Your middle finger is only your middle finger if you also count your thumb as a finger. Which I find hard to accept. 🖕

This is like the square/rectangle thing: "Not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers".

I swear one of these days I'm gonna dive into Wikipedia and find the name for that kinda relationship
- I don't know if there's a better term, but a subset is what it is.
Except for some monkey thumbs that are toes... Apes are so clearly superior even in the thumb area

The thumb is thicker than other digits so naturally it'll be harder to accept. A lubricant may help but the key is to relax and go slow.

Nailed it.

In that case use clippers and a small sanding stick.

It's pretty normal to count the thumb as a finger. I find it strange that you would not.

If you were asked "how many fingers do you have", would you answer 8, or 10? Surely, everyone knows the answer is 10 (assuming no physical abnormalities)? On a fingering chart, music will instruct you to play a note with your thumb with the number "1" and your pinky with the number "5".

The whole concept of even having a middle finger is a bit arbitrary. When you put your hands on a table, all 10 fingers spread out, the gap between the hands is the exact middle. If you include all 10 fingers, there is no middle finger, but there is a middle gap.

Andy why do we even count the fleshy fingers, when we could be counting the gaps between them? It’s the number of gaps that really matters when you’re holding on to a bunch of things like papers, magazines, forks, sticks, stones, strings, cables or whatever.
- Sure, but we don't say you have one middle finger, we talk about the two middle fingers. As in, one per hand. It's not the middle of all your fingers, it's the middle of the fingers on that hand.
  
  We don't count the gabs because that's...not how counting things works. When delivering a bag of apples, you don't count how many gaps between apples there are, you count the number of apples. You have to know that your second paragraph here is a stretch that would make a Republican lawmaker seem sensible, don't you?
- You take one hand and count with the thumb as 1 and the pinky as 5 and the middle number is 3. If you switch and start with the pinky as 1 and the thumb as 5 the middle finger is still the middle number. Talking about the gaps can be useful but anatomically we name things for what’s there and what’s not there and we talk about fingers much more than we talk about the gaps
- Andy why do we even count the fleshy fingers, when we could be counting the gaps between them?
  
  Each finger is conveniently split into 3 parts. Using 8 fingers we can count to 24 without resorting to any fancy math.

You don't consider a thumb a finger? What is it then in your world? Tail?

a digit
- There are ten digits in our numeral system, and the thumb is neither a 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9.

All of them are fingers. Thumbs are fingers, but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. I dont know where people get the idea that a thumb is not a finger. So many common sayings reinforce that it is. "Counting on your fingers (including your thumbs)", healthy babies have "Ten fingers, ten toes", "What did the five fingers say to the face... slap", "high five", "five finger discount", etc. Also, honorable mention to Princess Bride's Inigo Montoya searching for "the 6 fingered man" which includes his thumb. "Middle finger" is not the only thing that makes no sense if you don't accept that the thumb is a finger.

In almost every other language there isn't even a separate word for "thumb", it's just one of the fingers.
- I don't think that's right? I know polish has a separate word, and sampling in Google translate seems to show separate words in German, french and Spanish. Maybe I got lucky and hit the exceptions, but it seems to commonly be a separate word.

What do you consider the thumb to be if not another finger?

Its a thumb. Its its own thing. If we had only 5 fingers we would be INFERIOR BEINGS

glares at spider monkies

Edit: apparently sponkeys have 4 fingers on their hands and thumbs on their feet
- Nah it's the thumb finger, like the index finger etc. We have fully truncated it to just thumb because of how it feels more unique to the others. Doesn't mean it no longer fits the categorisation though.
- how is a thumb different from a finger?

I used to genuinely argue that it wasn't a finger bc it had only two segments, not three. I've since realized that there is a third and I'm fucking stupid.

Your original instinct was actually correct. Fingers have the metacarpal, proximal phalange, middle phalange, and distal phalange. The thumb doesn't have a middle phalange. The proximal and distal phalange connect directly to each other.
- I may or may not have just started feeling up my hand while wiggling my fingers to check this

you count your pinky as a finger ? it is not a finger; it is a pinky.

with the thumb being a thumb and as we have previously discussed about pinky leaves three fingers and certainly a middle one

If it’s not a finger, what do you think it is?

Are toes also fingers?

What's wrong with you?

The thumb, the misunderstood tentacle.
An essay.

"middle finger" is "the finger in the middle of the digits" not "the finger on the middle of the fingers"

Well, it's not a toe.

I wonder if OP thinks the big toe isn't a toe...

Why do you accept your pinky as a finger?

Yeah, that's classified as dwarf finger now.

When I was in elementary school I tried to start a protest during the break by getting on the desk and proclaiming that we need to stop the discrimination of the middle finger, it is a finger like the others and should be allowed to stand on its own just like the other fingers. Needless to say I held up my middle fingers during that passionate speech. I was also very sincere about it, not emotional, but I did find it unjust. I'm not sure where I am going with this but it was weighing on my chest for too long and needed to get out finally. Thanks for reading.

Oh yeah? Well 🖕

If you had to pick either one of those fingers to call the "middle" one, it's pretty obvious which one better fits the description.

I got shocked when I learned my SO had learnt we have only four fingers. And a thumb.
I mean..

Yeah seriously don't tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it's going to go badly…

You have three fingers named fingers.
Index finger, ring finger and middle finger. The middle finger is in the middle of the three. Thumb and pinky are both outliers.

I have always known it as the "Pinky Finger" myself.

Long finger

Have you ever thought that it's called the middle finger but it's actually the long finger?