I just watched a video of Horowitz playing a Schubert piano piece (inspired by @needle_e's recent tweet). The audience was clapping for the previous piece and Horowitz got up from his chair and suddenly gave them an inward-palm facing V-sign. It looked like he was flipping them off, but I wasn't sure why. Wikipedia writes of a British gesture like this which is indeed meant to be insulting. But Horowitz was born in Kiev, and lived in America, so I'm unsure if he intended the English version or not.

In any case, I continued reading the article which soon made mention of the V-sign in Japan. Almost everyone shows the peace sign when a photo is being snapped here, the origin of which remains unclear. The article contains three theories: 1) two can be pronounced "ni" in Japanese and "ni" is a prefix of certain "smiley" words, like "niko niko"; holding up two fingers and smiling seem to go together well; 2) Jun Inoue, a Japanese celebrity, showed the V-sign in a camera commercial in 1972; 3) also in 1972, an American figure skater, Janet Lynn, flashed the peace sign for cameramen and photographers after winning a bronze medal in the Sapporo Olympics. (pre-1972 photos of young girls showing the V-sign would be counter-examples of points 2 and 3. Anyone have any?)

This led me to find this video, of a modern-day Lynn (actually more like 10 years ago) reminiscing about her experience at the Olympics and successive visits to Japan:

Here is the Horowitz video. What do you think? "Peace" or "Shut up"?