Fliiping the bird bell full#

There’s a photo of Old Hoss Radbourn of the Boston Beaneaters flipping off a player from the New York Giants. But I will add that the Latin digitus impudicus meant “shameless, indecent or offensive finger.” Pretty much.įast forward a couple thousand years and we see the bird showing up in US baseball in 1886. Within what is termed the “Classical Era” of the bird, there is far too much detailed history to include here. But being there must have been a laugh-riot. We’ll step back from explaining this double entendre, leaving it to the classical poetry scholars. Socrates is pressing Strepsiades on meter in poetry and the latter pushes back, saying he knows well what a dactyl is and flips off Socrates. We see the bird appear in Aristophanes play The Clouds in 423 BCE. In Greek this gesture was called katapygon, or roughly the combination of “downwards” and “rump” or “buttocks”. It is recorded that when strangers at the inn were expressing their wish to catch sight of the great orator Demosthenes, Diogenes stuck out his middle finger and exclaimed, “This, for you, is the demagogue of the Athenians”. Most sources credit the ancient Greeks with originating the bird, though likely they were merely there for the first public recognition of the flip and cave people had been doing it for millennia, having found a pre-verbal means to exclaim, “Keep your grubbers off my leg o’ mastodon.” We’ll get to the “how to’s” in a minute.īut as a sideline, it’s worthwhile to explore the history of this “bird” and prepare to at least use the damned thing properly and with respect to its cultural primacy.įlipping the bird has deep roots. It’s getting bad when a writer has to say that.Īs a contingency, flipping the bird deftly is something to keep in one’s vest pocket for that rare time one thinks it warranted, after careful self-evaluation and thought. But no good outcome ever resulted.įurther, in these times of utter social and political polarization, what is required of us is more patience, more listening, more empathy, and less ad hominem attacks, less Facebook rants, and yes, less birds. Momentarily I felt righteous and my sense of injustice was briefly sedated.

Fliiping the bird bell full#

I am prepared.Īnd, full disclosure, I have in fact flipped the bird. Intellectually experiencing the worst case makes pursuing the better easier. Doing so crosses a line that most of us do not intend, and one that is very difficult to retrace.īut personally, I think about decisions and choices in terms of a continuum of possibilities and outcomes, best to worst case in other words. Let me preface these brief remarks by saying that by no means do I recommend any of us traipse about our lives flipping one another off. “Fighting words”, as it were, in one finger. The venerable bird, that ancient gesture of abandonment of civility and any pretension of effort to understand the other. and Cee Lo Green during her own halftime show.ĭid you even notice this middle-digit moment? And do you think it’s worthy of FCC action? Weigh in by posting a comment.Ahh. I’m not sure how friendly Madonna may be feeling after being upstaged by both M.I.A. While the FCC could - maybe - slap a fine on NBC for this halftime mishap (one not nearly as noticeable as the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake incident of 2004) the harsher punishment may have been issued backstage. She’s long enjoyed flaunting her connection to the Sri Lanka Tamil Tigers, and her latest music video shows her rapping and steering through the streets of a Middle Eastern country in what appears to be a protest of Saudi Arabian laws that bar women from driving.

This would not be the first time the “Paper Planes” artist has courted controversy. NBC and the NFL issued apologies for the incident, with an NBC spokesman characterizing the finger-flipping episode as “a spontaneous gesture that our delay system caught late.” M.I.A.’s simultaneous use of the s-word appeared to have been bleeped out moments after the incident, the screen went black a beat longer than usual for a television transition, especially in so orchestrated a show. who joined Madonna and Nicki Minaj for the track “Give Me All Your Luvin’ ” - raised her middle finger toward the camera during her performance. But one of her fellow performers still managed to sneak in a gesture that may not please the FCC.Īs confirmed by a screengrab that circulated on Twitter, M.I.A. Madonna may have made it through her Super Bowl halftime show with no wardrobe malfunctions. Madonna with Nicki Minaj, left, and M.I.A., who was only lifting a pom-pom at this point in the performance.