V sign

For the V sign of dermatomyositis, see Shawl sign.
Woman showing the V sign

The V sign is a hand gesture in which the index and middle fingers are raised and parted, while the other fingers are clenched. It has various meanings, depending on the cultural context and how it is presented.

When displayed with the palm inward towards the signer, it has long been an offensive gesture in some Commonwealth nations. In the 1940s, during World War II, a campaign by the Western Allies to use the sign with the back of the hand towards the signer (U+270C VICTORY HAND[1] in Unicode) as a "V for Victory" sign proved quite effective. During the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, the "V sign" was widely appropriated by the counterculture as a symbol of peace. Shortly thereafter, it also became adopted as a gesture used in photographs, especially in Japan.

Usage

The meaning of the V sign is partially dependent on the manner in which the hand is positioned:

Singer Robbie Williams using a V sign with palm facing signer as an insult.

As an insult

The use of the V sign ("the forks") as an insulting gesture, including the use of the upwards swing at the elbow.

The insulting version of the gesture (with the palm inwards U+1F594 🖔 REVERSED VICTORY HAND)[10] is often compared to the offensive gesture known as "the finger". The "two-fingered salute", (also "the forks" in Australia[11]) is commonly performed by flicking the V upwards from wrist or elbow. The V sign, when the palm is facing toward the person giving the sign, has long been an insulting gesture in England,[12] and later in the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.[2] It is frequently used to signify defiance (especially to authority), contempt, or derision.[13]

As an example of the V sign (palm inward) as an insult, on November 1, 1990, The Sun, a British tabloid, ran an article on its front page with the headline "Up Yours, Delors" next to a large hand making a V sign protruding from a Union flag cuff. The Sun urged its readers to stick two fingers up at then President of the European Commission Jacques Delors, who had advocated an EU central government. The article attracted a number of complaints about its alleged racism, but the now defunct Press Council rejected the complaints after the editor of The Sun stated that the paper reserved the right to use vulgar abuse in the interests of Britain.[14][15]

On April 3, 2009, Scottish football players Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor were permanently banned from the Scottish national squad for showing the V sign while sitting on the bench during the game against Iceland. Both players were in their hotel bar drinking alcohol after the Scottish defeat to Holland until around 11 am the next morning, meaning that both of the players breached the SFA discipline code before the incident as well, but the attitude shown by the V sign was considered to be so rude that the SFA decided never to include these players in the national line-up again.[16][17] Ferguson also lost the captaincy of Rangers as a result of the controversy.[18] Allan McGregor returned to Scotland national squad in 2010.[19]

Steve McQueen gives the sign in the closing scene of the 1971 motorsport movie, Le Mans. A still picture of the gesture[20] was recorded by photographer Nigel Snowdon and has become an icon of both McQueen and the film itself. The gesture was also flashed by Spike (played by James Marsters) in "Hush", a Season 4 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The scene was also featured in the series' opening credits for all of Season 5. It was only censored by BBC Two in its early-evening showings of the program.[21][22]

For a time in the UK, "a Harvey (Smith)" became a way of describing the insulting version of the V sign, much as "the word of Cambronne" is used in France, or "the Trudeau salute" is used to describe the one-fingered salute in Canada. This happened because, in 1971, show-jumper Harvey Smith was disqualified for making a televised V sign to the judges after winning the British Show Jumping Derby at Hickstead. His win was reinstated two days later.[23]

Harvey Smith pleaded that he was using a Victory sign, a defence also used by other figures in the public eye.[24] Sometimes foreigners visiting the countries mentioned above use the "two-fingered salute" without knowing it is offensive to the natives, for example when ordering two beers in a noisy pub, or in the case of the United States president George H. W. Bush, who, while touring Australia in 1992, attempted to give a "peace sign" to a group of farmers in Canberra—who were protesting about U.S. farm subsidies—and instead gave the insulting V sign.[25]

Origins

A commonly repeated legend claims that the two-fingered salute or V sign derives from a gesture made by longbowmen fighting in the English and Welsh[26] archers at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War, but no historical primary sources support this contention.[27] This origin legend dictates that the English and Welsh archers who were captured by the French had their index and middle fingers cut off so that they couldn't operate their longbows, and that the V Sign was used by uncaptured and victorious archers in a display of defiance against the enemy.

