Submitted 3 weeks ago by MishaVelthuis@social.edu.nl to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. @showerthoughts
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.
In that case use clippers and a small sanding stick.
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?
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.
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
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.
I’d a tail! Prehensile, or of that’s not possible, then spiky
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 it. “Counting on your fingers (including your thumbs)”, healthy babies have “Five fingers, five 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.
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.
how is a thumb different from a finger?
you count your pinky as a finger ?
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’s wrong with you?
“middle finger” is “the finger in the middle of the digits” not “the finger on the middle of the fingers”
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…
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.
Oh yeah? Well 🖕
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.
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…
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.
Have you ever thought that it’s called the middle finger but it’s actually the long finger?
Long finger
Blade9732@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is like the square/rectangle thing: “Not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers”.
TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I swear one of these days I’m gonna dive into Wikipedia and find the name for that kinda relationship
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t know if there’s a better term, but a subset is what it is.
Droechai@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Except for some monkey thumbs that are toes… Apes are so clearly superior even in the thumb area