Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. @showerthoughts 🖕
Well, it’s not a toe.
I wonder if OP thinks the big toe isn’t a toe…
Why do you accept your pinky as a finger?
Yeah, that’s classified as dwarf finger now.
What do you consider the thumb to be if not another finger?
Its a thumb. Its its own thing. If we had only 5 fingers we would be INFERIOR BEINGS
glares at spider monkies
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
Ah yes, that’s why we can only count to 8 using our fingers
Are your fingers not opposable? I can move all of my fingers and touch the other 4?
Opposable, meaning positioned in the opposite. Guys look if you cant look at your thumbs and tell they are different than your other fingers I dont know what to tell you.
how does being opposable make it not a finger?
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
The thumb, the misunderstood tentacle.
An essay.When I was in elementary school I tried to start a protest during the break by getting on the desk and proclaiming that we need to stop the discrimination of the middle finger, it is a finger like the others and should be allowed to stand on its own just like the other fingers. Needless to say I held up my middle fingers during that passionate speech. I was also very sincere about it, not emotional, but I did find it unjust. I’m not sure where I am going with this but it was weighing on my chest for too long and needed to get out finally. Thanks for reading.
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?
I only know Japanese, but it is 親指 (oya yubi) which means parent-finger.
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.
I got shocked when I learned my SO had learnt we have only four fingers. And a thumb.
I mean…Yeah seriously don’t tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it’s going to go badly…
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.
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.
If you put a fake mustache on that 0, it sure looks like a thumb.
Well darn, can’t argue with that!
first of all, there exist more than one numeral system. Ex. I, X, V, A, B, C, D, E, F,etc
I’d a tail! Prehensile, or of that’s not possible, then spiky
If you had to pick either one of those fingers to call the “middle” one, it’s pretty obvious which one better fits the description.
Oh yeah? Well 🖕
This is like the square/rectangle thing: “Not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers”.
I swear one of these days I’m gonna dive into Wikipedia and find the name for that kinda relationship
I don’t know if there’s a better term, but a subset is what it is.
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
