If you do this to the wrong person it could make them very upset.
As the universal symbol that rockers use to signify something is rocking, you’d have never thought the hand gesture beloved by metal lovers and moshers around the world would ever offend anybody. But apparently we were wrong.
An important piece of investigative journalism by VICE has uncovered that in certain parts of the world the ‘rock on’ gesture has an altogether different meaning, far removed from guitars solos and blokes with shoulder length hair.
If you throw up the ‘metal horns’ at someone in several Mediterranean and Latin countries, it actually means you are calling them a ‘cuck’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwQ1A5eB_dY
‘Cuck’ of course is the go-to insult of basement dwelling 4chan-ers and the guys from school who share Paul Josesph Watson videos on Facebook.
Though, somewhat ironically given it is usually thrown out by members of the alt-right, the phrase literally means that somebody is being cuckolded – i.e. that somebody is having sex with their significant other.
The world derives from old French for cuckoo. As a BBC article points out: “The females of some species of cuckoo lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and leave them to bring up the offspring.”
In turn this gave us ‘cuckhold’, and somewhere in the Middle Ages that came to mean a husband with an ‘errant wife’.
It is believed this meaning became associated with ‘the horns’ gesture, as an illusion to the mating habits of stags, who forfeit their mates after being defeated by a competitor.
So, there you have it: feel free to rock on bro, but remember you’re probably more safe doing it at Glastonbury than you are Primavera.
