The history behind the most controversial digit

By Scottie Andrew | CNN

If you’ve ever “flipped the bird,” you have something in common with ancient Greeks.

It was around 2,500 years ago that the naughty Greeks developed a phallic gesture to offend, taunt and literally poke each other. 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.

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. Here’s how it became the human hand’s most obscene digit.

The middle finger originated as a phallic gesture

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.

Proudly displaying a middle finger was usually a joke, an insult or a sexual proposition, Nelson and other classical researchers posit. A few sources from ancient Greece reference middle fingers being used to prod or poke people’s persons, from nostrils to, well, nethers.

The Greek playwright Aristophanes was also purportedly a fan of the gesture, referring to “the long finger” in several of his plays.

In his comedy “The Clouds,” written in 419 B.C., a caricature of Socrates attempts to instruct the debtor Strepsiades about poetic meter. Strepsiades makes a crude joke about using a different finger to create rhythm. 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. Whatever the intent, the Socrates character responds with disgust.

The gesture eventually made its way to ancient Rome, where locals likely called it “digitus impudicus” – the indecent digit. The Roman historian Suetonius reported that the emperor Caligula forced his subjects to kiss his middle finger – per anthropologist and leading middle-finger historian Desmond Morris, this was a demeaning gesture that represented the ruler’s member.

Morris has said that the middle finger we know today – the digit hoisted high in the air, other fingers bending to its will – represents a penis and testicles.

“It is saying, this is a phallus that you’re offering to people, which is a very primeval display,” Morris told BBC in 2012.

It’s not clear, though, whether the ancient Greeks and Romans extended their middle fingers vertically in the air. Nelson wrote that while ancient people did likely use their middle fingers to make obscene gestures, they may have pointed them horizontally or in other directions – a bit different from the typical “finger” we know today.

“In the end then it is perhaps best to keep ‘the finger’ to ourselves,” Nelson wrote.

‘Flipping the bird’ is perhaps even more offensive today

The middle finger’s popularity faltered, but did not entirely disappear, during the Middle Ages, likely due to the growing influence of the Catholic Church and its disapproval of sexual gestures, researchers have concluded. Morris has said that the middle finger landed in the US with Italian immigrants in the late 19th century.