V – V-sign/ Victory V

Always a difficult letter “V” plus at this stage in the A to Z I am only 2 posts away from “pantsing it” so forgive me if this post is a little briefer than normal…

Winston Churchill’s iconic V-sign – meaning V for Victory, is a sanitised version of the V-sign going back to the Battle of Agincourt and the days of the great English Long Bow-men. So effective were these bowmen both in terms of accuracy and power – being able to rain down armour-piercing arrows on the enemy – so the French threatened that if they caught the English bowmen, they would cut off their first two fingers – the ones used to draw their bow and so, as two lines of soldiers faced each other across no-mans-land, the English bowmen would wave their first and second fingers in a V-sign to show that they were still armed (or fingered) and dangerous. The true V-sign is delivered by raising your forearm smartly to the vertical, fingers spread, brandishing a V whereas Winston Churchill held up his Victory V palm forward in a respectable but recognizable reference to the classic gesture.

The Cant Language beginning with V from the Wikipedia article is:

• Verlan, from France