My boyfriend submits to Wikipedia

So where did the origin of the middle finger come from anyway?
Photo Illustration by Rachel Seymour

Apparently, the offensive "middle finger" began in the Hundreds Years War between the French and English.

According to the story, the English were so effective at killing the French with the bow and arrow, that the French could not even get in place to fight back. The middle finger is one of the fingers used to shoot a bow and arrow. As a result, the French would cut off the middle finger of English bowmen. In return, when an English bowman had the chance, he would raise only their middle finger - if they still had it - at the French to taunt them.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, actually, my boyfriend made that story up and told it to me. I told about five or six people until he finally told me I had unintentionally been lying to people. He wanted to see how many times I would repeat the story and thought it was funny. Unfortunately, I did not exactly agree.

So, I decided to figure out what exactly was the origin of the middle finger. I clicked my way to Wikipedia's "the finger". There are several ideas to how the middle finger became offensive. The Hundred Years War was not one of them, but it was the possible origin of the "V sign".

All the interesting facts you can find on the Wikipedia site are pretty amazing, I thought to myself.

Then it hit me.

People like my boyfriend can submit to Wikipedia.