What’s Up with Thumbs Up?

What’s got two thumbs and an oversized appreciation for varied rating systems? That’s right, this guy right here.

Now, I have just penned a deep exploration on where five stars ratings came from, but if no one is opposed, it’s time to give some love to our thumbs and the simple manner that they rate things. That, of course, means it’s time for another quick history lesson.

Let’s Get Turnt

Gladiator. Ah, just saying the name of the movie is enough for the roar of the crowds, the cheer of the tigers, and the dark, pouty eyes of Joaquin Phoenix to rush through my head. If you haven’t seen Gladiator – maybe that should be my next Reviews in Pop Culture post – don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything here. The gist of the story is that Russel Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. HE has been imprisoned by Phoenix’s Commodus, and he will have his vengeance, in this life or the next. Nice little gist, innit?

Well, to round out the gist- the warriors in the coliseum fight to the death and any time Commodus decides a fighter’s fate, he does so by giving either a thumbs up to spare them or a thumbs down to snuff their mortal flame.

OR SO WE THOUGHT. Hollywood never gets things right, they just get things cool.

You may have heard that the movie got it mixed up and that the opposite gestures were used, but even that seems to be a bit off.

According to various sources, including statues and paintings, but especially antiquated texts (some with illustrations), the symbol for sparing someone’s life was simply a fist with the thumb pressed down upon it, the term being pollices premere.

While it has apparently proven harder to determine the negative thumb gesture, texts describe it as pollice converso, or “turned thumb,” and experts argue that a thumbs down gesture involves turning of the wrist, while thumbs up is purely a turned thumb alone.

Additional sources back up each stance. The phrase stantes missi – or let the men who are still standing be released – can be seen in the caption of a gladiatorial fight where a referee (because I guess they had those) is holding a closed fist between two fighters. Conversely, the upturned thumb was known to be offensive, being called the infestus pollex, or hostile thumb, a gesture not dissimilar from a present day middle finger.

So how did the thumbs get mixed up?

We take a big jump here to 1872, and the painting Pollice Verso, which, though painted by an artist known for his attention to detail and historical accuracy, depicts crowds around a gladiatorial fight extending their hands with thumbs pointed down. It’s worth noting that this painting was cited as a partial inspiration for the film Gladiator.

Makes sense, that sort of thing seems to have happened all the time. Popular media gets some fact wrong and the public accepts, or enough time passes where it is impossible to discern which is right and which is wrong.

But that still doesn’t explain everything, does it?

Nope. As we now know, what we believe to be correct is thumbs up = BAD and thumbs pressed = GOOD. Thumbs down was never an option for the gladiators. So how did thumbs pressed morph into thumbs up?

Like five star ratings, it appears to have been a shockingly recent development.

A 1979 study of 1200 Mediterranean Europeans revealed that the majority knew thumbs up had positive connotations, but they also believed that it was a relatively new concept that the Americans had introduced in “the war.” So the people who descended from Romans who were there watching the gladiators thought it was American-made. And we know Americans steal all the best ideas, so where did the Americans get it?

It isn’t perfectly clear, but if we can trust my source (this Time magazine piece, I give it a thumbs up), then the answer might be found in a 1917 book written by an American serving with the British army. In the book Over the Top, Arthur Guy Empey described it as follows, in the section titled Tommy’s Dictionary of the Trenches:

Tommy's expression which means "everything is fine with me." Very seldom used during an intense bombardment.

And I suppose it makes sense that things wouldn’t be fine. Empey appears to have had a sense of humor:

So now we know where and when thumbs ups became the go to for meaning Okay, Good, and You Got It.

Now, jumping in history again, we land on the famed movie reviewers of yesteryear, Siskel and Ebert. The story goes that Ebert disliked ratings and opted for a yes/no system. When their show became produced by Disney, the thumbs were introduced. A thumbs up for something they recommend, down for what they didn’t, leading to the enduring term “two thumbs up,” which was reserved for movies both of them recommended (and was also trademarked).

Two thumbs down was obviously the antithesis of thumbs up, a movie you shouldn’t see, shouldn’t rent, shouldn’t acknowledge.

But hey, there are thumbs elsewhere these days, aren’t there? We see them all over YouTube and other forms of social media or video streaming services, just that simple Like/Dislike option.

We notably also see it on Netflix, but that wasn’t always the case. In Netflix’s younger days (think back to when sending out discs in the mail was the norm), Netflix asked you to rate the movie or show you’d just finished on a five-star scale (heck yes, five stars!). Then, the algorithms went to work and assigned star ratings to other titles in the Netflix catalog, using the stars to indicate how much they thought you would like it, not how much anyone else liked it.

In other words, if you gave one star ratings to Friday the 13th because you hate that Kevin Bacon is uselessly in it for two minutes before being killed, or one star to Nightmare on Elm Street because you hated seeing young Johnny Depp not being better used, then Netflix would start showing all other horror movies with a low star rating, not because they weren’t good, but because the algorithm assumed you wouldn’t like them.

Confusing, yeah? Yeah, especially because we’re conditioned by our overlord Amazon to see star ratings as a measure of quality, not as a measure of how much a program thinks something is a match for us. Netflix has now switched to the simple thumbs up/down, and tells you a percentage match instead of a star rating match.

So it appears that sometimes five stars is just too much to consider. Sometimes thumbs win out, that binary good/bad, like/dislike, upvote/downvote. Is it perfect? No. But it is simple. Let’s give it a hand for that.