Fickle Finger of Fate Origins

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Bruce Alvarez.

Hi, Bruce. Where are you calling us from?

Fairfax, Vermont.

Excellent. What’s up?

Well, I’ve been watching a bunch of old TV shows from back when I was a kid, and I’ve been watching McHale’s Navy. And in one episode from season one, Captain Binghamton used the term fickle finger of fate. And the only references I have to that, in my mind, are from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Right.

And the only things I can find beyond that, there’s a book titled Fickle Finger of Fate by Raymond Ives, but it was published in 2008. And the term was also used in a book called Crossing the Line by Wendell Saylor, published in 2013. So I’m trying to figure out when was it first used and why.

Well, remind us about the Fickle Finger of Fate on Laugh-In.

I remember that well. It was basically something that was offered up, I think, as a joke. And they called it the flying fickle finger of fate. And wasn’t it a little trophy or something that had a hand?

Yes, it was a trophy that had like a little propeller or something on it.

Yeah. Really goofy like the rest of that show, right?

Yes. The flying fickle finger of fate being awarded to somebody. But it’s actually much older than that. Yeah, most people would know it from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. But I can take some form of it back to at least the 1930s, decades before Laffin. And different parts of the phrase, we can break them down, take them back to the 1860s and 1870s.

If you go back to the 1870s, you will find the finger of fate, and you’ll find fickle fate separately used in different texts in different ways. But they’re always talking to this experience we have as humans where we kind of don’t know what’s next, right? We don’t know what our day of doom is going to be. We don’t know how badly our well-played plans will end up in disarray. It’s all about fate. And that fickle fate or the finger of fate is something that we always have to kind of pay attention to.

By the 1930s, these two phrases were combined into the fickle finger of fate. And they start to pop up in the language of military men, especially during World War II, where they’re using it to talk about what happens when you die. Like you’re killed on the battlefield in a way that is unexpected. It’s not just this glorious moment. It’s just you died in a Jeep accident maybe instead of being shot by the enemy and the fickle finger of fate. And they put the F word on the front of it as well. So it’s the F word fickle finger of fate. And in that way, they just kind of turn into this really dark humor, this gallows humor. You just don’t know when your time is off.

Yeah, you’re thinking maybe it’s the middle finger of fate.

Yeah, the middle finger of fate. I’ve always thought about it as being this kind of bony finger of death, you know, pointing at me out of the shroud to say, now is your time, something like that.

That’s a little scary.

Yeah. And even—I still, I think, think of it as just, like you said, we don’t know what’s going to happen and things happen and it’s the fickle finger of fate.

Yeah, that’s part of being alive, right? And are there specific references to it in texts prior to the McHale’s Navy episode I saw?

Yeah, absolutely. Like I say, it comes up in print in the 1930s for sure as the full phrase of the fickle finger of fate. And in the 1940s, it comes up with the F word attached to the beginning of it in the American Speech, which is a journal published by the American Dialect Society. And there’s a glossary of military terms used by soldiers during World War II. And it’s in there. But interestingly, it’s in there as the F wording flickle flinger of flate, where they’ve, as a joke, have inserted L’s in all of the words.

So presumably the writers of that episode knew it from World War II context because McHale’s Navy is a World War II.

Yeah. Yeah. They may very well have had some copies of these military glossaries, which floated around and were published and appeared in various forms in newspapers during the war.

Yeah. And of course, people consumed war stories, real and imagined. They consumed newspaper stories about it. They heard back from their soldiers who were abroad in letters. So, yeah, the whole country was immersed in World War II, and it’s not surprising that this language got around.

It’s very interesting. Thank you.

Bruce, thank you for this walk down memory lane. I’m remembering all these laugh-in jokes now. And remember how the people got doused with water and all that? Sock it to me. And Artie Johnson falling over on his tricycle.

Yes, yes. Those were the days, Bruce. Thank you so much for calling.

All right. Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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