Chin flick

How to read it

Rick Steves describes the head tilted back slightly and the backs of the fingers flicked forward in an arc from under the chin, and gives its meaning in Italy and France as “I’m not interested, you bore me” or “You bother me”; in southern Italy, “No.” AFAR calls it borderline rude in Italy and France, for being uninterested, bored or bothered, and says that in Portugal it just means “I don’t know.”

Also searched as: chin flick gesture, flicking fingers under chin, Italian chin flick, la barbe, under the chin gesture.

Between Rome and Naples

Desmond Morris mapped the gesture in Manwatching (1977). In France and northern Italy he found it insulting: “Get lost, you are annoying me.” In southern Italy it is still negative but no longer an insult, saying only “There is nothing”, “No”, “I cannot” or “I don’t want any”. The switch takes place between Rome and Naples, and Morris suggests it is a surviving influence of ancient Greece, whose colonies in southern Italy stopped at that line: Greeks today use it as southern Italians do. In Tunisia it is insulting again, as in France, which Morris puts down to French colonial rule.

Justice Scalia’s chin flick

In 2006 the Boston Herald reported that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had made an obscene gesture to a reporter outside church. Scalia said it was dismissive, not obscene. Roger Axtell, author of Gestures: The Do’s and Taboos of Body Language Around the World, told NPR he sided with “dismissive”: a curt gesture that just says “enough”, or “I’ve had enough, go away”, which may differ a little between the north and the south of Italy.