Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. @showerthoughts 🖕
Why do you accept your pinky as a finger?
What do you consider the thumb to be if not another finger?
Its a thumb. Its its own thing. If we had only
5fingers we would be INFERIOR BEINGSglares at spider monkies
Edit: apparently sponkeys have 4 fingers on their hands and thumbs on their feet
Nah it’s the thumb finger, like the index finger etc. We have fully truncated it to just thumb because of how it feels more unique to the others. Doesn’t mean it no longer fits the categorisation though.
We have fully truncated it to just thumb because of how it feels more unique to the others
Kinda like the goalie on a hockey team or the drummer in a band. Still on the team, just a bit weirder.
how is a thumb different from a finger?
Its a thumb. Its oppsable. If you had 2+ thumbs on each hand we would probably differentiate them more
how does being opposable make it not a finger?
Ah yes, that’s why we can only count to 8 using our fingers
The Sangheli in Halo actually have two fingers and two thumbs on each hand.
What’s wrong with you?
The thumb, the misunderstood tentacle.
An essay.I used to genuinely argue that it wasn’t a finger bc it had only two segments, not three. I’ve since realized that there is a third and I’m fucking stupid.
Your original instinct was actually correct. Fingers have the metacarpal, proximal phalange, middle phalange, and distal phalange. The thumb doesn’t have a middle phalange. The proximal and distal phalange connect directly to each other.
All of them are fingers. Thumbs are fingers, but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. I dont know where people get the idea that a thumb is not a finger. So many common sayings reinforce that it is. “Counting on your fingers (including your thumbs)”, healthy babies have “Ten fingers, ten toes”, “What did the five fingers say to the face… slap”, “high five”, “five finger discount”, etc. Also, honorable mention to Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya searching for “the 6 fingered man” which includes his thumb. “Middle finger” is not the only thing that makes no sense if you don’t accept that the thumb is a finger.
In almost every other language there isn’t even a separate word for “thumb”, it’s just one of the fingers.
I don’t think that’s right? I know polish has a separate word, and sampling in Google translate seems to show separate words in German, french and Spanish. Maybe I got lucky and hit the exceptions, but it seems to commonly be a separate word.
Do other fingers get their own names in those languages, though? Or is thumb special, like in English?
Well, it’s not a toe.
This is like the square/rectangle thing: “Not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers”.
If it’s not a finger, what do you think it is?
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Are toes also fingers?
Not unless they are on your hand. Either way though they are phalanges.
It’s pretty normal to count the thumb as a finger. I find it strange that you would not.
If you were asked “how many fingers do you have”, would you answer 8, or 10? Surely, everyone knows the answer is 10 (assuming no physical abnormalities)? On a fingering chart, music will instruct you to play a note with your thumb with the number “1” and your pinky with the number “5”.
The whole concept of even having a middle finger is a bit arbitrary. When you put your hands on a table, all 10 fingers spread out, the gap between the hands is the exact middle. If you include all 10 fingers, there is no middle finger, but there is a middle gap.
Andy why do we even count the fleshy fingers, when we could be counting the gaps between them? It’s the number of gaps that really matters when you’re holding on to a bunch of things like papers, magazines, forks, sticks, stones, strings, cables or whatever.
Sure, but we don’t say you have one middle finger, we talk about the two middle fingers. As in, one per hand. It’s not the middle of all your fingers, it’s the middle of the fingers on that hand.
We don’t count the gabs because that’s…not how counting things works. When delivering a bag of apples, you don’t count how many gaps between apples there are, you count the number of apples. You have to know that your second paragraph here is a stretch that would make a Republican lawmaker seem sensible, don’t you?
make a Republican lawmaker seem sensible
Whoa now, hold your horses…
Not a comparison I use lightly, I assure you.
Maybe that one politician a while back who wanted to redefine pi to equal 4 would be on this level.
Andy why do we even count the fleshy fingers, when we could be counting the gaps between them?
Each finger is conveniently split into 3 parts. Using 8 fingers we can count to 24 without resorting to any fancy math.
Just go base 2 and you can count to 31 without using knuckles
True, although I would put binary in the “fancy math” category.
Actually can count to 144 or a gross if you use base 12. One hand for the ones place and the other hand for the dozens.
I’ve always wonder if it was worth the effort of learning base 12 mental arithmetic.
Depends if you’re a farmer or merchant without access to electronics.
That’s the point most westerners seem to miss. There are so many ways to use fingers to count, while the one common in Europe the simplest one possible. It’s like demo version, while some other countries get the full pro ultra max edition.
There are so many ways to use fingers to count, while the one common in Europe the simplest one possible
But this isn’t about counting on fingers. It’s about counting fingers. As in, the fingers themselves are what’s being counted when you talk about your “middle finger”.
Fair enough. This was an unnecessary side tangent.
You take one hand and count with the thumb as 1 and the pinky as 5 and the middle number is 3. If you switch and start with the pinky as 1 and the thumb as 5 the middle finger is still the middle number. Talking about the gaps can be useful but anatomically we name things for what’s there and what’s not there and we talk about fingers much more than we talk about the gaps
The thumb is thicker than other digits so naturally it’ll be harder to accept. A lubricant may help but the key is to relax and go slow.
Nailed it.
In that case use clippers and a small sanding stick.
You don’t consider a thumb a finger? What is it then in your world? Tail?
a digit
There are ten digits in our numeral system, and the thumb is neither a 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9.
first of all, there exist more than one numeral system. Ex. I, X, V, A, B, C, D, E, F,etc
If you put a fake mustache on that 0, it sure looks like a thumb.
I’d a tail! Prehensile, or of that’s not possible, then spiky
you count your pinky as a finger ? it is not a finger; it is a pinky.
with the thumb being a thumb and as we have previously discussed about pinky leaves three fingers and certainly a middle one
Which I find hard to accept.
How?
Probably because of its unique structure. It is slightly different than the rest of your fingers. I wouldn’t consider it different enough to exclude it from being a finger though.
Its more of a finger than a finger is a thumb
You have three fingers named fingers.
Index finger, ring finger and middle finger. The middle finger is in the middle of the three. Thumb and pinky are both outliers.I have always known it as the “Pinky Finger” myself.
