Also, the disease can be diagnosed by a positive middle finger test, where resisted middle finger extension produces pain. The middle finger has been involved in judicial hearings. The non-folded part of the forefinger and the middle finger should still be touching. Showing a middle finger is a part of today's youth. In this gesture, the thumb sometimes touches the middle finger. For example, people often develop calluses on the middle finger of their dominant hand due to writing with a pen or pencil.
See all examples of middle finger. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
What is the pronunciation of middle finger? Browse middle class. Middle Eastern. Middle England. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day kind-hearted. The story goes that English soldiers waved their fingers at French soldiers who had threatened to cut off captured archers' first two fingers to prevent them shooting arrows. The English were thus boasting they were still capable of doing so.
The middle finger's offensive meaning seems to have overtaken cultural, linguistic and national boundaries and can now be seen at protests, on football pitches, and at rock concerts across the world.
In December, Liverpool striker Luis Suarez was photographed giving an American-style middle finger to Fulham fans after his club's loss there.
The FA cited him for improper conduct and suspended him for one game. In , a Canadian MP from Calgary was accused of pointing his middle finger at a member from another party who he said had been heckling him in the House of Commons. Two years earlier, pop star Britney Spears gave the finger to a group of photographers in Mexico who she complained had been chasing her.
Some of her fans thought the gesture was aimed at them, and Spears later apologised. While the middle finger may historically have symbolised a phallus, it has lost that distinctive meaning and is no longer even obscene, says Ira Robbins, a law professor at American University in Washington DC, who has studied the gesture's place in criminal jurisprudence.
It means so many other things, like protest or rage or excitement, it's not just a phallus. See more words from the same century. Middle French. Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for middle finger. See the full definition for middle finger in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!
Log in Sign Up. Save Word. During the Occupy Wall Street OWS protests in and , many middle fingers were thrown in the general direction of the Wall Street establishment, and more directly at individual police. Two OWS protesters were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for doing the latter on a train car in While middle fingers are sometimes looked down on as vulgar or indecent, vulgarity and indecency are at the heart of why we give the finger.
A raised middle finger reflects something detestable, and shows whoever committed the offense just how awful we think it is. All Rights Reserved.
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