Re: fingers

I've called it a "pinky" (and always spelled that way, not with -ie) all my 
life - but that doesn't dispute Ph.D's recollection, since I wasn't old 
enough to start remembering things until the 70s. :)

However, I have never called the index finger "pointer" - and never heard 
the term until I saw the Wiggles' version of "Where is Thumbkin?" just a few 
weeks ago. If I heard it out of context without the noun attached it would 
take me some time to decode. To me, a "pointer" is a data type in a computer 
program, a variety of dog, a helpful tip, and several other things that 
would have to occur to me before I thought of a finger.

It is a shame the middle finger doesn't have a name all its own in English; 
it's only distinguished by being between its neighbors. I suppose we could 
call it the "giving-the-finger finger" (or "bird finger", to use another 
colloqualism of dubious universality...).

On 6/28/05, Joseph Bridwell <darkmoonman@...> wrote:
> 
> Having grown up in the Deep South (piedmont region of South Carolina),
> I heard it all my life until I moved West. My parents used the word,
> and their parents (my grandmother was born on 01 Jan 1900 and died on
> 01 Jan. 1980).
> 
> > As I've said, growing up in the United States,
> > I never heard the word "pinkie." It was always
> > called the "little finger." Then when I was in
> > college in the mid-1970s, some men started to
> > wear a ring on their little finger. These were
> > called "pinkie rings." Soon afterwards, I
> > began to hear people calling the little finger
> > itself a "pinkie." It's probably been around a
> > lot longer than that, but that's the way I
> > remember it.
> 


-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>