Gestures: Their Origin and Meanings
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| THE THUMB UP MEANINGS: | |||||
| 1 | O. K. | 738 | |||
| 2 | One | 40 | |||
| 3 | Sexual insult | 36 | |||
| 4 | Hitch-hike | 30 | |||
| 5 | Directional | 14 | |||
| 6 | others | 24 | |||
| 7 | not used | 318 | |||
DESCRIPTION
The clenched hand is extended. with the thumb vertically erect. In Englishit is better known by thc popular name 'thumbs up', despite thc fact thatthe action is commonly performed with only one hand.ORIGINS
Few gestures can have a stranger history than the familiar 'thumbs up'.There is no doubt in the popular mind as to its origin. Everyone agreesthat it hails from the days of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. whena decision had to be made concerning thc fate of a beaten warrior. PeterQuennell, in his book on The Colosseum describes what has now become thegenerally accepted scenario:- In the sovereign's presence. thc crowd advised their ruler. Wavingcloths and displaying up-turned thumbs, they shouted 'Mitte!' (Let himgo free); or, by turning down their thumbs, they vociferated 'lugula!'-- recommending that the fallen man should pay the penalty. When the emperorhappened to share their feelings, he confirmed the crowd's verdict ...and ... with polico verso, downturned thumb, ordered his immediate execution.
What could be simpler? The answer is that it would indeed be a simplederivational explanation, if only it happened to be true. But it is not.The ancient Romans did not behave in the manner ascribed to them, and thewhole story of the thumbs up 'approval' sign is based on misunderstandingand mistranslation. It is a complete distortion of the facts, and the truebasis for our modern usage comes from a different source altogether. Whathas happened is that, having acquired our modern thumbs up and down meaningsfrom elsewhere, we have then blatantly re-written Roman history to fitin.
Thereare, in reality, no ancient references to the thumbs going either upordown in the Colosseum, at the vital moment of decision. Later authorswho have claimed so have simply not understood the Latin phrases.Polliceversodoes not mean a down-turned thumb it simply means a turned thumb-- one that is moved in some unspecified way. No particular direction canbe assumed. The posture of the thumbs of those wishing to spare the gladiatorwaspollice compresso-- compressed thumbs. In other words, notthumbs up, but thumbs covered up -- thumbs folded away out of sight. Whatthe spectators did, in fact, was to extend their thumbs for a kill andhide their thumbs for an acquittal. The reason for this is not hard tofind. If they wanted the victorious man to plunge in his sword, they mimedthe act with their hands, their extended thumbs stabbing the air in encouragement.If they wanted to spare the defeated fighter because he proved himselfvaliant in battle, they did the opposite of sticking out their thumbs --they hid them away. This made sense in an arena as vast as the Colosseum,where the kill/no-kill signals would have to he strongly contrasting tohe visible at all.
If this was the true situation, then how has it come to be distortedby later writers? It is not even the case that the truth was completelyforgotten. It is recorded both in theOxford English Dictionaryandin Brewer'sDictionary of Phrase and Fable. Sir James Murray compiledthe volume of theO.E.Ddealing with the letter 'T' between 1909and 1915. Under the entry for phrases connected with the word 'thumb',he includes the following quotation:
- 1880. Lewis and Short. s.v.Pollex: To close down the thumb(premere) was a sign of approbation: to extend it (vertere, convertere,polex infestus) a sign of disapprobation.
Brewer's dictionary was first published in 1870 and has been reprintedmany times since then. His entry is just as clear:
- In the ancient Roman combats, when a gladiator was vanquished it restedwith the spectators to decide whether he should be slain or not. If theywished him to live, they shut up their thumbs in their fists (pollicecompresso favor judicabatur);if to be slain, they turned downtheir thumbs ... Our pupular saying, Thumbs up! expressive of pleasureor approval is probabbly a perversion of this custom.
- R. Garnett, 1887: 'They had unanimously turned their thumbs up. "Sartor",the publisher acquainted him, "excites universal disapprobation".'
J. Dixon, 1896: 'To turn the thumbs up. To decide against. The Romansin the amphitheatre turned their thumbs up when a combatant was not tobe spared.'
R.Y. Tyrrell, 1907: '"Thumbs down" means "spare him ...": the signalfor death was "thumbs up".'
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What seems to have happened here is that the extended thumb has automaticallybeen thought of as going up, and the hidden thumbs as being kept down (ratherthan pointed down). But as the idea has been passed from author to author,the distortion has hardened. Sadly, it appears that translations from theLatin are often less than scholarly. In one case, we can actually watchthe bias change as the years pass. There is a passage in Juvenal's thirdSatire, written at about the heginning of the second century A.D.,which, in the original, refers to thumbs being eitherversoorconverso(according to two different sources). Either way, it means that thethumbs were being turned. but makes no suggestion as to the direction Juvenalhas been translated many times, but if we select just three examples, wecan see how the interpretation varies with the period.
