A Brief History Of The Middle Finger

Or “digitus impudicus” as they say in Latin

Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

I’m sure most of us have used the middle finger at some point in our lives, but have you thought about where this obscene yet often-needed gesture comes from?

I was re-watching James Cameron’s very famous movie, Titanic, recently. You might have heard of it?

Historically, I have done this to fill up my romantic fuel tank, but this time, I found myself asking some important questions that were unrelated to the love story.

Specifically, there’s a scene before the ship slams against the iceberg, where Rose, the female protagonist, decides to free herself from her fiance’s tight grip. As her (now ex)-fiance’s bodyguard pursues her, she flips him off.

The movie was set in 1912, and that particular scene would have occurred on April 14, 1912, to be exact, the fateful day when the ship sank.

Rose’s gesture got me thinking about the middle finger’s origin story.

Where did it come from? Was it even around in 1912? Why that particular finger?

As it turns out, The Bird is “one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” says anthropologist Desmond Morris. According to his research, the upright finger represents a penis and the bent fingers…