To flip the bird is to raise the middle finger at someone as an insult, usually a quick, aggressive gesture aimed at a driver, a rival or anyone else who has caused offence. It is used both literally, to describe someone actually making the gesture, and loosely, to describe a general act of contempt or defiance towards a person or situation. The phrase is informal and blunt, and it is understood the same way across the English-speaking world even though its wording is American.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘flip the bird’?
The word “bird” has been linked to jeering and disapproval in English for a very long time, going back to a tradition of audiences hissing like geese or hooting like owls at performers they disliked. By the mid nineteenth century this habit of “giving the bird” had generalised from geese specifically to birds in general, but at that stage it still referred only to vocal jeering, booing and hissing rather than to any hand gesture.
The gesture itself is separate and much older than its name. The earliest known photograph of an American making the one-fingered gesture shows the baseball pitcher Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn in 1886, aiming it at the camera, decades before anyone called it flipping the bird. By the mid twentieth century “the bird” had shifted in meaning to describe the gesture directly rather than jeering noise, as shown by the 1942 animated short A Tale of Two Kitties, which includes a censor-baiting joke about “giving the bird.”
The specific compound phrase “flip the bird,” naming the one-fingered gesture rather than vocal heckling, is dated to the 1960s in the United States. How exactly the older sense of jeering birds merged with the newer sense of a raised middle finger to produce this particular wording is not fully documented; the precise line of descent has not been traced. What can be said with confidence is that the gesture long predates its name, and that “bird” carried a meaning of contempt in English well before it ever meant a finger raised in anger.