英國很忌諱v字手勢么？為什麼？

01-26

聽說在英國拍照不能比V ??，為什麼？

V字手勢（V sign）有兩種。

一種是手心向外，表示「勝利」（Victory）：

丘吉爾首相，1943

撒切爾夫人，1987

威廉王子慶祝女兒誕生，2015

另一種是手背向外，表示侮辱、蔑視。

最著名案例是1971年賽馬選手 Harvey Smith 比賽獲勝後做出 V 字手勢，被判定為侮辱裁判而取消成績；但他自辯只是在慶祝勝利。

Harvey Smith，1971

球員 Steven Gerrard 曾因在球場上的 V 字手勢引起輿論嘩然，不過最終他並沒有受到處罰。

Steven Gerrard ，2010

（以上照片均來自互聯網）

傳說表示侮辱、蔑視的 V 字手勢起源於十四至十五世紀的百年戰爭。當時法國騎士在俘獲英國長弓手後，往往會砍掉他們的手指作為報復，或使其喪失戰鬥力。於是當英國長弓手要對法國人進行挑釁時，就會做出 V 字手勢：看，我的手指還在哦！

不過這種說法並沒有切實的證據。

As an insult

The insulting version of the gesture (with the palm inwards U+1F594 reversed victory hand

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) is often compared to the offensive gesture known as "the finger".
The "two-fingered salute", also known as "The Longbowman Salute", "the
two", "The Rods", "The Agincourt Salute", and as "The Tongs" in the West
of Scotland and "the forks" in Australia,

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is commonly performed by flicking the V upwards from wrist or elbow.
The V sign, when the palm is facing toward the person giving the sign,
has long been an insulting gesture in England,

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and later in the rest of the United Kingdom. It is frequently used to
signify defiance (especially to authority), contempt, or derision.

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As an example of the V sign (palm inward) as an insult, on November 1, 1990, The Sun, a British tabloid, ran an article on its front page with the headline "Up Yours, Delors" next to a large hand making a V sign protruding from a Union flag cuff. The Sun urged its readers to stick two fingers up at then President of the European CommissionJacques Delors,
who had advocated an EU central government. The article attracted a
number of complaints about its alleged racism, but the now defunct Press Council rejected the complaints after the editor of The Sun stated that the paper reserved the right to use vulgar abuse in the interests of Britain.

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Steve McQueen gives the sign in the closing scene of the 1971 motorsport movie, Le Mans. A still picture of the gesture

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was recorded by photographer Nigel Snowdon and has become an iconic
image of both McQueen and the film. The gesture was also flashed by Spike (played by James Marsters) in "Hush", a Season 4 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The scene was also featured in the series opening credits for all of Season 5. It was only censored by BBC Two in its early-evening showings of the program.

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For a time in the UK, "a Harvey (Smith)" became a way of describing the insulting version of the V sign, much as "the word of Cambronne" is used in France, or "the Trudeau salute" is used to describe the one-fingered salute in Canada. This happened because, in 1971, show-jumper Harvey Smith was disqualified for making a televised V sign to the judges after winning the British Show Jumping Derby at Hickstead. His win was reinstated two days later.

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Harvey Smith pleaded that he was using a Victory sign, a defence also used by other figures in the public eye.

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Sometimes foreigners visiting the countries mentioned above use the
"two-fingered salute" without knowing it is offensive to the natives,
for example when ordering two beers in a noisy pub, or in the case of
the United States president George H. W. Bush, who, while touring Australia in 1992, attempted to give a "peace sign" to a group of farmers in Canberra—who were protesting about U.S. farm subsidies—and instead gave the insulting V sign.

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Origins

The first unambiguous evidence of the use of the insulting V sign in
England dates to 1901, when a worker outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham used the gesture (captured on the film) to indicate that he did not like being filmed.

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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.

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Between 1975 and 1977 a group of anthropologists including Desmond Morris
studied the history and spread of European gestures and found the rude
version of the V-sign to be basically unknown outside the British Isles.
In his Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, published in 1979, Morris discussed various possible origins of this sign but came to no definite conclusion:

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

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Bowman explanations

Various fanciful explanations attribute it to English peasant archers expressing defiance towards French knights.
A commonly repeated legend claims that the two-fingered salute or V sign derives from a gesture made by longbowmen fighting in the English and Welsh

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army at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years War.
According to the story, the French were in the habit of cutting off
the arrow-shooting fingers of captured English and Welsh longbowmen, and
the gesture was a sign of defiance on the part of the bowmen, showing
the enemy that they still had their fingers,

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or, as a widespread pun puts it, that they could still 「pluck yew」. The
longbow story is of unknown origin, but the 「pluck yew」 pun is thought
to be a definitively false etymology that seems to originate from a 1996 email that circulated the story.

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Such an explanation is illustrated in the graphic novelCrécy (published 2007), where the English author Warren Ellis
imagined "The Longbowman Salute" being used even earlier, in 1346, by
English archers toward the retreating French knights after the Battle of Crécy.
In this story the lower-class longbowmen in the English Army used the
sign as a symbol of their anger and defiance against the French-speaking
upperclass, who had since the Norman conquest of England in 1066 subjugated the English people. However, that is a work of fiction.
The bowman etymology is unlikely, since no evidence exists of French
forces (or any other continental European power) cutting off the fingers
of captive bowmen; the standard procedure at the time was to summarily execute
all enemy commoners captured on the battlefield (regardless of whether
they were bowmen, foot soldiers or merely unarmed auxiliaries) since
they had no ransom
value, unlike the nobles whose lives could be worth thousands of
florins apiece. Also, the war-bows of the time, with a draw weight of
around 100lb, would certainly have required all three fingers.

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V sign