While this is completely eligible offense, proper discretion is advised: If you wear glasses, pretend to adjust them on the bridge of your nose with your middle finger. During a meeting when someone interrupts you.If the official reacts by glaring at you like he wants you dead, you’ve scored. The larger and more boisterous the crowd, the louder you must scream. In most cases, you should also scream obscenities at the offending official at the top of your lungs. In response to a bad call by a referee or umpire.If you’re positive that he intentionally cut you off, roll down the window and scream “F**k You” as loud as you can while extending both arms out the window to make sure the bastard sees them. When someone cuts you off in traffic.Use both hands if you even suspect the idiot did it on purpose.Particularly when you’re too out of your mind to say anything intelligent, or you’ve concluded that the only other viable alternative is to break the enemy’s face: Regardless of potential jail time or fines, there are instances when it’s not only appropriate to flip someone off, it’s damn necessary. (Although, if I thought I could do it and get away with the $20 fine, I’d probably go for it too.)Ĭompletely logical reasons for flipping someone off Either way, think twice before you honor that police officer with the single finger salute. So, you may get off with as little as a $20 fine, or you may spend up to a year in jail, depending on extenuating circumstances. If you do end up in the pokey, it will likely be based on a charge of disorderly conduct or creating a public nuisance. So where does the law come down on flipping the bird? In most jurisdictions, while it’s not technically illegal to give someone the finger, flipping off the wrong cop at the wrong time can cost you some money, land you in jail, or both. The extension of the middle finger and the long arm of the law Just imagine it for a moment: Cave guys flipping off other cave guys for ogling their cave babes! More likely, bird flippage goes all the way back into prehistory. Most experts doubt that the ancient Greeks were the original flippers of the bird however. Even then, the use of the middle finger had a clear, obscene connotation. The earliest recorded mention of the finger is in the play “The Clouds,” written by the Greek dramatist, Aristophanes in 423 B.C. Augustus Caesar expelled entertainers from his presence with an obscene wave of his middle finger. It is identified as the digitus impudicus (impudent finger) in Ancient Roman writings, while reference to the use of the middle finger is also found in ancient Greek comedy as a means of insulting another person. The Emperor Caligula insulted people by making them kiss his middle finger instead of his hand. While it sounds like the perfect beginning for our favorite obscene gesture, allusions to the middle finger go back as far as early Mediterranean cultures and variations of it can be tracked across every civilization with a written history. This famous weapon was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as “plucking the yew,” or “pluck yew.” Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English achieved a major victory and began mocking their defeated rivals by wagging their middle fingers and proclaiming: “See, we can still pluck yew! PLUCK YEW!” I’m sure you can extrapolate from here. Without their middle fingers, the story goes, it would be impossible for them to draw their renowned English longbows and would therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. Perhaps my favorite explanation of the origin of “the finger” dates to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when French soldiers, anticipating victory over the English, proposed cutting off the middle fingers of all English prisoners. In reality, this non-verbal method of telling people to “stick it where the sun don’t shine” can be traced back to ancient Rome and the Greco-Roman Empire. Most of us assume that the act of giving someone the finger is a contemporary gesture. There are many variations to it, and there are many names for it: “flipping the bird, “giving the finger,” “the highway salute,” “the New York hello,” “the double barrel salute,” “the one-finger victory salute,” just to name a few.Ĭall it what you will we’ve all done it, and we’ve all had it done to us.
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