Montaigne, in his Essays of 1603 (Second Book, 26th Chapter) translatesthe Juvenal passage as 'When people turn their thumbs away, they popularlyany slay.' This is very restrained and correct, but he makes it the basisof a comment ofhis own to the effect that a thumb-sign 'of disfavour ordisgrace' is 'to lift them up and turn them outwards'. Read properly, heis still not badly distorting the original, but the phrase 'lift them up'can easily be taken to mean 'point them up', and this is undoubtedly theway many subsequent authors interpreted him.
Dryden, in his translation of Juvenal in 1693, gives the same passageas: 'Where ... with thumbs bent back, they popularly kill.' Turning awayhas now become bending back, and again this was taken to mean an erectthumb, even though Dryden was not specific ahout it.
Coming up to date, in Peter Green's 1967 translation, the passage becomes:'... and at the mob's thumbs-down, will butcher a loser for popularity'ssake.' Now the meaning has gone the other-way, to fit in with modern usage.
So,from an ambiguous beginning the distortion has taken off, first in onedirection, and then in another. The question we now have to answer is whatis it that controls these directions? Are they mere whims, or are therecertain pressures being exerted to pull them one way or the other? First,we must consider pressures favouring the idea that thumbs up mean somethingunpleasant and thumbs down something pleasant. Whatever the pressure is,it has not been a, particularly stron or successful one, and has lost outto its rival in modern times. A glance at the list of meanings for thethumbs up gestures, which we obtained from our informants in our presentgesture-maps field study, reveals that 738 of them gave the 'O.K.' pleasantmeaning, while only 36 gave an unpleasant meaning, namely that of an phallicinsult. In the latter case the erect thumb is jerked in the air as a symbollicphallus, and the message is 'sit on this', or 'up yours'. This appearsto be an old usage that has lost ground in the face of the increasinglypopular O.K. meaning. If it was once better known than it is today, itcould easily have led to the idea that, if an unpleasant thumb gesturewas used in the Colosseum, it must have been this one.
Another clue comes from the first century A.D. writings of Pliny. Inhis great work,The Historie of the World, translated into Englishin 1601 by Philemon Holland, there is a passage in the second chapter ofthe 28th book, which reads: 'to bend or bow down the thumbs when we giveassent unto a thing, or do favour any person, is so usuall, that it isgrowne into a proverbial speech, to bid a man put down his thumb in tokenof approbation.' There is no doubt here about the way Pliny viewed thegesture: thumbs down meant O.K. But he was not talking about what happenedin the Colosseum. He was referring to ordinary, everyday life, and it isimportant to make that distinction.
If we now put together these two observations: thumbs up meaning anunpleasant insult, and thumbs down meaning a pleasant form of approval,it is possible to see how these usages, if known about by earlier authors,could have been grafted on, as it were, to the ambiguous statements aboutwhat the spectators' thumbs were doing at the gladiatorial combats. Thiscan explain how one kind of distortion developed, but what of the other- the one leading in the opposite direction, to the popular usage of moderntimes?
To understand this other distortion we have to consider the basic natureof 'up' gestures and 'down' gestures. If we are feeling 'up in the air'we are feeling good, and if we are feeling 'down in the dumps' we are feelingbad. There is something inherently optimistic, positive and dominant aboutupward movements, and something essentially pessimistic, negative and subordinateabout downward movemeets. This dichotomy pervades the whole of our languageand our thinking, and it is obviously going to have an impact on our gesturalrepertoire as well. So, whatever other, more specific, influences may beat work, there is also going to be a generalized pressure tending to favoura thumbs up gesture as meaning something pleasant and a thumbs down gestureas something unpleasant. We feel that it is this basic innfluence thathas finally favoured the modern interpretation of the thumbs up and downgestures.
There is some evidence that this is not exclusively modern. John Bulwerin hisChirologiaof 1644, has this to say about ordinary thumbpostures: 'To hold up the thumbe, is the gesture ... of one shewing hisassent or approbation. To hold up both thumbs, is an expression importinga transcendency of praise.' He quotes classical authors to support himin this view, which contradicts the statements made by Pliny. There isno way we can see to reconcile these two views and it looks as though theremust have been an early conflict of thumb signals which was eventuallyresolved by the rise to dominance of the 'up = good' version.
