Tidbit #30 - April 29, 2011

Remember the 60s? All the hippies talking about how groovy it'd be if everyone stopped the war, made free love, promoted peace? Yeah, I remember that, too. But, I've wondered what's up with that weird hand sign that they pioneered and is now used in common life. Why do they use that weird two fingers up sign?

Question: Where did the hand sign for peace come from?


Answer: Ahh, Wikipedia. It's helped us quite a bit in the long run, hasn't it? I searched it up, and found an entire article on the "V Sign". You can go to the article here.

An early recorded use of the "two-fingered salute" is in the Macclesfield Psalter of c.1330 (in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), being made by a glove in the Psalter’s marginalia. 

According to a popular legend, the two-fingered salute or V sign derives from the gestures of longbowmen fighting in the English army at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War. According to the story, the French claimed that they would cut off the arrow-shooting fingers of all the English and Welsh longbowmen after they had won the battle at Agincourt. But the English came out victorious and showed off their two fingers, still intact. Historian Juliet Barker quotes Jean Le Fevre (who fought on the English side at Agincourt) as saying that Henry V included a reference to the French cutting off longbowmen's fingers in his pre-battle speech. If this is correct it confirms that the story was around at the time of Agincourt, although it does not necessarily mean that the French practised it, just that Henry found it useful for propaganda, and it does not show that the two-fingered salute is derived from the hypothetical behaviour of English archers at that battle.

The first definitive known reference to the V sign in French is in the works of François Rabelais, a sixteenth-century satirist.

It was not until the start of the 20th century that clear evidence of the use of insulting V sign in England became available, when in 1901 a worker outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham used the gesture (captured on the film) to indicate that he did not like being filmed. Peter Opie interviewed children in the 1950s and observed in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren that the much older thumbing of the nose (cock-a-snook) had been replaced by the V sign as the most common insulting gesture used in the playground. (Re: Wikipedia.com Article)

Okay, that was a nice wall of text. Here's your summary:

The sign for peace could have started as a salute around the 1330s, where the sign was made from a glove. Some say that the sign was derived from the English Battle of Agincourt in 1413, when the French threatened to cut off the British's fingers, and the British showed off their two remaining digits. Henry V also made reference to this in a pre-battle speech. It was first referred to as the "V Sign" by François Rabelais, a satirist of the time. In 1901, a British worker used the gesture on a camera to show that he didn't want to be filmed. In the 1950s, Peter Opie discovered through interviewing children that biting your thumb at people had been replaced with the V sign as an insult gesture, like flipping someone off is today.

Still not satisfied? Here's your final condensed answer:

The V sign for peace could've been introduced in the 1330s as part of a glove or 1415 during the Hundred Years' War. It was first put into popular use in 1901.