Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil (Dan Hoey)
Date: 1997/04/25
Subject: Re: Toes have no names?

About the article on toe-naming in the 6 April 1991 _New Scientist_,

c...@midway.uchicago.edu (Christine Malcom) writes:

> Don't you look at me like that, Rick Tyler.  I was merely trying to point
> out that while charming, to be sure, the article was bullocks while not
> being confrontational.  'tis my shy and retiring way.

Well, I'd be glad if you had pointed out the article was bullocks, but
you didn't.  You noted that the 5th edition of _Nomina Anatomica_ is
"that latest on information on what gets used in publication", but the
_article_ didn't claim the toe names had been incorporated into the
standard, only that someone had suggested the names.

As distinct from the article, there is a _rumor_ that those names were
submitted to a standards-making body and "accepted".  Now the idea
that these are the standard names for toes and if you publish an
article on toes you'd better call them this, that's bollucks plain and
simple.  But isn't there a standards-making body saving up new names
for body parts until they assemble enough to have a new International
Congress of Anatomists and vote on them?  I mean, that could have
been, "accepted for consideration by the 12th ICA, when and if," after
all.  For all I know, the International Anatomists may even have
decided when they next will have a Congress.

Now my observation that this was published in the first week of April
(which you snipped, so Rick Tyler could rediscover it on his own)
and Ian's observation that the Feedback column is a bespoke bollocks
supplier to the pseudoscientific community, these observations tend
to suggest an article that is, well, bollocks.  But all you did was
repeat what you said before, that the 5th edition is currently the
standard.  It would be nice to know who anatomists are supposed to do
tell when they actually do discover a new gobbet of flesh that needs a
name.  Is there an International Anatomist in the house?  (And do you
guys have a humerous bone in your body?)

I hope you don't consider this confrontational.  I just wanted to note
which parts of this poisson have been debunked and which are still
bunking around.

Dan Hoey                                posted, e-mailed
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil