular forms they do.

  Source: David Bergen.

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  You’ll recall that with respect to words, the different or similar ways a word is translated across languages provide evidence on how arbitrary its sound is. We know, for instance, that the two consonants and one vowel of fuck don’t have any special relationship to the meaning they combine to convey, and we know this in part because other languages use totally different sounds to convey the same meaning—French baiser, Spanish cojer, Chinese cào, and so on. This is the principle of arbitrariness. Modern English has the word fuck because hundreds of unpredictable little things happened over thousands of years to create just the conditions for that word to emerge and be shaped to the point that it means just what it means and sounds just the way it sounds.

  When we ask the same question about gestures, we get a slightly different but equally complicated answer. Compare the Bird, the British Bird, the Fig, and the various other ways people use their hands to display disdain and to denigrate. Are these gestures arbitrary, in the same way the words of the spoken languages they accompany are? They’re certainly articulated in different ways. The Bird has a totally distinct form from the Fig, for example. It uses a different handshape and a different palm orientation. (And that’s not even considering the variants of the Bird—one where the middle finger erupts from a closed fist and another where it’s flanked by the bent knuckles of the index and ring fingers.) The British Bird uses one hand and two extended fingers. The Up-Yours uses two hands and no extended fingers. The Greek Mountza and Brazilian A-Not-OK are even more different. It seems that, at least to a first approximation, if diversity of forms across languages and cultures demonstrates arbitrariness, then gestures, just like words, are arbitrary.

  But let’s add a wrinkle to that reasoning. Is it possible that, while diverse, at least some of the Birds of the world are nonarbitrary, each in its own way? In other words, is there some meaningful reason why the Bird has the form it does and another reason why the Greek Mountza has the form it does, different though it might be?

  One way to answer this question is to look at the history of each gesture. Perhaps the origin of a gesture reveals why it looks the way it does. This is easier said than done—gestures don’t leave the same paper trail that words do through written language, and as a result differing stories often develop about how a gesture came to be. So it can be challenging to discriminate the true history of a gesture—its etymology—from the invented “folk” etymologies that people propagate. For instance, some version of this folk etymology of the Bird might have appeared in your inbox:

  In preparation for the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle fingers of every captured English soldier. Without their middle fingers, it would be impossible for the English to draw their renowned longbow, rendering them incapable of fighting in the future. The English longbow was made of the native English yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as “plucking the yew” (or “pluck yew”).

  But to the great bewilderment of the French, the English were victorious, and they began mocking the defeated French by waving their middle fingers at them, saying, “See, we can still pluck yew!”

  Since “pluck yew” is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative f, and thus the word is often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute.

  It’s also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as “giving the bird.”

  This is a fantastic story—fantastic in that it’s total fantasy. Basically nothing about it is true, from the military origin of the gesture to the pluck yew contrivance to the timing of its invention to the reason we call it the Bird.11 To find the true history of the Bird, we’d ideally want to find records of it in visual representations, like paintings, or, failing that, in written descriptions. Perhaps for self-evident reasons, profane gestures are entirely absent from early paintings and drawings. And they tend to be only sparsely accounted for in writing. Fortunately, the Bird is about as notable a gesture as there is, and it has left a discernible trickle of a written record.

  Here’s what we know from that record. The Bird has had a long and appropriately turbulent flight. It was not invented by English speakers—British or American. And it doesn’t date from anywhere close to as recently as the fifteenth century. That estimate is off by about 2,000 years. The earliest records place it in ancient Greece.12 For example, it shows up in the bawdy Greek playwright Aristophanes’s 419 BC play The Clouds, in which Strepsiades presents his middle finger to Socrates before waggling his penis at him.13 Those Greeks could party. In Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers (from 330 BC), the philosopher and critic Diogenes expresses disdain for Demosthenes, a prominent Greek statesman and orator, by flipping him the Bird and calling him a demagogue.14

