meaning - What does "fig" mean in "showing the fig"?


From Etymonline



"Showing the fig" was a vulgar gesture made by sticking the thumb between two fingers, a display which vaguely resembles a fig, itself symbolic of a vagina (sykon also meant "vulva").



What does "fig" mean in "showing the fig"? I looked up the dictionaries, which say either a kind of fruit or nothing, which doesn't fit the context.



Answer



All you need to do is parse the excerpt from etymonline, and use your imagination:


enter image description here


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?