It is not entirely clear when the Americanisation of the offensive gesture took place. Cultural anthropologists will argue over it for decades to come. It certainly hadn’t occurred in 2009 when the benched Scotland players, Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor, gave the V-sign, rather than the single finger gesture, to the cameras, after they had been disciplined for getting wellied in a late-night drinking session after a defeat by the Netherlands.

This used to be normal behaviour for our professional athletes, the bevvying before and after games, and the traditional physical admonishment to critics.

However, by contrast, contemporary photographs show a bashful, rather than belligerent, Jimmy Johnstone on his late-night, oarless escapade on the Firth of Clyde. No hand gestures were to be seen, apart from the waving for help.

But nowadays you can’t find a famous person who hasn’t given the finger to the camera. From Taylor Swift to Ben Affleck, Madonna to Cara Delevingne, Johnny Depp, obviously, to Gerard Butler.

Even the venerable Keith Richards, who at his age ought to know better, has discarded the traditional Vicky for flipping the bird.

I suppose it’s all about the appropriation of culture. And whenever the C-word is uttered there’s some tame social scientist who springs out of the seething undergrowth, or Wikipedia, to tell us what it all means.

Did it begin with Diogenes, demonstrating to a gaggle of fans, what he thought about Demosthenes in a 4th-century Greek critique? You thought I made that up. This time I didn’t.

The Romans called it digitus impudicus, the offensive finger, and the Latin poet Martial in his Epigrammata in about 50AD, writes of a healthy character giving the bird to three doctors.

The historian Tacitus claimed that German tribesmen greeted advancing Roman soldiers with the middle finger, but sadly there is no historical evidence that William Wallace and his army lifted their kilts and waggled their bums at the English, although I am sure it happens regularly now when the Tartan Army are away.

The British zoologist Desmond Morris, whom I’ll call eccentric because at 92 he’s still alive and able to sue, reckons it is one of the most ancient theatrical insult gestures known. “The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture,” and not of the loving kind.

The French have their own interpretation which has caught on here too – the “bras d’honneur” (arm of honour), the forearm thrust up and out while slapping the inside of the elbow with the other hand.

As far as is known the French, at Agincourt, did not resort to the “get-it-up-ye” on the battlefield but, according to some historians, even wackier than dear old Desmond, this is where our two-fingered insult originated. On the night before the set-to the French allegedly taunted the English that captured longbowmen would have their first two fingers cut off so that they’d never again be plundering the quiver for an arrow and drawing back the bow string.

Sadly, several scientific spoilsports have provided empirical evidence that this is just myth, as to pull back and fire an arrow from one of those ancient howitzers would take 100lb of pressure and three fingers. Perhaps the French were shortsighted? Or stronger?

It was during the Second World War, in the Blitz, that it was decided that a symbol of defiance was required, one to boost morale.

A Belgian in the BBC came up with V for victory idea. It could be tapped out in Morse code, it was also the opening bar of Beethoven’s 5th symphony and it was the initial letter in not only English but in French/Walloon and Flemish. And it was easily painted or scribbled on a wall in an act of resistance in an invaded country.

Winston Churchill adopted the sign in mid-1941, often with a fat cigar clenched between the two digits, but as late as 1942 he was doing it with knuckles towards him rather than away, although, of course, it might have been a deliberate message to Herr Hitler.

In 1971, the combustible northern show jumper Harvey Smith gave the two fingers, captured in close-up on the BBC, to the judges after he won the British title at Hickstead.

He was disqualified but the decision was reversed when he pleaded that he was trying to give the victory sign and got a little muddled after all that jogging about on the horse’s back.

The first solid pictorial evidence of the rude V-sign dates from 1901, when the Edwardian filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon were filming workers outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham.

A surly young man, who clearly didn’t want to be included in a social document, is seen making the gesture aggressively to the camera. This was later repeated towards photographers, on almost every public occasion, by Liam Gallagher.

Infamously, in 1990, The Sun, alongside its “Up Your Delors” headline, had the two-fingered salute to the Common Market boss Jacques splattered on its front page. The paper demanded that readers tell “the feelthy French to FROG OFF!” – tastefully concluding that “it won’t be long before the garlic-breathed bastilles will be here in droves once the Channel Tunnel is open”. Today they reserve the hatred for immigrants in packed inflatable dinghies.

In the early 2000s, the then-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who had been dubbed “Two Jags” because he did have two of them, was rebranded “Two Fingers” after giving the salute to the press and, again, in the Commons to heckling Tories.

In 2006, after England had lost a European qualifier to Croatia 2-0 in Zagreb, Wayne Rooney, then of Manchester United and pre-hair graft days, gave the V-sign to supporters, although he claimed it was to just one fan who abused him and, obviously, because of the circumstances, he wasn’t able to argue that it was a misunderstood victory sign.

At the US Super Bowl half-time show in 2012 the network NBC had to quickly apologise for the British singer MIA, who had got her message wrong and stuck the finger up to the world audience.

If it had been two fingers she would probably have got away with it.

The first known photograph of a person flipping the bird was taken in1889 when Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, of the equally wonderfully-named Boston Beaneaters baseball team, is seen with with a middle finger up. The Beaneaters were about to play the New York Giants and the teams grouped for the camera with Hoss graphically expressing his team and city’s feelings with regards to the opponents and also New York.

But the bird can also have its monetary benefits.

During the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 and 2012 in the States, two protesters were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for doing it to police on a train.

The pair won $52,000 for having their First Amendment rights violated.

A photograph is said to be worth a thousand words. The gesture, however many fingers employed, is the mime equivalent of the two-word insult you’re not meant to utter in polite company and, in that, the meaning is utterly universal.