About that raised middle finger

A continuation of sorts of the previous post.

Or, rephrasing the end of that post: What you punish says as much or more about you as about the action you punish.

The Huffington Post reports:  A police officer can't pull you over and arrest you just because you gave him the finger, a federal appeals court declared Thursday.

German police officers can and will pull you over.

The German Die Welt reported about upset drivers in 2011.
From "stupid cow" to flipping off someone, penalties range from 300 to 4000 Euros.
If you use strong language or gesture toward a German police officer, you get a bonus for indirectly insulting the state, so forget about extending the one finger salute to a uniformed government employee over here.

While we personally find that bonus a little creepy, two other points from the German press are noteworthy.

The first one is that there is consensus about the middle finger steadily displacing the older German pointing the index finger to the temple ("the bird").

The globalisation of insults removes uncertainty, yeah.

The other point is a language issue. In case you don't know, Germans address each other with two words where we use "you". There is the "du", considered informal, between friends, and the "Sie", the formal version of "you".

There is a court ruling that using "du" in a slighty heated conversation with a policeman can cost you 600 Euros.

That one is gross.

For two reasons. One, the "du" has been the single common form of addressing another person in the German working class (not the best term, but heck) for as long as dictionaries have been around.

Two, as a foreigner, the "du" invariably becomes your preferred form of addressing someone until you become fluent enough to differentiate.