Two other derivational clues exist to help explain the 'thumbs up =good' equation. There is a old English saying 'Here's my thumb on it!'which was used to seal a bargain. The two people involved each wetted athumb and then extended it, held upwards, until the two raised thumbs cameinto contact with one another. It is easy to see how this custom couldlead to, or support the idea of holding out a raised thumb as a sign offriendly agreement or approval. Another supportive clue comes from GerardBrault's study ofFrench Gestures, where he says that admirationis expressed when 'the thumb of the right hand is held erect and pushedforward, as if pushing in a thumbtack . The thumbs up gesture here signifies"first class", for the French number one with the thumb.'
Summing up, it would be an understatement to say that the origins ofthe thumbs up gesture are not as simple as most peopic seem to believe.The whole 'Roman arena' explanation that is so often given, appears tobe largely irrelevant. The evidence as to exactly what was happening inordinary, daily life in ancient times is still not clear and the informationis contradictory. But the present--day situation is obvious enough. Everywherethe O.K. message of the thumbs up gesture has come to dominate the scene,as the gesture map reveals.
DISTRIBUTION
If Rome really was the ancestral home of this gesture, we would expectto find the Italian region particularly strongly represented on our gesturemap. The opposite is the case, with the Italian-speaking zone, in fact,being the weakest of all, closely followed by Greece. This confirms oursuspicions that the fate of gladiators played no part in the history ofthis gesture. It also seems to indicate that perhaps the existence of theancient thumbs up obscenity in the Italian and Greek zones has been themain factor working against the domination of the O.K. message there. Thesecond gesture map, dealing with the gesture as a phallic insult clearlyshows that this sexual interpretation (apart from solitary informants inBelgium and Malta) is entirely limited to the Greco-ltalian world. In Italy,its strongholds are in the more remote, less cosmopolitan regions, whereolder customs tend to die hard. It would seem that the O.K. gesture is likely to have enjoyed its majorgrowth in the north of Europe and then to have rapitily invaded the south.Many Italians were surprised to learn that nor-therners thought of thegesture as having sprung originally from Rome. To them it was a 'new thing'imported by the American G.I.s during the war. At every location we visitedon mainland Italy, at least one person identified it as 'The American O.K.',helping to drive yet another nail into the 'Roman Arena' explanation.
Finally, it is perhaps worth recording in this case the wide varietyof 'O.K.' messages we were given by informants. They reveal the genericnature of the gesture, encompassing many subtly differing specific signals.Answers given included the following:
All right, A.O.K.,!arriba! (Spain), bang on,champion(France),everything's fine, everything's fixed, excellent, first class,fixe(Por-tugal), good luck, great, great stuff, I agree, I made it, it'sa winner, it's in the bag,kalo(Greece), O.K., ready to go, realygood, right on, solid,Spitze(Austria), spot on, success, superb,tops,va bene(Italy), very good, victory, you are right, you'vedone well.
This is almost exactly the same range of meanings as we found with theO.K. ring gesture, and the two can be used almost interchangeably. Theyare also of about equal popularity (700 for the O.K. ring and 738 for theO.K. thumbs up) and have the same widely scattered range. The major differencebetween them is that the O.K. ring is the more popular in Italy, and theO.K. thumbs up the more popular in France.
The distribution of the minor meanings of the thumbs up are of littleinterest. They are so scattered that few zonal concentrations show up,and we have not felt it worthwhile to map them. The 40 informants who interpretedthe gesture as meaning 'one', ranged from Holland to Turkey. Only in Tunisiawas this meaning at all popular (14 out of 30 informants). The 30 informantswho saw it as a hitch-hiking signal (often called by the name 'autostop')were scattered right across the map, but there were never more than 4 atany one site. The 14 who interpreted it as a directional sign -- a thumbpoint -- were confined to southern regions, where this kind of guide-signis slightly less surly in its ordinary use.
It is not safe to use the 'thumbing-a-lift' gesture in either Sardiniaor Greece. The message transmitted to the passing drivers by the hopefulfigures at the roadside is not 'please help us', but 'get stuffed', anddoes not encouriage drivers to stop, except to pick a fight. Our figuresshow that, although both the insult meaning und the O.K. meaning are presentin these countries,in southern Sardinia and northern Greece the obsceneinsult is dominant. Furthermore, with the addition of the upward jerkingmovement, shared by both the insult and the true hitch-hiking gestures,but absent from the O.K. version, far more people in those countries wouldsee the action in its obscene role, and the hitch-hiking tourist woulddo well to imitate the local hitch-hikers, and adopt the loosely waved,flat hand gesture we observed at Sardinian and Greek roadsides.
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