crosswind [they/them]

Getting in to the fine details of it is important for researchers or doctors who specifically work with the tongue, but the issue that we’re talking about here is how this was commonly taught as absolute fact to young children with no nuance and seemingly for no reason other than it being widely believed.

If anyone is specifically claiming that the tongue is completely uniform in taste reception then they’re it taking too far, sure. But generally when I see this brought up, the focus is on questioning the process of how some facts make it in to what schools teach as “common knowledge” even when they are both wrong and unimportant to daily life and general education.

When a teacher tells a 6-7 year old that flavors can only be tasted on certain parts of your tongue, the problem isn’t that they failed to call it a “spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus”. At that age, teachers have to strip out most nuance from any lesson, and the goal is to find a way to explain things that is true enough while still being understandable to young children.

So why, if stripping out the nuance makes it basically wrong, did teachers keep teaching it for a century? Even if it were true, it’s not really important information for most people. Necessarily even, because if it were important to daily life, it would be a lot easier to notice it’s mostly wrong.
I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s an exact reason. I had teachers tell us about this, then seem to realize they needed a reason for it to matter and try to turn it in to a lesson about scientific inquiry. They told us to go home and try putting flavors on the ‘wrong’ parts of the tongue and notice how we couldn’t taste anything. I tried it once, and it didn’t work, and it was never brought up again.

Feel free to educate people about the mechanics of our sense of taste, but I think this is a fine example of myths making it in to what’s taught in schools.

Looks like you were imagining a measurement system where you could easily convert to sub-units by just moving the decimal place. It’s too bad that’s impossible.

He says it because 1.75m is 5 feet 8.9 in.

It really falls apart any way you look at it, but some of them seem to believe they’re the one person who is immune to propaganda and has complete control over their biases and associations. Like, okay even if that’s true, what happens now that you shared it with people that aren’t as big-brained as you.

Exactly. Sometimes people will defend it with some supposed high-minded origin, like “it’s not saying being gay is wrong, it’s using trump’s homophobia and insecurity against him and turning it into a vulnerability that we’re using to trigger him”. And maybe some of the people repeating it actually believe that, but the images don’t come with a paragraph explaining the nuance. They’re just supposed to be an easy shot at trump, you’re supposed to laugh and keep scrolling. Most people liking or sharing them aren’t thinking about it any more than “haha, he’s owned cause he’s gay”.

You can spend all day convincing yourself that your specific way of thinking about it isn’t racist/homophobic, but when you share this shit online all that stuff stays in your head, and you’re just spreading bigotry.