The other night I was blissfully eating a delicious supper with my Sweet Wife, when all of a sudden it happened:
I bit my tongue! Not just a glancing nip, but a good, solid chomp.
Ouch!!!
I have to say biting my tongue while eating is right up there with violently stubbing my toe or banging my elbow really hard.
Now that I think about it, our bodies are dangerous!
They can deliver such exquisite pain when it’s least expected.
So -- after a tongue bite -- it takes a while before you’re ready to take another nibble of food, as your wounded tongue ever so slowly dissipates its pain.
Eventually, you can finish your meal – although you’re chewing more carefully than you have in a long time.
Thank God I don’t bite my tongue that often. But it makes me wonder: Why not? With all the chewing we do in the course of a lifetime, we should probably be enduring a lot more self-inflicted mouth wounds.
Think about it: Generally speaking, we eat three meals a day (sans snacks). That’s 1,095 meals in a year. Over a lifetime – say, 80 years – we consume more than 87,000 meals.
That’s more than 87,000 times we risk a serious tongue bite.
But – so far – no one has ever died from a tongue bite – to my knowledge.
I guess we humans – like most other mammals – have adapted to life with a tongue. Our evolution has generally created tongues of just the right size to fit comfortably in our mouths to do the things they were designed for:
Tasting and licking.
And I suppose they also help us talk.
So basically, they’re a good thing.
Tongues: They’re not something we often focus on. They're just laying in our mouths – and we try not to notice their presence – most of the time.
So while we’re all pretty equally vulnerable to a sudden nasty tongue bite, there are those who may be much more vulnerable.
Have you seen Kiss bassist Gene Simmons’ tongue? It’s long.
Like really, really, really long.
Simmons’ tongue seems to have been a huge part of the band’s success, so I’m sure he takes very good care of it.
But with a tongue that lengthy, wouldn’t it be likely that he suffers more self-inflicted tongue owies than a normal human?
I think so. And I would be totally surprised if I found out Simmons doesn’t have his famous tongue insured for millions.
Or – given the band’s slippage in recent years to “state-fair-level” popularity – at least thousands? (Actually, I just learned the band officially retired last year)
All I can say is: Oh Gene, God forbid a slip of that tongue!
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