The other day I bit my tongue while eating lunch.
I was going to add the phrase ‘by accident’ while writing this, but marveled in the thought that most likely one would not wound one’s own tongue on purpose. Unless, you are EMO or someone of that bent.
But mashing my mucosa hurt like hell! Thoughts of my paralyzed and possibly amputated papillae as I suffered the stinging of my half chewed sustenance mixing into the new cavern in my head was seemingly unbearable!!
Many can and would state that I should not endure any more new niches anywhere near my cranium.
There was no blood to worry about or to ruin the taste of the rest of my lunch not yet consumed. Yet lunch was still not enjoyed because of my caution of not taking the same stupid bite pattern again.
Reminds me of the Garfield comic where his Garfield’s master, Jon asks this famous feline ‘just which paw do you start with when you start in any forward motion?’. Garfield looked at us with the realization that he may never walk again.
After the suffering was past sufficient, my curiosity turned to cogitation of just what makes one NOT bite our tongue? Constantly.
I mean, look at the odds…
When I was growing up, I had a lazy tongue. I would walk around a lot with my tongue just laying there outside of my lips like some type of drooling cretin. I went to a thpeech therapitht(now a speech therapist) and was given tongue exercises to correct this. My Mom would tap me underneath my chin or just look at me with her tongue hanging out. Finally I took heed of her maternal help. Thanks, Mom for caring enough to make me fix my shortcoming. But I do still have my whole tongue. All of it. There is no memory of any partial amputation of my oral appendage.
So although my tongue was lazy, it was still smart enough not to get bit off!!
I interrogated the internet, looking for some definition of what is instilled into the tongue to have such awesome instinct of survival, to no avail. Many sites wrote of unfortunates who ‘chew’ their tongue subconciously or even on purpose!!!
And of course, you may state something in conversation like “I think I may end up seeing your dog chewing off it’s tail and barbecuing it tomorrow” where the canine keeper will exclaim “Bite your tongue!”
I can safely say “Been there, done that.”