Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. @showerthoughts 🖕
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- 1 year
This is like the square/rectangle thing: “Not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers”.
- TriflingToad@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 year
I swear one of these days I’m gonna dive into Wikipedia and find the name for that kinda relationship
- 1 year
Except for some monkey thumbs that are toes… Apes are so clearly superior even in the thumb area
- 1 year
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.
1 yearIt’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?
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.
- 1 year
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
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.
- spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish1 year
Just go base 2 and you can count to 31 without using knuckles
True, although I would put binary in the “fancy math” category.
- Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish1 year
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.
- Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish1 year
I’m willing to bet I could teach someone how to count in binary on their fingers who doesn’t know binary in five minutes or less. They don’t need to know it’s binary. It’s just a simple rule that you add one and if that finger is up it instead goes down and the next goes up. They don’t need to know more than that. Then they just work backwards to get the final count. Knowing this is binary can be helpful, but it isn’t a prerequisite.
- 1 year
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.
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”.
- 1 year
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
- Lembot_0002@lemm.eedeleted by creator1 year
You don’t consider a thumb a finger? What is it then in your world? Tail?
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
- 1 year
Can’t tell if this is a list of Roman Numerals or the names of some of Elon Musk’s kids
- 1 year
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 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.
- 1 year
In almost every other language there isn’t even a separate word for “thumb”, it’s just one of the fingers.
- KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish1 year
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.
- 1 year
Do other fingers get their own names in those languages, though? Or is thumb special, like in English?
- KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish1 year
Not sure about other languages, but in polish the thumb is “kciuk”, while the rest are variants on finger - “palec wskazujący”, “palec środkowy”
Edit: checking google translate, German seems to be the same, with the thumb being a distinct word, and the rest being compound words of “finger”
- 1 year
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.
- sugarfoot00@lemmy.caEnglish1 year
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.
- 1 year
Its a thumb. Its oppsable. If you had 2+ thumbs on each hand we would probably differentiate them more
- 1 year
Are your fingers not opposable? I can move all of my fingers and touch the other 4?
- 11 months
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.
The Sangheli in Halo actually have two fingers and two thumbs on each hand.
- 11 months
It is a finger but its more of a thumb than a finger. It has its own function and does thumb things
- 1 year
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.
- sugarfoot00@lemmy.caEnglish1 year
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.
- 1 year
I may or may not have just started feeling up my hand while wiggling my fingers to check this
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
Not unless they are on your hand. Either way though they are phalanges.
Then they are barbarians and probably protogermanic so they become fingraz.
- 1 year
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.
- 1 year
“middle finger” is “the finger in the middle of the digits” not “the finger on the middle of the fingers”
