The Index finger
Created | Updated Mar 23, 2007
Introduction
The index finger is 1 of the 4 fingers that can be found by stretching your arm and lifting your hand to your face. There, do you see the hand? And the spikey bits of squishy epidermal tissue? Those spikes are your fingers (with the exception of the short stubby spike which is your thumb). The index finger is the closest finger to your thumb.
The Design of The Index Finger
Take your index finger and observe it closely. You will see that the finger is made of a brownish, stretchy material called skin. This skin, you shall further observe, is not flat. Close inspection shall reveal that there are tiny wrinkles in the skin. This is to improve the grip of the finger. To prove this, take a plastic hand with no grooves and a lump of dry soap. Using the index finger and thumb, attempt to pick up the soap by positioning the index finger on one side of the soap and the thumb on the other, maintaining the verticle angle of both. Now take hold of the soap by squeezing the index finger and thumb together. Squeezing hard, lift the plastic hand upwards and observe what happens. After recovering the soap from where it shot off to, attempt the same with your own hand. Notice that the soap stays firmly clamped in your hand, and has not gone boing into a corner. This is because of the grooves on your fingers and hands.
Still observing the hand you will see that there are 4 large creases of skin running all the way round the finger. These are where the skin must stretch to way over 3 times its length in order for you to bend the finger. Without these creases, you would only be able to bend your finger in the slightest of angles, rendering the fingers virtually useless. These creases have divided the finger into three sections. At the end section you can find a pattern of sorts developing from the minute creases in your fingers. This is called your fingerprint and is used to trace you as the perpetrator of a crime, because your fingerprint is unique, no other person in the world has exactly the same pattern as you and therefore the perpetrator can easily be targeted.
On the opposite side to your fingerprint, the fingernail is clearly visible. The fingernail is a piece of organic bone that is used to inflict minimal damage to a predator. The female of the species are also known for having long fingernails which they paint different colours, though the true meaning of this is now lost, many leading scientists believe it may hark back to the primitive days when bright colours were warnings of poisonous animals. Though most males keep their fingernails plain (though in this article dirt is counted as plain), some do enjoy to paint their fingernails.
The Uses of The Index Finger
The index finger is most commonly used with the apposable thumb to grip small, or thin objects, such as a pen, or even a pencil. For most large objects, all of the fingers are used in conjunction with the thumb in order to improve the grip on said object. The index finger is also used as a pointer in order to accuse someone or to simply show someone something that is a distance away.
