Ever since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” the Super Bowl halftime show has been both the province of aged pop stars and a source of network official anxiety. This year’s epic spectacle starred Madonna, legions of acrobatic dancers, and the artists Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. It didn’t take much familiarity with that last duo to imagine that the NFL and NBC may soon have a bit of trouble on their hands.
And, indeed, from hands came trouble. One hand, actually, and one finger: M.I.A.’s left middle, which she flashed to the camera, scandalizing an entire nation on its most pure and sacred day. Just kidding, right? Not such a big deal. But the outcry was loud and righteous enough to make the BBC wonder when the middle finger became so offensive. As they note, it’s a salute with quite a lineage:
A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: “This is the great demagogue.”
The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian.
The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.
The article goes on to quote anthropologist Desmond Morris referring to the finger as “one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” and also lists several classic works that make reference to it. This caught our notice, of course, and sent us off to our Loeb Classical Library shelves. The BBC article notes the appearance of the middle finger in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds. Well, there’s a Loeb for that, Volume 488. The passage arrives in an exchange between Socrates and his inept pupil Strepsiades:
Socrates: Very well then, what would you begin learning now, of the subjects you were never taught anything about? Tell me, would it be measures, or rhythms, or words?
Strepsiades: I’ll take the measures: the other day a corn dealer shorted me two quarts.
Socrates: That’s not what I’m asking you; I’m asking what you consider to be the most beautiful measure, the three-measure or the four-measure?
Strepsiades: I say nothing beats the gallon.
Socrates: You’re making no sense, man!
Strepsiades: Bet me then, that a gallon isn’t a four-measure.
Socrates: To hell with you! You’re a stupid clod. No doubt you’d soon learn about rhythms!
Strepsiades: But how will these rhythms help me get my daily bread?
Socrates: To begin with, by making you smart in society, and enabling you to recognize which rhythms are shaped for marches, say, and which by the finger.
Strepsiades: By the finger? That one I know, by Zeus.
Socrates: Well, tell me then.
Strepsiades: What could it be but this finger here? (raising his middle finger to Socrates) In the old days, when I was a boy, it was this one.
Socrates: You’re a brainless lout!
Socrates’s reference to “the finger” is to dactylic meter, in which one long syllable is followed by two short syllables, in the pattern of the relative lengths of the three bones in the human finger. Strepsiades’s middle finger in response is often cited as one of the earliest recorded indications of the gesture’s ability to offend.
The BBC article also notes the Latin poet Martial’s reference to the digitus infamis in his Epigrams (Loebs for those, too: Volumes 94, 95, and 480). You historians of the gesture will also find reference to the middle finger in Tacitus. And fans of Caligula know that as Roman Emperor he is said to have made subjects kiss his middle finger (also known as digitus impudicus - the shameless or indecent finger), rather than his hand.
Perhaps all this connection to the Romans explains the sartorial inspiration for Madonna’s halftime extravaganza? It’s as good a guess as any.
