Cocking a snook

Wonderful arcane phrase used by Angela Carter in one of her pieces about an English town; it means thumbing one's nose. Evidently it originated among men engaged in cockfighting. Here's a descriptive passage she wrote about a city called Bradford, in 1970:
"At times, Bradford hardly seems an English city at all, since it is inhabited, in the main, by (to all appearances) extras from the Gorki trilogy, huddled in shapeless coats - the men in caps and mufflers, the women in boots and headscarves. It comes as no surprise to hear so much Polish spoken or to see so much vodka in the windows of off-licenses, next to the British sherry, brown ale and dandelion and burdock. Though, again, it might be a city in a time machine. Those low, steep terraces - where, at night, gas lamps secrete a mean, lemon-coloured light which seems to intensify rather than diminish the surrounding darkness - and the skyline, intermittently punctuated by mill chimneys, create so consistent an image of a typical Victorian industrial town everything teeters on the brink of parody and the public statuary goes right over the edge.
Like monstrous "genii loci", petrifactions of stern industrialists pose in squares and on road islands, clasping technological devises or depicted in the act of raising the weeping orphan. There is something inherently risible in a monumental statue showing a man in full mid-Victorian rig, watch chain and all, shoving one hand in his waistcoat a la Napoleon and, with the other, exhorting the masses to, presumably, greater and yet greater productiveness."
Off to finally see "An Inconvenient Truth" this evening at Drinking Liberally.