Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards Read Online Free Page B
Author: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Emmy, a Writer’s Guild Award, and the first annual Mark Twain Humor Prize, to name a few. For his devotion to animal rights, particularly the protection of baby elephants from circus life, he was honored by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Pryor turned every obstacle into a springboard. Through severe drug addiction, a suicide attempt (the freebasing incident, according to his interview with Barbara Walters), seven marriages to five different women, six children, repeated run-ins with the law, and living with multiple sclerosis for nearly 20 years, he still managed to become one of the most beloved characters in show business. His contributions to the art of comedy continue to be celebrated long after his death at age 65 on December 5, 2005.
“I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now: relaxed. Cause when I heard the police car, I knew they weren’t coming after me!”
—Richard Pryor
THE LET YOUR FINGERS DO THE TALKING AWARD
Rudest Hand Gestures
A picture is worth a thousand words, but a hand can say so much more.
IN YO’ FACE
People have many ways to show their displeasure with someone else: a withering look, a frown, a choice word or two. Then there are the hand gestures. Nothing is worse in terms of rudeness than an in-your-face flick of the hand that says what the lips haven’t. Here are our least favorite hand gestures.
DIGITUS INFAMIS
There was a time, not too long ago, when the “F” word was one of the rudest things one could ever utter in the English language. Very few words topped it for effect and impact. Nowadays it’s commonplace (though not quite to the point where we can print it here). The correlating hand gesture has similarly become increasingly used in public. That doesn’t stop it from being rude, though. For a long time, people have been rightly offended by it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Who was first offended by it, though, is up for debate:
• Some accounts of the gesture’s origin trace it back to 423 BC, when a Greek playwright named Aristophanes included it in one of his works. A modern translation of his play The Clouds features a character giving the finger to Socrates, who calls him a crude buffoon in reply. But scholars debate whether it was actually included as a stage direction.
• Other sources trace it back to the ancient Romans, who are
said to have called it the digitus infamis —the infamous finger. They may have used that term, but there’s no way to know which finger they were talking about.
A third, persistent story is based on the fact that British soldiers in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years War used longbows made of yew. When they were captured, the French would cut off their middle fingers, making the English unable to use the bow. English soldiers who were not captured supposedly began showing their middle fingers to the French to show they could still pull the bow.
That story goes to an even further extreme by claiming that the soldiers bragged they could still “pluck yew.” Hogwash, linguistic historians say. The longbow-using soldiers at Agincourt were mostly Welsh mercenaries, and it’s unlikely that any of them would ever utter the phrase “pluck yew.” It’s also unlikely that the French had a plan to cut off the fingers of captured soldiers. It’s a fun story, though.
However, none of the bird’s origin stories offer a realistic explanation for why the gesture is primarily one used by Americans. The obscenity is universal. Many cultures use a finger as a phallic symbol: in Iran, an American “thumbs up” is equivalent to flipping the bird, and Sri Lankans use their index finger. But the middle finger is uniquely American. Movies, television, the Web, and global travel have helped to spread the American version, but for the most part, foreign countries already have their own rude hand gestures and are sticking with them.
Whatever its beginnings, and
Pryor turned every obstacle into a springboard. Through severe drug addiction, a suicide attempt (the freebasing incident, according to his interview with Barbara Walters), seven marriages to five different women, six children, repeated run-ins with the law, and living with multiple sclerosis for nearly 20 years, he still managed to become one of the most beloved characters in show business. His contributions to the art of comedy continue to be celebrated long after his death at age 65 on December 5, 2005.
“I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now: relaxed. Cause when I heard the police car, I knew they weren’t coming after me!”
—Richard Pryor
THE LET YOUR FINGERS DO THE TALKING AWARD
Rudest Hand Gestures
A picture is worth a thousand words, but a hand can say so much more.
IN YO’ FACE
People have many ways to show their displeasure with someone else: a withering look, a frown, a choice word or two. Then there are the hand gestures. Nothing is worse in terms of rudeness than an in-your-face flick of the hand that says what the lips haven’t. Here are our least favorite hand gestures.
DIGITUS INFAMIS
There was a time, not too long ago, when the “F” word was one of the rudest things one could ever utter in the English language. Very few words topped it for effect and impact. Nowadays it’s commonplace (though not quite to the point where we can print it here). The correlating hand gesture has similarly become increasingly used in public. That doesn’t stop it from being rude, though. For a long time, people have been rightly offended by it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Who was first offended by it, though, is up for debate:
• Some accounts of the gesture’s origin trace it back to 423 BC, when a Greek playwright named Aristophanes included it in one of his works. A modern translation of his play The Clouds features a character giving the finger to Socrates, who calls him a crude buffoon in reply. But scholars debate whether it was actually included as a stage direction.
• Other sources trace it back to the ancient Romans, who are
said to have called it the digitus infamis —the infamous finger. They may have used that term, but there’s no way to know which finger they were talking about.
A third, persistent story is based on the fact that British soldiers in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years War used longbows made of yew. When they were captured, the French would cut off their middle fingers, making the English unable to use the bow. English soldiers who were not captured supposedly began showing their middle fingers to the French to show they could still pull the bow.
That story goes to an even further extreme by claiming that the soldiers bragged they could still “pluck yew.” Hogwash, linguistic historians say. The longbow-using soldiers at Agincourt were mostly Welsh mercenaries, and it’s unlikely that any of them would ever utter the phrase “pluck yew.” It’s also unlikely that the French had a plan to cut off the fingers of captured soldiers. It’s a fun story, though.
However, none of the bird’s origin stories offer a realistic explanation for why the gesture is primarily one used by Americans. The obscenity is universal. Many cultures use a finger as a phallic symbol: in Iran, an American “thumbs up” is equivalent to flipping the bird, and Sri Lankans use their index finger. But the middle finger is uniquely American. Movies, television, the Web, and global travel have helped to spread the American version, but for the most part, foreign countries already have their own rude hand gestures and are sticking with them.
Whatever its beginnings, and
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