![]() ![]() Fox received complaints from viewers who believed former American Idol host Simon Cowell scratched his cheek with his middle finger as a covert obscene gesture. That’s probably a wise choice, given recent history. The FCC has never explicitly banned the finger from television broadcasts, but stations typically pixelate the finger rather than test the agency. It’s not yet clear whether the FCC will prosecute NBC for the obscene gesture. Flashing a thumbs-up to an Afghan with no exposure to Western habits is the equivalent of flipping him the bird. ![]() In Afghanistan, Iran, and a few other countries, the thumb, rather than the middle finger, represents the phallus. The earliest known use of the bird in the New World didn’t come until 1886, when a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters flashed his middle finger in a team photo. The middle finger gesture fell out of favor during the Middle Ages, likely because the Catholic Church disapproved of its sexual suggestiveness. In a show of superiority, eccentric Roman Emperor Caligula made senators kneel and kiss his middle finger, which was understood to represent his phallus. (The ancient Greeks also associated the penis with birds, although there’s no evidence that they ever referred to the middle finger itself as a bird or showing it to someone as “flipping the bird.”) The ancient Romans called the middle finger digitus impudicus, or the impudent finger. The Greek philosopher Diogenes show ed his middle finger as a sign of disrespect to the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C.E. If showing someone the middle finger wasn’t already a common insult at that time, it became one within the next century. play The Clouds, the character Strepsiades jokes that when he was a boy he kept time by tapping his phallus rather than his middle finger. As many writers have pointed out, the middle finger became a symbol of the penis at least 2,500 years ago. The obscene gesture itself is far older than that, though. ![]()
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