The Middle Finger

You’re driving behind someone who keeps on tapping their brakes on purpose. They think you’re tailgating, but you’re definitely not. For some reason, this person is driving like a real asshole.

Fortunately, there’s a remedy that fixes the entire situation: gesturing at them with your middle finger up.

Okay, maybe it only feels satisfying for a few seconds, and then you’re still stuck in that same situation—only now, the other driver is utterly infuriated.

This potent symbol of utter contempt for someone or something has been around for a long time, although the meaning through various cultures has changed. Take the ancient Romans, who called the gesture digitus impudicus (“shameless finger”). This was tantamount to an erect penis, so you can get a sense of how quickly things might escalate if you flipped someone off in the Colosseum.

Does the gesture go back further than Rome? Certainly to at least the ancient Greeks, where Diogenes pointed at Demosthenes by extending his middle finger, and people pointed out how aggressive it already seemed to them.

Why the middle finger, though?

Well, for most people, it’s the longest of all your fingers. It’s an incredibly important digit: you can probably write something legible if you have your thumb and index finger, but the middle finger provides very deliberate support.

It’s kind of like the central finger, with two others on each side. It’s sort of like the king of fingers, at least if your hand was the chessboard. If you want to feel really cool when swing music starts to play, you typically allow the friction between your thumb and middle finger to begin to give way, forcing your middle finger to smack against the palm of your hand and ring finger—and making a snap.

Even physics has a good middle finger story. When Galileo had been buried in 1642, his corpse was placed in a modest grave in Florence. This is because he had been judged vehemently suspected of heresy after claiming that the Earth went around the Sun in space, and not the other way around. The Church wasn’t particularly interested in the overwhelming evidence, so Galileo was confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

By 1737, things had changed. A much better climate for science vis-a-vis the Church had coalesced, and it was finally clear that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. It was time to give Galileo a final, proper resting place inside of a monumental tomb built just for the occasion.

Unfortunately, moving a century-dead corpse meant that things might break off—or be broken off. Galileo lost three fingers and a tooth during the transfer, and wouldn’t you know it, one of the fingers was his middle finger. One opportunistic relic hunter was Anton Francesco Gori, who was something of a historian in Florence. He’s the one who ended up with Galileo’s bird, though it was ultimately displayed at a museum when Gori died.