The mother of all tongues

I've been thinking about that fleshy movable muscular marvel in the middle of my mouth and found in the oral cavity of most vertebrates, especially tetrapods – it positively bursts with sensory end organs and innumerable small glands that function with almost unbelievable evolutionary adaptiveness and delight, especially in savoring and swallowing food as part of our astonishing digestive system and in us bipeds at least and especially as a speech organ a lot lately.

I'm not even going to mention kissing for obvious reasons, but I will give a shout out to Libby W. and the exuberant epiphany I had with her in the basement of Julie L.'s parent's house on Woolford Road right next door to Sweatt Beach in Wrentham, MA sometime in the spring of '79. I was so young and didn't know what I was doing – we're all like that on my father's side.

Seriously, there was a cutaway drawing I saw somewhere on the internet recently that showed I forgot the kind of woodpecker that has such a long tongue to fish insects out of the holes it makes that it has to retract it into a channel in the back of its skull which also allows it to serve as a shock absorber when the bird jackhammers away.

And how about bats clucking their tongues to echolocate as a fascinating example of vertebrates literally exploiting every terrestrial nook and cranny in order to survive and succeed as a species. And salamanders whipping out sticky tongues longer than their bodies to catch, while snakes smell their environment with "forked tongues", and the many other magnificent metaphors: tongue-tied, tongue-lashing, tongue-in-cheek.

I was going to segue into telling a story about the time I went to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx way back in the day when they still had a "wet" market where you could pick out a chicken or a rabbit and they would kill it right there while you waited. They also had an organ meat market right next door where there was tripe, brains, liver, etc – an impressively offal array.

I'll never forget riding back to my apartment in Gramercy Park on the subway with a paper bag (which the proprietor used to add up the total for all the stuff I bought with his crude pencil math) decorated with meat juice and a few errant plucked feathers, and the look on my wife's face when I showed up with two rabbits with the fur and head still on. And then her almost fainting surprise when I unwrapped the butcher paper, proudly revealing a bloody beef tongue that was about the size of an adolescent chihuahua.

But I'm not going to tell you about that humiliating miscalculation.

Instead I'm going to pivot to a rambling but interesting podcast I just listened to this afternoon about the chemical PFAS that are everywhere in our atmosphere and our lives and which we, to our diminishment, have kind of gotten used to not noticing or at least not worrying about the health dangers they present to us on a daily microscopic basis anymore. These "forever" chemicals, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances marketed under the common household name "Teflon" are not only pervasive and insidious, but wicked and invidious. And they never dissolve, dilute, or deteriorate – hence the name.

I won't beat the war drum on this one – don't buy bottled water, non-stick pans, fizzy drinks, or eat all the usual highly-processed junkety junk that passes as food these days. Or slather your face, hair, and skin with schloop that have ingredients with unpronounceable names, obviously. But then the podcaster swerved into an interesting discourse on trees, which the woodpecker and his and our wondrous tongue reminded me of.

He was talking about how the idiotic powers that be wanted to spray Teflon on trees to prevent parasites from climbing onto them because they'd just slide off. The harm to the trees themselves wasn't ever part of their lunatic calculation or proposal.

He then said how when a tree senses an insect landing on it, it can tell what kind it is from the saliva and then send out a chemical signal into the air to that insect's predator to come and get it. The tree will also release a chemical to the other trees in the area so that when then insect goes to land on them they've already prepared for it, i.e. they've changed the taste of their leaves to something that those insects don't like.

I was always aware of the way that trees communicate underground through their root systems and the fungi attached, which now that I think of it kind of reminds me of long subterranean tongues licking and kissing in the cozy, loamy dark, separate and together in loving cahoots, silently communicating in a mother language they all understand.