Why is your pinkie perky?
QUESTION Why do people raise their little finger while drinking tea?
Many weird and wonderful explanations have been offered for this phenomenon. Some claim it goes back to Roman times, when cultured people would eat with three fingers while commoners used their whole hand.
One interesting theory relates to the medieval practice of reserving the pinkie for spices. Only the wealthy could afford salt and exotic spices, so this digit was kept clean for their application.
Historian Madeleine Pelner Cosman, writing in the annual Review Of nutrition, stated: ‘almost all medieval feast foods were conveyed to the mouth by elaborate, and often elegant, finger choreography . . .
‘ However, both pinky fingers were extended, never touching food or gravy or sauce, reserved as spice fingers.
‘Dipped into salt, sweet basil, cinnamoned sugar or ground mustard seed, then raised to the tongue, the spice fingers displayed a feaster’s digital finesse while adding another sensual pleasure: touch of food’s texture.
‘Some modern polite extensions of pinky fingers, serving no physical purpose, are cultural remembrances of medieval spice fingers.’
Other, more spurious, explanations are that the raised pinkie was in honour of anne Boleyn’s extra finger or was a joint disorder suffered by those with syphilis.
a more probable explanation is the small size of the porcelain tea cups that made their way from China to Britain in the 17th century.
They did not have a handle, so to avoid spilling the contents on yourself, you had to spread your hand around the cup with the pinkie raised for balance. alternatively. it may simply be a middle-class trait to make yourself feel posh.
according to alexandra Messervy — once of the Royal Household of the Queen and founder of The English Manner, an etiquette, protocol and household management consultancy — the extended pinkie is a faux pas.
‘When drinking tea, you should hold the cup and saucer; with coffee, you can leave the saucer on the table. never hold your pinkie out,’ she advises.
Jane Cooper, Worcester.
QUESTION What is the deepest building in the world?
THE Jinping Underground Laboratory is the deepest building in the world. It is 1½ miles under a mountain in Sichuan Province, China.
It’s 14 times the depth of CERn’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe and equivalent to seven Empire State buildings stacked on top of one another.
Completed in 2010, the reason the laboratory is so deep is that it blocks out practically all cosmic radiation. This allows scientists to look for the elusive dark matter, which is thought to account for 85 per cent of the universe.
angloGold ashanti’s Mponeng gold mine, south-west of Johannesburg in South africa, is the deepest mine in the world. Its operating depth extends from up to 2½ miles below the surface.
at 7½ miles, Kola super-deep borehole in Russia is the deepest artificial point on Earth.
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