Dear Americans and other lifeforms

[burntcopper]

Was re-reading Warren Ellis' Crecy, which has the best one line sum-up of the two-finger gesture possible.

"I can kill you from 200 yards away with these."Which gets me wondering : what in the nine hells does your one-finger gesture actually *mean*? Seriously, what's it supposed to imitate? Most rude and obscene gestures have some sort of real-

Comments

[gmh]

what in the nine hells does your one-finger gesture actually *mean*? Seriously, what's it supposed to imitate?Oookay. I suspect that there are a number of explanations for the more common ones, as every cultural group tends to have its own

[clanwilliam]

*cough*

I believe you pinched one of 'em from me. It was a leaving present from my last set of permanent colleagues who clearly thought my vocabulary needed expanding...

[gmh]

Actually, I wasn't thinking of that book, as it's mostly 18th Century slang; which, while wonderful, is not the required period.

I was mainly thinking of Geoffrey Hughes' Swearing; which has a chapter that might have some useful bits of information.

[dario006]

RE:Slang

I tried looking around myself but I see your problem with date stamps and common usage, I found some stuff on the term Gay first coming to stage/screen about 1933/38 so it's possible it was in more common usuage in the 40's.

"Gay" was first used to refer to a male homosexual in the 1933 play "Young & Evil." Cary Grant used it in the 1938 movie "Bringing up Baby" to refer to a transvestite. Gershn Legman & G.V. Henry mentioned the term in their book Sexual Variations (1941)."

One thing you might want to try is contacting the OED regarding editions around that time and if they have any ideas. You might spark someone's OCD and they'll go searching for you.

Hope you feel better soon hun x

[gmh]

Right. Hughes has turned up a few, as I thought he might:

(Obviously, the year beside each term is when Hughes records it as coming into common usage:

1914: faggot
1923: fag
1924: queen
1929: homo
1929: pansy
1932: queer

also:

1942: dyke
1954: butch

(I have some reservations about the dating of 'queen'; I'm pretty sure that someone wrote of Julius Caesar that he allowed his favoured troops to call him a queen and mock him if they'd fought well.)

Other contemporary terms: chicken (US-influenced), 'friend of Dorothy' (US origin, definitely post-1939); alas, Cassell's isn't much use, because it doesn't deal with specifics on time and social connotations.

With regard to dario006's comment below, 'gay' was actually associated as a descriptive term for homosexual circles well before it became directly synonymous; the testimony (for the defence) of John Saul, one of the male prostitutes ('professional Sodomites') involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal included his referring to his associates as 'gay'; which at the time was used as a slang

[gmh]

Oops; the Roman term for it was digitus impudicus; I was getting it confused with fungus.

Also; had a chance to raise the subject of insulting gestures with someone from rural Turkey (Trebizond!); she'd never heard of it, so I'm guessing that it may no longer be a current gesture.

(That said, the Ayyubids of C.11th/12th Egypt and Syria have comparatively little in common with modern Turks, so it isn't necessarily a bogus source.)