The first unambiguous evidence of the use of the insulting V sign in England dates to 1901, when a worker outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham used the gesture (captured on the film) to indicate that he did not like being filmed.[28] 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.[28]

Between 1975 and 1977 a group of anthropologists including Desmond Morris studied the history and spread of European gestures and found the rude version of the V-sign to be basically unknown outside the British Isles. In his Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, published in 1979, Morris discussed various possible origins of this sign but came to no definite conclusion:

because of the strong taboo associated with the gesture (its public use has often been heavily penalised). As a result, there is a tendency to shy away from discussing it in detail. It is "known to be dirty" and is passed on from generation to generation by people who simply accept it as a recognised obscenity without bothering to analyse it... Several of the rival claims are equally appealing. The truth is that we will probably never know...[28]

Victory sign

World War II: V for Victory campaign

Winston Churchill, British prime minister, giving a V sign in 1943

On January 14, 1941, Victor de Laveleye, former Belgian Minister of Justice and director of the Belgian French-speaking broadcasts on the BBC (1940–44), suggested in a broadcast that Belgians use a V for victoire (French: “victory”) and vrijheid (Dutch: "freedom") as a rallying emblem during World War II. In the BBC broadcast, de Laveleye said that "the occupier, by seeing this sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, [would] understand that he is surrounded, encircled by an immense crowd of citizens eagerly awaiting his first moment of weakness, watching for his first failure." Within weeks chalked up Vs began appearing on walls throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France.[29]

Buoyed by this success, the BBC started the "V for Victory" campaign, for which they put in charge the assistant news editor Douglas Ritchie posing as “Colonel Britton”. Ritchie suggested an audible V using its Morse code rhythm (three dots and a dash). As the rousing opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony had the same rhythm, the BBC used this as its call-sign in its foreign language programmes to occupied Europe for the rest of the war. The more musically educated also understood that it was the Fate motif "knocking on the door" of the Third Reich. ( Listen to this call-sign. ).[29][30] The BBC also encouraged the use of the V gesture introduced by de Laveleye.[31]

By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe. On July 19, Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred approvingly to the V for Victory campaign in a speech,[32] from which point he started using the V hand sign. Early on he sometimes gestured palm in (sometimes with a cigar between the fingers).[33] Later in the war, he used palm out.[34] After aides explained to Churchill what the palm in gesture meant to other classes, he made sure to use the appropriate sign.[24][35] Yet the double-entendre of the gesture might have contributed to its popularity, "for a simple twist of hand would have presented the dorsal side in a mocking snub to the common enemy".[36] Other allied leaders used the sign as well; since 1942, Charles de Gaulle used the V sign in every speech until 1969.

The Germans could not remove all the signs, so adopted the V Sign as a German symbol, sometimes adding laurel leaves under it, painting their own V's on walls, vehicles and adding a massive V on the Eiffel Tower.

In 1942, Aleister Crowley, a British occultist, claimed to have invented the usage of a V-sign in February 1941 as a magical foil to the Nazis' use of the Swastika. He maintained that he passed this to friends at the BBC, and to the British Naval Intelligence Division through his connections in MI5, eventually gaining the approval of Winston Churchill. Crowley noted that his 1913 publication Magick featured a V-sign and a swastika on the same plate.[37]

Vietnam War, victory and peace

Nixon departing the White House on 9 August 1974

U.S. President Richard Nixon used the gesture to signal victory in the Vietnam War, an act which became one of his best-known trademarks. He also used it on his departure from public office following his resignation in 1974.

