What makes my thumbs different from yours

When I open my hands palms-down in front of me, I see two little mounds — calluses — in the Vs between thumbs and forefingers. I think of these parts of my hands as oar locks, where the shaft of my kayak paddle — the pole-y part between the flat paddle blades — rotates in my [...]

Fragment II

In anatomy, the thumb has many names: the first finger, pollex, digitus primus, or digitus I. It consists of three bones:

distal phalanx (of the first digit)
proximal phalanx (of the first digit)
first metacarpal

Eight muscles control its movements:

opponens pollicis
abductor pollicis brevis
flexor pollicis brevis
adductor pollicis
flexor pollicis longus
abductor pollicis [...]

Elementary thimble

 All first-timers get the pink badges, as well as a permission slip to the coolest show at convention.
 The program has become so popular, the organizers have had to limit it to beginners only. So when a pink badge enters the seminar room, a woman who resembles your first grade teacher scrutinizes your badge and checks your name off [...]

I’m 40-percent thumbs

Despite the popularity of the saying, we humans will never be “all thumbs.” Ten million years from now, however, we could be “almost half thumbs.” A professor and chief surgeon at the Robert A. Chase Hand & Upper Limb Center at Stanford told me she sees a trend toward the little finger becoming a second thumb. [...]

More thumb (and random Japanese) superstitions

If a funeral hearse drives past, you must hide your thumb in a fist. This is because the Japanese word for thumb literally translates as “parent-finger” and hiding it is considered protection for your parent. If you don’t, your parent will die.
When you are nervous, write “human beings” ( “ningen” 人間 ) in Japanese on [...]

Revealing the soul’s agenda

“Thumbs are about doing, accomplishment, and rearrangement,” says Kay Packard, an International Institute of Hand Analysis-certified hand analyst who operates her practice, Hand Factor, from the oak-studded foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Three Rivers, Calif.
As a hand analyst, Packard reads and decodes the fingertips “to reveal the soul’s agenda to the owner of the [...]

Sometimes when dallying

Last March, Ronnie Gene Crowder had his right thumb yanked off but for a sinew.
“It was the last steer I was gonna rope of the day,” the 65-year-old retired ferrier says, shaking his head.  It’s always the last one, isn’t it?
Crowder, who grew up herding cattle from the Kern River Valley into surrounding Sierra high [...]