"stinkfinger"

[Wilson Gray]

Well, there's certainly no semantic connection between "Stinkefinger" and
"stankfang-uh" that I can see, after reading the article. It's an
interesting coincidence that both German and BE treat
_finger_ the same way: [fVN@], as opposed to sE [fINgr] / [fINg@]. In BE,
it's called simply "(giving someone) the finger." I was ca.35y.o. before I
ever heard "(shooting someone) the bird" from a white colleague, who had to
explain it to me.

IAC, allow me to explain: "to play at stinkfinger" is to use one's middle
finger to masturbate a girl, then, at some later time, to wave that finger
under the noses of one's cut-buddiies in order to demonstrate to them that
one has "strong conversation": the ability to talk a girl into allowing one
to fisticate with her genitalia, despite knowing that one is going to tell
all one's friennds about it.

-Wilson

On 3/15/06, Chris F. Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Chris F. Waigl" <chris at LASCRIBE.NET>
> Organization: rather inconsistent
> Subject:      Re: "stinkfinger"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 16:05 -0500, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> > >From the OED On Line:
> >
> > "*To play at *stinkfinger*,..to grope a woman."
> >
> > Is this really all that "to play at stinkfinger" means to white people?!
> > Of course, it could be simply the case that "correcting" BE
> [stEiNkfEiN@]
> > to "stinkfinger" in spelling does not mean that its meaning is
> necessarily
> > the
> > same as that of stinkfinger. Or, perhaps, the problem is due to my
> > interpreting
> > "to grope a woman" to mean merely "to cop a feel."
>
> I'm not sure I understand[1] the various allusions to what the
> expression means; I'll only be able to consult the OED tomorrow at the
> earliest; and this might not have to do anything with the English
> version at all. Still: colloquial German "Stinkefinger"[2] refers to the
> well-known hand gesture (illustrated in Wikipedia:
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinkefinger ) Why the finger should stink
> sheds light on the sense that some attribute to it (those who don't
> believe in it's being merely a phallic symbol).
>
> Chris Waigl
>
> [1] or rather, I'm quite sure I don't understand
> [2] German wants a linking-E
>
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