Protesters against the Vietnam War (and subsequent anti-war protests) and counterculture activists adopted the gesture as a sign of peace. Because the hippies of the day often flashed this sign (palm out) while saying "Peace", it became popularly known (through association) as the peace sign.[38]

As a photography pose

In Japan

Young Japanese women giving V gesture in Tokyo (2006)

The V sign, primarily palm-outwards, is very commonly made by Japanese people, especially younger people, when posing for informal photographs, and is known as pīsu sain (ピースサイン, peace sign), or more commonly simply pīsu (ピース, peace). As the name reflects, this dates to the Vietnam War era and anti-war activists, though the precise origin is disputed. The V sign was known in Japan from the post-World War II Allied occupation of Japan, but did not acquire the use in photographs until later.

In Japan, it is generally believed to have been influenced by Beheiren's anti-Vietnam War activists in the late 1960s and Konica's advertisement in 1971.[39][40] A more colorful account of this practice claims it was influenced by the American figure skater Janet Lynn during the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Hokkaidō. She fell during a free-skate period, but continued to smile even as she sat on the ice. Though she placed third in the competition, her cheerful diligence and persistence resonated with many Japanese viewers. Lynn became an overnight foreign celebrity in Japan. A peace activist, Lynn frequently flashed the V sign when she was covered in Japanese media, and she is credited by some Japanese for having popularized its use since the 1970s in amateur photographs.[38]

Because of its popularity in Japan, it exists as an Emoji and is in Unicode, as the sequence U+270C, or ✌.

In other East Asian countries

In Mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, the V sign is a popular pose in photographs. It is used in both casual and formal settings. For the most part in these countries, the gesture is divorced from its previous meanings as a peace sign or as an insult; for most the meaning of the sign is "victory" or "yeah", implying a feeling of happiness. It is used in both directions (palm facing the signer and palm facing forward). In certain contexts the sign simply means "two", such as when ordering or boarding a bus.

The pose is gaining significant popularity in South Korea due to the common usage amongst Kpop idols and young people – especially in selfies. V signing is commonly linked with aegyo, a popular trend in Korea meaning 'acting cutely'.

Elsewhere

An investigator flashes V-for-victory signs upon the 2006 arrival of material gathered by the Stardust spacecraft at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

In the United States, the usage of the V sign as a photography gesture is known but not widely used. The original poster for the 2003 film What a Girl Wants showed star Amanda Bynes giving a V sign as an American girl visiting London. In the US, the poster was altered to instead show Bynes with both arms down, to avoid giving the perception that the film was criticizing the then-recently commenced Iraq War.[41]

Specific uses

Singer Rihanna using the V sign, 2011.

