Well, it depends. In my region if you do that gesture horizontally, and shake the hand like a horned wild animal that is charging to attack a potential enemy… yes that’s exactly to fend off the evil eye!
Add “Sciò sciò ciucciuè” (go away you ominous owl!) for a better result.
But if you show your hand vertically with the fingers up with the palm turned to your collocutor, it means “you’ve been (sexually) cheated” (literally “you have horns”).
Mhhh, this beeing Berlusconi though and especially with that facial expression this could very well be a message to the whole audience:“All your wives are cheating on you…with me!”
Finally watched that vid. It was quite funny, though the family names sound pretty normal to me, haha. I can’t make out most of the place names though.
Thanks for the video, very interesting. Yes, at 0:24 there’s exactly the gesture I said above, which is more horizontal and in direction of someone: he says “malocchio” (evil eye). Here where I live is still a pretty common gesture.
Ok, I think we’ve got enough italian origins for a topic entitled to the most ridiculous english swear words. So now… just don’t say to frenchmen that an italian musician wrote the music (addressed to a Bavarian colonel) they used for their national anthem, the so-called Marseillaise…
Here’s the original by Giovan Battista Viotti (1781).
Your OT is quite interesting. I didn’t know about it, but I have done a quick Wikipedia search and I have to state, for the sake of truth, that actually this matter is controversial. If you look for Viotti, the Italian page mentions him as the writer of the Marseillaise. The English page says that a certain music written by him 11 years earlier has a strong resemblance with the anthem. The french page for Viotti doesn’t mention the Marseillaise.
But…
if you search for “Marseillaise”, both the English and the french page don’t mention Viotti.
The Italian page, though, has a complete description of the controversy, with plenty of references. Most of these references seem to suggest that Viotti simply signed some variations for the Marseillaise, and the date of 1781 could have been posthumously added by unknown.
Yes, there is a controversy about it, none of the two possible origins can be attested with certainty. Read also this article by musicologist Giuseppina La Face. But I like to tease our french friends, first 'cause I would like they join the forums too (and what’s better than a controversy on their national anthem to encourage them to join in) and second, because they sometimes show too much of their grandeur…
Hehehe, this reminds me of my sister locked in her room to listen to Nirvana after school and my mother was concerned about that evil music’s effects…
I mean, apart from increasing a teen’s depression, music can’t be that bad
I think that Ronnie James brought that gesture in metal in a very positive way, it’s an energetic and vitalistic gesture to face heavily bad luck and bad mood in general.
And it´s beautifully unifying, like when everybody does it at a concert. One of my favourite concert moments ever is standing in the front row of a Dio concert and making that sign at him and he making it back at us with a big smile.
My sister was once walking in her Blind Guardian shirt, and from a car passing by two guys shouted “METAL SISTER!” with gesture annexed to which she replied with the same horns.
The exact same thing happened to me when I wore my Blind Guardian shirt in a most random bavarian village. Someone else also wearing a Blind Guardian shirt walked past by me and we just smiled and nodded at each other.
I also had a metalhead friend for whom doing the horns was a casual greeting when we met.