And that old Roman thumb signal has been misinterpreted yet again.It was still worse when Ridley Scott made his extras in the audience do it in the gladiatorial combat scenes.The real Roman gesture was to position the thumb and the rest of the hand to act as if it were holding a knife or a dagger with the thumb at the hilt, and running that had across the neck to show that they wanted the vanquished dead.The only people that seemed to get that gesture right was director John McTiernan in “The Hunt For Red October” when the engineer on the Russian Sub used that gesture to signal his crew to cut the engines.The Renaissance painters got this gesture wrong, perhaps because the church or the local leaders and soldiers may not have liked that gesture at the time and people sanitized it to thumbs down, which was based on another old Roman gesture expressing disapproval, not killing somebody in gladiatorial combat.And modern Italians still use that “thumbs down” gesture to indicate their disapproval of anything and that modern Western People still use that gesture to indicate their disapproval, even though in some circles it is considered a rude gesture, just like raising the middle finger to somebody in the US and the two-fingered gesture that the British use in the UK.
And that old Roman thumb signal has been misinterpreted yet again.It was still worse when Ridley Scott made his extras in the audience do it in the gladiatorial combat scenes.The real Roman gesture was to position the thumb and the rest of the hand to act as if it were holding a knife or a dagger with the thumb at the hilt, and running that had across the neck to show that they wanted the vanquished dead.The only people that seemed to get that gesture right was director John McTiernan in “The Hunt For Red October” when the engineer on the Russian Sub used that gesture to signal his crew to cut the engines.The Renaissance painters got this gesture wrong, perhaps because the church or the local leaders and soldiers may not have liked that gesture at the time and people sanitized it to thumbs down, which was based on another old Roman gesture expressing disapproval, not killing somebody in gladiatorial combat.And modern Italians still use that “thumbs down” gesture to indicate their disapproval of anything and that modern Western People still use that gesture to indicate their disapproval, even though in some circles it is considered a rude gesture, just like raising the middle finger to somebody in the US and the two-fingered gesture that the British use in the UK.