Footnotes

  1. "Victory Hand". emojipedia.org Emojipedia.org.
  2. 1 2 V sign as an insult:
  3. Eric Patridge, Tom Dalzell, Terry Victor. (2008.) The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Routledge, p. 683. ISBN 0-203-96211-7
  4. "20th July 1941: ‘V for Victory’ widespread across Europe". ww2today.com.
  5. Zelinsky, Nathaniel (18 March 2011). "From Churchill to Libya: How the V symbol went viral". Washington Post. Retrieved 14 December 2015.
  6. Staff. American Manual Alphabet Chart Center for Disability Information & Referral (CeDIR), Indiana Institute on Disability and Community at Indiana University
  7. Gary Martin. "Air quotes". phrases.org.uk.
  8. ""see" American Sign Language (ASL)". lifeprint.com.
  9. ""numbers" ASL American Sign Language". lifeprint.com.
  10. "The Unicode Standard, Version 8.0, range 2700–27BF" (PDF). unicode.org.
  11. Tony Keim "Long tradition of flipping the bird", Courier Mail, November 18, 2008, accessed April 14, 2011.
  12. Staff Henry V, British Shakespeare Company.Accessed 23 April 2008
  13. Defiance, contempt or derision:
  14. "Up Yours Delors". The Sun. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  15. Wheeler, Brian (2005-06-24). "BBC NEWS | Politics | From two jags to two fingers". Newswww.bbc.net.uk. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  16. "Finished: Furious Walter tells disgraced pair their Rangers days are over". Daily Mail (London). 3 April 2009.
  17. Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor banned for life by Scotland, The Guardian, Friday 3 April 2009
  18. "Gers strip Ferguson of captaincy". BBC News. 1 January 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
  19. "Sweden 3-0 Scotland". BBC. August 11, 2010. Retrieved 16 May 2011.
  20. http://stvmcqueen.tripod.com/salute.jpg
  21. Radar: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4 – TV Tropes
  22. Still photograph of the gesture in the Season 5 opening credits of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  23. Staff On this Day 15 August 1971: 'V-sign' costs rider victory "BBC The infamous gesture won him an entry in the Chambers dictionary which defined 'a Harvey Smith' as 'a V-sign with the palm inwards, signifying derision and contempt'". Accessed 23 April 2008
  24. 1 2 Staff. The V sign, www.icons.org.uk. Accessed 23 April 2008
  25. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin (2004). George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Progressive Press paperback edition (2004), p. 651(web link to Chapter -XXV- Thyroid Storm). Tarpley & Chaitkin cite the Washington Post, 3 January 1992.
  26. "The Hundred Years War : Battle of Agincourt". britishbattles.com.
  27. David Wilton, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends, Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-537557-2.
  28. 1 2 3 Staff. The V sign, www.icons.org.uk web.archive.org
  29. 1 2 The V-campaign, Virtual Radiomuseum
  30. C. Sterling, 2003, Encyclopedia of Radio London: Taylor and Francis, page 359. at Google Books
  31. "The V sign at BBC’s H2G2 website". Bbc.co.uk. 1990-11-01. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  32. "Newswatch 1940s". news.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
  33. "Churchill outside Downing Street". Number-10.gov.uk. Archived from the original on 2008-08-09. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  34. "Churchill's famous victory sign". Number-10.gov.uk. Archived from the original on 2007-06-13. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  35. Staff. "The V Sign". The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA).
  36. James Jerman, Anthony Weir, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches London: Routledge, 2013, page 145.
  37. Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. North Atlantic Books, 2010, p. 511.
  38. 1 2 Staff. The Japanese Version (the Sign of Peace) ICONS. A portrait of England. Accessed 1 June 2008
  39. "雑誌に載ったわたし。". 日刊「きのこ」 skipのブログ.
  40. 1971's buzzwords
  41. Ascher-Walsh, Rebecca (Apr 11, 2003). "Sign of the Times". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved February 27, 2014.
  42. Francisco, Ronald (2010). Collective Action Theory and Empirical Evidence (1 ed.). Springer. p. 46. ISBN 978-1-4419-1475-0. Subtle gestures, noise, and artwork are additional symbolic signs that dissidents use in coercive countries. Poland's Solidarity's signal was two fingers held up in the form of the letter V. This gesture diffused widely in Eastern Europe and now it is used in Palestine as a symbol of unity and nationalism.
  43. "End to 45 years of Red rule". New Straits Times. 1989-09-13. Retrieved 2012-01-29. "Tadeusz Mazowlecki, who nearly fainted during his opening speech, flashed a V-for-victory sign as deputies voted his Cabinet into office by 402–0 with 13 abstententions.
  44. "A Soldier's Guide: Bosnia-Herzegovina". Dtic.mil. Retrieved 2011-10-31.
  45. "Manu Tuilagi forced to apologise for playing prank on Prime Minister David Cameron in No 10 visit". Daily Telegraph. 17 September 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  46. "ANC’s Council of Foreign Assemblies promotes international mobilization campaign to spread the "V" around the world". Assemblea Nacional Catalana. Retrieved 24 August 2014.
  47. RTL Newmedia. "Prestation de serment: trois N-VA font le "V", signe de la victoire et de ralliement de leur parti (vidéo)". RTL Info.

References

External links

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