His famous painting “Pollice Verso” depicts a crowded arena looking down on a few gladiators, only one of whom is still standing, foot pressed to the throat of one of his fallen combatants. Then, in 1872 the popular and influential painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, well, turned things upside-down a bit. From the 1600s until the early 1900s, that’s the primary dichotomy of thumbs: bent up (death) or down (life).
The thumb turned, extending from the hand, was translated from Latin as a sign of “disapprobation” in a number of instances that the Oxford English Dictionary records.
In the intervening years, the thumbs-up gesture was mostly mentioned in reference to the Latin. So how did the meaning get swapped around? In antiquity, says Corbeill, “the thumb was hostile in the same way the middle finger was hostile, and it was a threat, just like it is now.” There’s a poem that describes a crowd gesturing towards a gladiator with an unfriendly or hostile thumb, and then the same phrase is used in other contexts where it clearly means the upturned thumb. “‘Turning the thumb’ is turning the thumb up ,” he says, “and you’ve got the ‘up’ gesture.”Īnother reason we know the thumbs-up was the kill signal was a gesture known as the infestus pollex or hostile thumb, which is mentioned in texts but, again, isn’t pictured. He’s got a fist with his thumb pressing down on it.”įor example, the word for turning also means turning a limb in question on the joint, but doing the modern thumbs-down gesture involves turning the wrist, not the thumb. “And right underneath, one of the referees is pressing his thumb. There’s two referees around them breaking up the battle and up above it says, in Latin, STANTES MISSI, which means ‘let the men who are still standing be released,'” he says. “What’s great about these is that they often have text accompanying them, so what you see very clearly is two gladiators fighting to a standstill.
“A thumb can press or be pressed, it works both ways.”Ĭorbeill located an example of what exactly the gesture might look in Nîmes, in southern France, when he found an appliqué medallion that shows a scene from a gladiatorial battle. “The verb premere in latin is just as ambiguous as ‘press’ in English,” he says. The Latin term for the gesture of approval, Corbeill explains, is pollices premere, which means “press your thumbs” and has been described by Pliny the Elder as a common gesture of good wishes. Historical confusion about that thumb-pressing gesture exposes just how difficult it can be to track the evolution of body language.
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