Giving the Fico

In old England the deepest sign of contempt was to bite your thumb at someone, setting the nail against the teeth and then flinging the hand towards him. The thumb stood for a fig, and the gesture meant I don’t care a fig for you, a phrase that outlived it. It was known as giving the fico, and Hone’s correspondent pointed to the quarrel that opens Romeo and Juliet and to Lodge’s Wit’s Misery of 1596, and noted that the French still used it.