THUMBS UP!

Waipa Post, Volume 52, Issue 3705, 10 January 1936, Page 5

THUMBS UP!

AN ANCIENT CUSTOM The topic, in its sublimity and subtlety, is not to be embarked upon rashly, as Jack Horner inserted his thumb and extracted a plum. Our thumb must be insinuated carefully into the subject if we are to find the plums. Such profound significance may at times reside in the masterfinger! In ancient Rome, for example, life and death were at its command. A single movement of this small organ, a slight flexion of its joint one way or another, was the signal of fate in the circus. The thumbs of Roman holiday-makers decided whether a defeated gladiator should survive or perish by the weapon of his adversary or the fangs of the wild beast. Among those whom these civilised Romans contemptuously termer barbarians, the thumb was an influential member. Tacitus, we remember, relates that certain barbarian kings, when they desired to conclude a peculiarly solemn covenant, had the thumbs of their right hands tied together tightly. The tips were pricked with a dagger and they sucked the blood .together, signifying their wish for permanent peace by extracting the hot and fiery blood from that important member by which their arms w T ere made powerful for offence or defence. In Scotland, down to recent times, a bargain was held to be binding if the two parties licked their thumbs and placed them together—an emasculated version of the original ceremony. A wet thumb was esteemed even more binding than an oath. So Allan Ramsay, in one of his songs, says: 'Though kith and kin and a’ should revile thee, There’s my thumb, I’ll ne’er beguile thee. An Ulster man signifies his assent to a proposition ■ with, “We may lick thooms upo’ that!” Rustic lovers once betrothed themselves in this manner, vowing as they did so to remain faithful to each other for ever and a day.—Anthony Clyne.