Body Language and Gesture

Although swearing is generally regarded as an exclusively verbal practice, blasphemy, profanity, and obscenity cover a wide variety of modes, including violations of taboos through insulting signs or outrageous actions. These modes can be highly developed in what were traditionally called “primitive” cultures. Thus the ritualistic action of pointing the finger among the Australian aborigines can in itself have fatal consequences for the victim, the equivalent of the curse. It is a viable speculation that in the remote stages of a culture, gesture increasingly accompanies and even replaces language (see Sapir 1921, 21 and Barber 1964, 24-34). Consequently, a historical survey shows that various modes of body language continue to thrive up to modern times, some of them sufficiently provocative to lead to legal consequences.

The most unambiguous and wounding gesture of personal contempt, short of actually laying hands on someone, is to spit at them, notably recorded in the humiliation of Christ in the Gospels (Mark 10:34 and Matthew 26:67). Secular references abound from the Middle English period onward, and there are powerful instances in Shakespeare, such as Shylock’s complaint in Merchant of Venice that the Gentiles “spit upon my Jewish gaberdine” (I iii 109) and the Lady Anne’s rejection of the outrageous advances of Richard Gloucester at her husband’s funeral ( Richard III , I ii 148). Elsewhere in Shakespeare about a dozen similar instances are to be found. One of the last references recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), chapter xxxviii.

Offensive body language, or what Ashley Montagu calls “gesticulatory swearing” (1973, 344), has become the focus of considerable discussion in modern times, often carrying the misleading implication that it is a modern phenomenon. Although little evidence exists in the surviving Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature, there are highly developed instances in the Renaissance. François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533–1535) has a whole farcical chapter in which Panurge indulges in a contest of insulting sign language with an Englishman (Book II, chapter 19). Absurdly and tantalizingly, the signs are described in detail, but their meaning is not. The famous exchanges of coded provocation between the servants of the Capulets and the Montagus in Romeo and Juliet (1594) provide a notable early example. Since the actions are derived from Continental practices, they need to be explained in the text to the English audience:

Sampson : I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they do bear it.

Abram : Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Sampson : I do bite my thumb, sir.

Abram: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Sampson (aside to Gregory): Is the law on our side if I say ay?

Gregory (aside to Sampson): No.

Sampson: I do not bite my thumb at you, sir; but I do bite my thumb, sir. (I i 47-57)

First, the servants seek to perpetuate the feud between the great families of Verona, but use a lower form of currency, the gesture; second, they are uncertain of the codes, wishing both to provoke and remain ambiguous, even using “sir” in an ironic fashion. Their actions are explained in Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) under the entry for nique : “To threaten or defie by putting the thumbe naile into the mouth and with a jerke (of the upper teeth) make it to knack [make a cracking sound].”

Cotgrave’s entry is quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary in relation to another gesture, “to give the ‘fico’, to insult.” Dr. Johnson defined fico in 1755 in both linguistic and physical terms as “An act of contempt done with the fingers expressing ‘a fig for you.’” ( Fico is Italian for fig .) The action is defined more specifically by the OED as “A contemptuous gesture which consisted of thrusting the thumb between two of the closed fingers or into the mouth,” supported by quotations from the Elizabethan period, such as Thomas Lodge’s in 1596: “Giving me the Fico with his thombe in his mouth” ( Wits Misery , 23). Other continental idioms, such as French faire la figue and Spanish dar la biga , denote the same action. Among slang dictionaries, Grose (1785) curiously has no reference, but Farmer and Henley (1890–1904) carry a long colorful etymological account, alluded to by Ben Jonson and others, concerning the emperor Barbarossa, who avenged an insult to his empress by making prisoners use only their teeth in “the extraction of a fig from the fundament of a mule.” Two of the braggart Pistol’s numerous bellicose ejaculations in Shakespeare’s Henry V are “Die and be damned and figo for your friendship!” and “The fig of Spain!” (III vi 62). In another piece of bluster he vows, with obvious emphatic gesture:

When Pistol lies, do this; and fig me, like
The bragging Spaniard.
( Henry IV, Part II , V iii 120-22)

However a sexual aspect is suggested by the use of fig in Elizabethan slang to mean fuck . Charmian certainly puns on this sense, saying to the Soothsayer: “I love long life better than figs” ( Antony and Cleopatra , I i 34). A modern survival is the idiom “not to give a fig” for something.

The Italian term cornuto contains a powerfully insulting complex of symbolic actions implying adultery, discussed in the entry for cuckoldry. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the term was borrowed into English, the related word born came to acquire strong associations of cuckoldry, but neither the term nor the symbolic gesture has ever conveyed the gravity of insult surrounding them in Italy, where the repertoire is notable and the subject of several works—for example, Desmond Morris, Gestures (1979). Peter Burkein his article, translated from the French as “The Art of Insult in Italy,” records the outrageous response of a famous sixteenth-century Roman courtesan, Isabel de Luna, to a demand for debt: she wiped her backside with it (1989, 53).

The degree of symbolic gesticulation used in communication is often derived from cultural factors. When Captain James Cook arrived in Oceania in 1774, he recorded this greeting from the natives: “One fellow shewed us his back side in such a manner that it was not necessary to have an interpreter” (Beaglehole 1961, 485). On her visits to New Zealand, Queen Elizabeth has often been subjected to this insult or gesture of protest, known by the Maori name of the whakapohane , described by a local expert as “the ultimate culturally sanctioned way of registering opprobrium” (Mort 1986, 212). The same practice has become well known on college campuses in the United States as mooning , recorded from 1965, although it is more of a prank or taunt, intended variously to impress, register protest, or affront. Moon in the slang sense of “buttocks” is recorded as far back as 1756, but the subsequent history is disjunctive.