  So the Bird was around in ancient Greece. The Romans’ passionate cultural appropriation of all things Greek extended beyond religion, democracy, and attire into things that really matter, like vulgar gestures. So enamored were they of the Greek Bird that they gave it a name: digitus impudicus, the “indecent finger.” Then, like now, it was deployed to great effect. The emperor Caligula reportedly denigrated his subjects by making them kiss his middle finger rather than his hand.15 Cassius, one of these offended subjects, then assassinated him (though there was a lot of assassinating going on at the time, and Caligula doesn’t appear to have been the easiest emperor to deal with, so we can’t be sure it was the finger that sealed the deal). In another instance of imperial digital intervention, Augustus Caesar allegedly punished an actor who presented the Bird to a heckling audience member by banishing him from Rome.16

  So we know that the Bird has been around for more than two millennia and that it wasn’t always called “the Bird,” at least not in its earliest incarnations. That name is a much more recent innovation, dating from the 1960s. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, people used the expression to give someone the big bird as a way to describe hissing at another individual, for instance, a performer or public speaker.17 From there, the term bird appears to have migrated from vocalizations to the manual gesture we now associate the word with. Not before 1967 did flipping the bird enter the written record. It first shows up in a music magazine article describing the Grateful Dead’s onstage antics.18

  But how did it come to have the form it does—why the extended middle finger? Some say that, at least in ancient times, the Bird was considered a phallic symbol.19 Strepsiades makes the relation clear with his juxtaposition of presented middle finger and penis. And the belief continues to the present day. For instance, anthropologist Desmond Morris (whom you might know as the celebrated author of The Naked Ape) argues, “The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles.”20 This might begin to explain why the Bird has the shape, or shapes, that it does. This explanation leans on the idea of iconicity—the notion that gestures may look like the things they represent. The Bird looks something like an erect penis.

  Similar iconic accounts have been offered for all the profane gestures we’ve seen thus far. The Up-Yours in fact has the same proposed explanation: it’s belie
ved to have originated as a phallic symbol too.21 The Fig has a more complicated history. In early Italian tradition, its name gave it away—it was described not only as making the Fig but also as the far le fiche, or “cunt gesture.” This is pretty damning evidence that people of the time thought of it as representing female genitalia, and the typical interpretation is that the thumb itself represents a clitoris. But by contrast, in current Russian use, the Fig is called shish, or “pine cone,” a word also used to refer to the glans, or tip of the penis, perhaps represented by the tip of the thumb. If these names are any indication, the Fig’s various incarnations over time and space have been iconic for different body parts.

  But it’s not all phalluses and clitorises. The Greek Mountza—that’s the open palm oriented toward the denigrated person—apparently dates back to a Byzantine penal custom of wiping cinders on criminals’ faces to defame them as they were paraded through towns (although it may have precursors in a gesture used to cast curses).22 The gesture derives its name, Mountza (“cinders”), from the ash-wiping practice that the hand evokes. Similarly, cultural interpreters describe the circle formed by the thumb and index finger in the Brazilian A-Not-OK as representing the anus.23

  These proposed origin stories are all quite similar in one way. They all explain profane gestures from around the world as more or less analog representations of specific things—usually body parts but also denigrating actions. This “iconicity” is akin to sound symbolism, but it lives in the visual rather than the auditory modality. The erect middle finger of the Bird originates in its similarity to the penis it’s meant to represent. The touching thumb and index finger of the Brazilian A-Not-OK form a circle to represent the shape of an anus.

  But if we’re hoping to understand why gestures have the forms they do, we’re still missing a step. These origin stories, even assuming they’re correct, only go as far as to explain why people might use an extended finger to represent a penis, or a thumb emerging from a clenched fist to represent a clitoris. But these gestures don’t mean “clitoris” or “penis.” They don’t mean “wiping ashes” or “anus.” Like their linguistic analogs, they serve predominantly as forceful indications of disdain or denigration. This is the missing step. Why would a manual representation of a phallus (or anus or clitoris) indicate derision and deprecation? Why would it be aggressive to show a manual facsimile of an organ?