Because of a cultural tradition popularized in antiquity – probably inherited from a custom of man’s ancestors, still in prehistoric times. A group of anthropologists maintains that the gesture is a variation of an aggressive strategy of some primates, who showed their enemies an erect penis as a way of intimidating them. More civilized, the man would have replaced the bilau by the raised finger to offend someone. One of the first written records of this ill-mannered custom appears in the year 423 BC, when the Greek poet Aristophanes wrote the play The Clouds. In one of the dialogues, the character Strepsiades makes a joke comparing the middle finger to the penis. From Greece, the offense reached Rome, where it was known as digitus infamis, the «obscene finger.» In the book Gestures, their Origin and Distribution (“Gestures, their Origin and Distribution”, without translation into Portuguese), the British zoologist Desmond Morris maintains that Emperor Caligula (12-41) shocked his subjects by forcing them to kiss his finger middle instead of your hand. A tremendous humiliation. Over the centuries, most countries in the world have incorporated the gesture of Latin origin – it can be said that it is an almost universal symbol! But many peoples have found other creative ways to get someone to do you know what. What explains why a sign is considered naive in one country and offensive in another? For this “transformation” to happen, a group needs to establish a kind of pact around this form of communication. In other words, a gesture is only considered aggressive if everyone in the group understands and agrees with its meaning. “To avoid gaffes and deal with cultural differences, nowadays multinationals make behavior books. These publications explain to executives who travel a lot what gestures they can and cannot do when visiting other countries,” says anthropologist Rosali Telerman, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