The related practice of “flashing” has a longer continuous history, starting as underworld slang in the eighteenth century, and defined by Grose (1785) as: “To shew ostentatiously. To flash one’s ivory; to laugh and shew one’s teeth.” The modern genital sense is first recorded in Farmer and Henley (1890–1893), but was then applied to both sexes: “To flash a bit (venery) … to permit examination; to ’spread’… said of women only” and “To flash it or to flash one’s meat—to expose the person … said usually of men.” The modern practice invariably has the motive to shock and usually occurs in a public place. The more recent action of “streaking” (running naked in public) seems to date from a sudden craze in late 1973 in Los Angeles, often performed as a communal act. Desmond Morris wryly commented: “The phenomenon of ‘streaking’ is a strange example of an act that only has value as an Overexposed Signal” (1977, 210).

More than half a century ago R.G. Collingwood made these observations about cultural differences in communication: “A dispute between Italian peasants is conducted hardly more in words than in a highly elaborated language of manual gesture…. Italians do not possess more sensitive fingers than northern Europeans. But they do have a long tradition of controlled finger-gesture, going back to the ancient game of micare digitis ” (1938, 242). (The “ancient game” is that of guessing how many fingers one has raised or hidden.) It is a common observation by visitors to the Latin parts of Europe that the indigenous population uses gestures to a marked degree. Thus the Larousse Dictionnaire du Français Argotique (Dictionary of French Slang) includes three pages of provocative gestures (2001, 261-63). However, one must be cautious about such generalizations, as the following extract shows:

Some cried, some swore, and the tropes and figures of Billingsgate were used without reserve in all their native zest and flavour; nor were those flowers of rhetoric unattended with significant gesticulation. Some snapped their fingers, some forked them out, some clapped their hands, and some their backsides.

This wonderfully graphic description of rude exchanges and robust body language has a timeless zest. But the source is unexpected, being Tobias Smollett’s description of a party in Bath, a fashionable upper-class enclave, in his novel Humphry Clinker (1771, 53-54). The allusion to Billingsgate is thus ironically amusing, normally referring to the crude language notoriously used by the fishwives in that London market. The passage also indicates that insulting gestures were well developed in the eighteenth century, a period traditionally regarded as highly formal. Snapping of fingers would not now qualify as a mode of insult, but is alluded to in Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses (1583): “Then snap go the fingers ful brauely [very stylishly] God wot” (II, 50). There is this memorable altercation in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44):

[Mrs. Prig] leaned forward, and snapped her fingers once, twice, thrice, each time nearer to the face of Mrs. Gamp; and then rose to put on her bonnet, as one who felt that there was now a gulf between them, which nothing could ever bridge across.

The shock of this blow was so violent and sudden, that Mrs. Gamp sat staring at nothing with uplifted eyes, and her mouth open as if she was gasping for breath. (chapter xlix)

We are certainly familiar with fingers used in other insulting modes. Indeed the phrase “to fork the fingers” is recorded, remarkably, as far back as 1640, in a collection called Witts Recreations : “His wife … behind him forks her fingers” (C ii).

Body language shows considerable instability over time, as well as the capacity to transfer to different cultures. Even the clapping of hands, now the traditional sign of applause and approval, was in earlier times a gesture of derision. Miles Coverdale (1535) translated Job 27:23 as: “Than [Then] clappe men their hondes at him, yee and ieaste [jest] of him.” The King James Version (1611) is more contemporary in its symbolism: “Men shall clap their hands at him and shall hiss him out of his place.” The wagging of the head was also a gesture of contempt in earlier times: “They that passed by revyled him waggynge ther heeddes” is in the William Tyndale Version (1526) of the mocking of Christ on the Cross. All three modes are found in the King James Version of Lamentations 2:15: “All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem.” To hiss someone is far older, recorded in John Wyclif’s translation of the Bible in 1388. Now the action is usually confined to public disapproval of a performance, known in stage parlance as “getting” (or being given) the bird, previously “the big bird” (i.e., the goose), recorded from about 1825. The verb to goose dates from the same period, but has probably been driven out of use by the rival sense from rhyming slang whereby goose = goose and duck = fuck , and more recently, “to grope,” recorded from about 1906.

Sticking out one’s tongue, another overt gesture of contempt, is related to the more disguised action of sticking one’s tongue in one’s cheek, or speaking “tongue in cheek,” recorded from about 1768, to which a derisive significance was previously attributed. (Today, of course, this action is metaphorical and simply denotes irony.) The literal action has become prevalent in sports in recent decades as a form of provocation and contempt. The tennis champion in the women’s French Open (2004), Anastasia Myskina, stuck out her tongue at her opponent upon receiving the trophy at the award ceremony.

Body language obviously continues to supply significant forms of aggressive and insulting behavior. While some gestures, like mooning, flashing, and streaking, have no semantic correlatives, others show a cross-fertilization between gesture and language. Continuing the tradition of figo and cornuto , the insulting phrase “Up yours!” is a verbalization of what the OED coyly terms “an impolite gesture, a shortened form of ‘Up your arse!,’ itself an abbreviated imperative of ‘Shove [it] up your arse!’” For the uninitiated, Norman Moss’s British/American Dictionary (1984) illustrated the British style (forked fingers) and the American (single finger). The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) defines the action more accurately as “an obscene gesture of contempt,” referring to the semantic analogue of Latin digitis impudicus , and giving the earliest instance as 1938. Although “giving the finger” is a deliberately provocative and insulting action, only flashing and streaking are legal offenses per se, no doubt because they involve exposing the genitalia.