When, last week, Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap won an audience prize at the Sundance Film Festival, a few reports noted that the fictionalised biopic had already stirred up some controversy. You’d expect that of a film following the Belfast hip-hop posse behind Get Your Brits Out. Enjoy more when the film opens later in the year.
Let’s air a minor gripe as amuse-bouche. I’m here to highlight the film’s illustration of yet another kowtow to creeping (in this case, fully crept) Americanisms. When did the queasily explicit “finger” take over from the more allegorical “two fingers”? An early scene in Kneecap sees Michael Fassbender, playing a fugitive republican volunteer, raise a defiant middle finger to a police helicopter.
The sequence looks be taking place around the turn of the century. Not that implausible. An Irish man of his generation would certainly have grown up with the two-fingered insult, but, even 20 years ago, the option preferred by baseball players, angry American truckers and Johnny Cash had already made inroads into the vocabulary of gestural defiance. The one-finger is used elsewhere in the film. One would no more expect to see the flicked “V” as see the antique Sicilian thumb bite mentioned in Romeo and Juliet.
The one-finger was much in discussion a few months back when footage leaked of Maryam Moshiri, a BBC news presenter, jokily offering her own in a gag meant for the production team alone. There was much tutting before Moshiri offered an apology. No regrets were, however, expressed for the UK’s national broadcaster abandoning a robust insult that has served furious yeomen for years.
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If some jerk blasts his horn at my bicycle while attempting to run me into the kerb, it would never cross my mind to proffer the middle digit. No more than it would – as many here now do – to drop the “s” from “maths” or say “bangs” for “fringe”. The only satisfactory response to the encroaching BMW driver is the forked figure that wasn’t actually proffered by English archers at Agincourt.
Oh, yes, that. Any discussion of this phenomenon will inevitably touch on the most preposterous of all man-in-the-pub etymologies. There is, of course, no evidence that English soldiers waved their fingers to confirm the enemy had not chopped them off (something French captors didn’t do, anyway). The V-sign looks to have arrived much later and, like the grey squirrel ousting the red, to have caught on at the expense of another digital insult.
First sightings were made at the start of the last century. It was sufficiently niche during the second World War for Churchill to deliver his famous V-for-victory gesture as both backhand and forehand. The ruder V set in properly during the 1950s as, in the schoolyards of Britain and Ireland, it quickly nudged out the thumb set to nose with waggled fingers. The V-sign as insult is said to have been entirely unknown outside Britain and Ireland.
It is probably just nostalgia talking, but the good old Harvey Smith seems more satisfactory in its aggressive shovelling of the air
There was a lot of it about in the North before the members of Kneecap were born. You wouldn’t say the shared gestural lexicon brought everyone together, but loyalist and republican youths were happy to present their supposed enemies with the same rebuff. It belonged to both Rangers and Celtic. It was the official salute of punk. Seek out photos of Johnny Rotten offering Churchill’s victory gesture when signing with EMI outside Buckingham Palace and then the reversed sod-off virtually everywhere else.
At this stage it was still occasionally referred to as the “Harvey Smith”, in honour of the famously bluff showjumper – a “proud Yorkshireman” if ever there was such a thing – who thus expressed his displeasure to the judges at Hickstead in 1971.
[ Sundance: Kneecap film wins audience award at US festivalOpens in new window ]
If the Sun newspaper was offering an insult to the perfidious EU, would it still favour the apocryphal Agincourt hello? I’m not so sure. But in 1990 nothing else would do as accompaniment to its notorious “Up yours, Delors!” front page. To that point, the single-fingered American take would have been seen as unforgivable affectation.
It make take weeks. It may take years. It may take decades. But British and Irish popular cultural will, for all the talk of US decline, always bow down to the Americanism in the end. Let’s not pretend, though mono-digit origins go back to the classical era, that we got this one from Diogenes or Aristophanes. We got it from Eminem and Limp Bizkit.
It is probably just nostalgia talking, but the good old Harvey Smith seems more satisfactory in its aggressive shovelling of the air. There is a less proctological sense of where that finger is theoretically headed (something that causes prudish American TV to pixelate). There is greater good humour.
Rudeness isn’t what it used to be. Two fingers to the lot of ye.
