V sign "history"

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. It is most commonly used to represent the letter V as in "victory", as a symbol of peace (usually with palm outward), as an offensive gesture (palm inward), to represent the number two, and as purely expressive gesture with no intended meaning. However, some people may mistake the sign for "peace."

The sign's meaning depends in part on the way the hand is positioned. With the palm of the hand facing the signer, it can mean:

• An insult – largely restricted to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom,^[1] it means "fuck off".^[2]
• Two – indicating quantity (but not in countries where it is an insult) although this is more common with the palm turned around;
• Peace – in the United States and Canada without respect to the direction.
• When used with other movement, it can mean:
• Air quotes – flexing fingers, palm out, both hands.^[3]
• This hand shape is also used in a number of signs, including "to see/look". When the pointer and middle fingers are pointed at the signer's eyes then turned and the pointer finger is pointed at someone it means "I am watching you." ^[4]
• With the back of the hand facing the signer, it can mean:
• Two – a nonverbal communication of quantity;
• Victory – in a setting of wartime or competition. It was first popularized by Winston Churchill. It is sometimes made using both hands with upraised arms as US President Eisenhower, and in imitation of him, Richard Nixon, used to do;
• Peace or Friend – used around the world by peace and counter-culture groups; popularized in the American peace movement of the 1960s

V gesture in Tokyo, Japan (2006) vs. 2009 Iranian election protests

Origins

An early recorded use of the "two-fingered salute" is in the Macclesfield Psalter of c.1330 (in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), being made by a glove in the Psalter’s marginalia.^[7]

According to a popular legend, the two-fingered salute or V sign derives from the gestures of longbowmen fighting in the English army at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War.^[7][17] According to the story, the French claimed that they would cut off the arrow-shooting fingers of all the English and Welsh longbowmen after they had won the battle at Agincourt.^[18] But the English came out victorious and showed off their two fingers, still intact. Historian Juliet Barker quotes Jean Le Fevre (who fought on the English side at Agincourt) as saying that Henry V included a reference to the French cutting off longbowmen's fingers in his pre-battle speech.^[19] If this is correct it confirms that the story was around at the time of Agincourt, although it does not necessarily mean that the French practised it, just that Henry found it useful for propaganda, and it does not show that the two-fingered salute is derived from the hypothetical behaviour of English archers at that battle.

The first definitive known reference to the V sign in French is in the works of François Rabelais, a sixteenth-century satirist.^[20]

It was not until the start of the 20th century that clear evidence of the use of insulting V sign in England became available, when in 1901 a worker outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham used the gesture (captured on the film) to indicate that he did not like being filmed.^[21] 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.^[12]

Desmond Morris discussed various possible origins of the V sign in Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution (published 1979), and came to no definite conclusion:

because of the strong taboo associated with the gesture (its public use has often been heavily penalized). 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 recognized obscenity without bothering to analyse it... Several of the rival claims are equally appealing. The truth is that we will probably never know...

—Desmond Morris

Reference: Wikipedia