October 21, 2003
Finger
One of our presidents, observing the crowds lining his parade route, reportedly commented to a colleague, “Look, someone’s giving me half of the peace symbol.”
A Texas motorist recently sued another for sending him the same message. When the Court of Appeals, Third District, at Austin, got the case, they ruled that the timeworn gesture of digitus impudicus (Latin for “impudent finger”) may be “repugnant, distasteful, and crass” and even beyond free speech protection, but if directed by one motorist against another, it neither constitutes disorderly conduct nor does it “incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
It is comforting in a society so infected with literalism and confused by myth, metaphor, and other languages, biblical or whatever, to realize that the meaning communicated by some symbols remains reasonably and functionally intact. Or, as Paul Tillich once put it, “not everything in reality can be grasped by the language which is most adequate for (the) mathematical sciences” (Theology of Culture, p 54).