The gesture eventually made its way to ancient Rome, where locals likely called it “digitus impudicus” – the indecent digit. Whatever the intent, the Socrates character responds with disgust. Translators of the text usually conclude that Strepsiades gesticulates with his middle finger (or, in some translations, reveals his privates) to refer to masturbation, said Nelson. Strepsiades makes a crude joke about using a different finger to create rhythm. In his comedy “The Clouds,” written in 419 B.C., a caricature of Socrates attempts to instruct the debtor Strepsiades about poetic meter. The Greek playwright Aristophanes was also purportedly a fan of the gesture, referring to “the long finger” in several of his plays. A few sources from ancient Greece reference middle fingers being used to prod or poke people’s persons, from nostrils to, well, nethers. Proudly displaying a middle finger was usually a joke, an insult or a sexual proposition, Nelson and other classical researchers posit. The cheeky Greeks “probably relied on the use of the middle finger to represent an erect penis,” wrote Max Nelson, who teaches courses on classical civilizations at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, in a 2017 piece on the gesture’s origins. The middle finger originated as a phallic gesture Here’s how it became the human hand’s most obscene digit. The middle finger has since become a frequently used emoji, an unintentional guest during a Super Bowl halftime show, a surprise live sign-off on the BBC and a crude gesture wielded by angry motorists. While throwing up a middle finger today clearly communicates a resounding “f**k you,” in classical society, historians say a middle finger was more of a ribald sexual reference. It was around 2,500 years ago that the naughty Greeks developed a phallic gesture to offend, taunt and literally poke each other. If you’ve ever “flipped the bird,” you have something in common with ancient Greeks.
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