Flipping People Off

Ah…the satisfaction of flipping people off! I miss it. I don’t flip people off anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to. In my mind, I’m flipping the bird all the time. It’s just that I can’t do it for real. It’s one of the downsides of my having systemic scleroderma, an uncommon auto-immune disease that causes hardening of my connective tissues – including my skin.

Over the twenty years since I was first diagnosed, my hardening skin has caused my finger joints to contract, making them bend and become fixed in certain positions. Positions that don’t allow for me to flip people off.

And I’m bummed. Because it’s not just flipping people off that I miss. It’s (not listed in order of importance) shaking hands properly, giving the peace sign, knocking on doors, shuffling cards, crossing my fingers for luck, holding hands with fingers interlocked, making a fist, opening a jar of peanut butter, giving a “high-five” or a fist bump, telling someone to be quiet by placing a straight finger before my lips, clapping at my daughter’s soccer goal, pressing doorbells or typing my zip code into the gas pump, securing buttons on my shirts with a decent amount of speed, wearing my wedding ring, pointing, cheering with a “number one” gesture, typing the way I learned in high school, washing my face without a washcloth, rubbing sunscreen onto my or my daughter’s face, waving without looking like a derelict, punching someone, turning a doorknob properly, wearing gloves, sitting on the ground and leaning against my stretched out arms, holding a basketball, volleyball, or softball, crossing my fingers behind my back giving me permission to fib, clipping my finger and toe nails, getting a fork to my mouth without dropping the food that’s on it, putting devil ears behind someone’s head before a picture is taken, opening a bottle of Diet Coke,… I could go on. Well, not really. That’s pretty much it.

The point is, you don’t realize what you use your fingers for until you can’t move them properly anymore.

So let’s get back to flipping people off.

I’ve done a bit of research on this popular but rude gesture and I’ve come across some interesting information I’d like to share with you. Let me first tell you about the origin of sticking your middle or “bad” finger in the air, what it meant originally, and what it has evolved to mean.

No one disputes that the hand gesture where only the middle finger is extended originated in ancient Rome or Greece. People believed that the hand in this position, resembled a man’s genitals — the extended finger looking like a penis with the other bent fingers looking like testicles. In ancient times, people would “flip people off” using this hand gesture to ward off the “evil eye”.

Okay, so what is the evil eye, you ask. It’s basically someone giving you a malicious glare (the hairy eyeball, I guess), intending to cause you bad luck. I guess these ancient folks, if they suspected that you were about to give them the evil eye, would flip you the bird so they wouldn’t be cursed with bad luck. To protect themselves. Hmm. I don’t understand why they thought a penis would protect them from evil forces but, maybe they knew something I don’t.

The extended middle finger eventually was used as a symbol of sexual intercourse, but giving “the finger” evolved into a more vulgar interpretation and was used to threaten or intimidate the person you were aiming it at.

It is believed that Italian immigrants brought the middle finger gesture to America. The earliest documentation of someone in America giving “the finger” was in 1886. A picture was taken of a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters giving the finger to a player for the New York Giants.

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Switching gears for a minute, let’s talk about the “A-OK” hand gesture. You’ll understand in a minute. But before we talk about the gesture signifying “OK”, I’ll tell you about where we get the term “OK”, okay?

Not all of the dates I found regarding the initial use of the term and the eventual use of the hand gesture for “OK” jive with each other, but I’ll take a stab at it.

First of all, it’s probable that the origin of the term “OK” was when an American newspaperman used it as an abbreviation for “oll korrect” in the 1830s. It is believed that “oll korrect” was deliberately misspelled so copy editors would know to delete it before typesetting.

Using abbreviated words was becoming common in the United States in the 1930s. The term “OK” took off in popularity during Martin Van Buren’s campaign for President of the United States in 1937. Van Buren was coincidentally from Old Kinderhook (O-K), New York and his supporters used “OK” to cheer him on. Van Buren’s opponents, however, used “OK” to make jeers like, “Out of Kash, Out of Kredit and Out of Klothes.” (As an aside, Van Buren won the election and served as our President from 1837 to 1841. He was the first President born after the United States gained its independence from Great Britain.)

I’m not sure when the hand gesture for “OK” first began, but we can assume it was some time after the use of the term. In the “OK” hand gesture, the circle formed by the touching of your thumb and index finger represents the “O” and the three extended fingers represent the “K”.

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For some reason, I have always just assumed that the hand gestures we use in America have the same meaning outside our country. But they don’t.

In some countries, for instance, giving someone the finger has no meaning at all. On the other hand (pun intended), the OK gesture is offensive in France, where you’re calling someone “worthless”, in Turkey where it’s an insult to gay people, or, in Latin America, where it has the same meaning as our flipping someone off!

Here’s a funny story from American history: In the 1950s, then-Vice President Richard Nixon did a goodwill tour of Latin America. On a stop in Brazil, Nixon exited the plane and, raising both arms above his head, gave a double A-OK gesture and the crowd booed. He had just given everyone a big “F-U”. It seems that even back then our country needed some work on our international relations.

Now I’m not so bummed about my inability to flip people off, because I’m able to do a reasonable rendition of the OK sign even with my contracted fingers. All I have to do is get myself down to Mexico where they’ll understand what I mean. And there’s really no reason why I can’t start using the OK gesture in the U.S. to flip someone off. My own secret sign language.

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I was shocked to read about how many American hand gestures have entirely different meanings in other countries. Below is a table where I’ve listed some of them. I couldn’t find a picture of a fist with only a pinky finger extended so I didn’t include it in the table. My advice to you, though, if you’re ever traveling to China: Do not make that gesture unless you mean to call somebody a loser.