Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Those Romans who got to decide the fate of gladiators by voting thumbs up or thumbs down must have experienced a feeling of great power.

The gesture has a very long history. One anthropologist back in the mid-1950s suggested that Barbary Apes in Gibraltar used it. So, it might not even be human in origin.

More recently, in 2017, the late U.S. Sen. John McCain conveyed iconic status on the hand signal. He did so by dramatically voting against reductive changes to the Affordable Care Act with a thumbs down motion on the Senate floor which halted efforts to reduce the controversial but highly popular health insurance program.

If you think about it, it stands to reason that any of us can endlessly entertain ourselves in the comfort and convenience of our own home by symbolically passing judgment on anything we wish simply by sticking a thumb in the air or pointing it down at the shag rug we should have burned years ago. In fact that sounds like a good first example of the use of the gesture. Burn that rug. Thumbs up!

Oh, and I have more! For instance I'd turn both thumbs down (as vigorously as possible) to those repulsive TV commercials featuring a reanimated decrepit corpse who loses body parts and leaks water as the ad progresses. Ugh!

Ditto to the proliferating number of promotions for deodorants specifically directed at parts of the human body that used to be referred to euphemistically if at all, but which the shills now delight in describing as graphically as possible.

OK, call me an aging fossil. That's better than describing me as a section of the anatomy these products are designed to deodorize.

There is one ad, however, that I will give a thumbs up to. It's the universal spray for bad smells that is so safe the spokesman shoots a blast into his own mouth.

Getting more local, I'm sort of on the fence about the state's new license plates. Being a true Rhode Islander, I have gotten used to and rather attached to the wave design that has been in use for such a long time. So, maybe I would invent a new gesture, the sideways thumb. However, if you twisted my arm behind my back, you could probably force my opposable digit into an upward position. I just wouldn't be very enthusiastic.

I'm not at all enthusiastic about the traffic situation in Greenville Center. What's going on at Greenville and Austin Avenues where they meet Putnam Pike? Nothing good as far as I can see.

So, it's thumbs down, for sure, but I might not display it if I were walking on either street lest someone might think I were thumbing a ride. Who'd want to be responsible for the chaos that might precipitate?

Moving on – so far this year the records of the Boston Celtics and the Boston Bruins each get a very enthusiastic two thumbs up from this quarter.

In another area, sometimes you might have to qualify a choice you make and come to a split decision. For example, the fashion statement that seems to be implied by wearing pajama bottoms, a sweatshirt, and fleece-lined bedroom slippers to the supermarket.

If it's a high school senior or college freshman so attired, then it's OK. I would vote thumbs up. If it's a silver-haired senior citizen (like a columnist I know) then it might be more prudent to say thumbs down. After all, it's embarrassing to look over your shoulder and wonder if the patrol car heading into the parking lot at Dave's Market is there to make a wellness check on the old guy in slippers staring into the deli case and asking for a quarter pound of turkey sliced extra thin.

Speaking of food and thumbs, I have to say that I have never understood the point of the childhood nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner. Remember, it is he who takes his Christmas pie, sticks in his thumb, and pulls out a plum, after which he declares "what a good boy am I."

Seems like putting your hand in a pie and tearing out some of the filling doesn't make you a good boy at all. So, I guess it would be a thumbs down to Jack from me.

The subject of pie makes me think of growing up on an apple farm, though. Pie was an integral part of the diet in such surroundings, and when one of your uncles also owned an apple orchard, and your aunt and your mother both made pies as readily as some folks make peanut butter sandwiches, you grew up thinking everybody always had an apple pie on hand, which makes you think of their hands which you loved, hands where the thumbs were always up for you.

Finally, with Valentine's Day just around the corner it would be remiss not to give two thumbs and both big toes up (as far as you can get them) for celebrating that most essential and bedeviling emotion, LOVE!

Laurence J. Sasso Jr.

(Contact me at [email protected])