Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. @showerthoughts 🖕
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.
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
What’s wrong with you?
The thumb, the misunderstood tentacle.
An essay.Well, it’s not a toe.
I wonder if OP thinks the big toe isn’t a toe…
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 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.
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.
I only know Japanese, but it is 親指 (oya yubi) which means parent-finger.
Do other fingers get their own names in those languages, though? Or is thumb special, like in English?
If it’s not a finger, what do you think it is?
Are toes also fingers?
Not unless they are on your hand. Either way though they are phalanges.
What if they aren’t greek?
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.
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.
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.
Just go base 2 and you can count to 31 without using knuckles
True, although I would put binary in the “fancy math” category.
I wouldn’t. It’s easy, people just haven’t learned it. It takes probably all of a minute to teach someone to count in binary with their fingers.
If they are already familiar with binary, sure.
There are 10 types of people. Those that understand binary and those that don’t.
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.
Why leave Pi to mathematicians rather than democratically-ish elected leaders? Pi is far to important to be left outside of democracys sphere of influence
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
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
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.
Oh yeah? Well 🖕
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…
