Day: 3/09/08

Ok, so it has been a few days since my last post. Admittedly, there just really hasn't been anything of any note worth talking about. I haven't had much time to read, been sick to a point where my mental processes are just working enough to keep me mobile, and, well, it's a dull ride sometimes. :)

However, with that said, I did have an interesting consideration today. I found myself questioning, "why do we have toenails?"

In my own effort to figure out this question, I took to looking inside my own thoughts to find some glimmer of why embedded in there. I considered that, in ancient days, they may have had some usage as a weapon, similar to a cat's claw. In this day and age, I think that these particular nails have lost much of their use in this respect as anyone who has torn a nail from it getting snagged on something will testify, it hurts, a lot!

So then I considered that they were instead more of a protective measure. If I recall properly from my days in the Boy Scouts, nails on the hardness scale (of which a diamond is rated a 10) are rated a 5. Pretty impressive being half as hard as a diamond. Ok, so, again, as many will agree, you drop something on that toe, it is going to hurt and in some instances, the nail will be damaged and fall off. Not much of a defense mechanism there.

With our fingernails, we are given a better ability to pick up objects. Perhaps in some ancient age our toes had much more flexibility and having nails on them allowed us to use our feet to pick up objects too? I don't know about you, but my toes aren't much good for picking up much of anything.

Ok, so my internal thoughts aren't helping much. I then hit the internet. Certainly some have questioned this before, maybe they fared better.

20 pages of Ask.com later on "toenails" did not fare me well. I found a number of sites from doctors regarding ingrown toenails, fungus infections, and runner's black toenails, but nothing anywhere that said 'why' we have them. I did encounter one site that approached the question, but it was not much better of than I am.

So now I head off on one of my tangents regarding black toe nails. I had at a time considered taking up walking/running and in a book (that I need to get back by the way) that covered the life of a person who wanted to run the New York City Marathon and how they lost a toenail or two in the training process. I went to find out if this was truth or myth. Ok, it's a truth, if you get the shoes right. Apparently there is a lot of data and science to getting the right pair of shoes for walking/running. And here I thought I was well informed regarding getting a good pair of shoes. Did you know that in a training session your feet can swell up to a whole shoe size? The things you learn. So it turns out that I have established another reason to avoid running/walking for the time being, I won't be able to get the proper kind of footwear to protect my (useless?) toenails from falling off.

This brings me back to the internalization, that perhaps we just have toenails to keep our digits all looking alike. Fingernails and toenails, just for a symmetry effect. To my mind now, I think of what a toe, or even an entire foot, would look like with no toenails, kind of creepy in a weird way. But, at the same time, it is only weird because I have toenails and understand that they are part of the toe and to not have them it would be an odd looking toe.

Perhaps we have toenails as a mean to provide support for the structure of a toe. If we didn't have a toenail, would we have little round rolls of whatever they are composed of to support us? Would it be able to support us and offer stability? Stability, that is a choice to consider. If our toes were rounded, they wouldn't be much good for stability as they may have more of a tendency to roll under pressure. The toenail, to some degree, seems to give the toe a more oblong shape, which in turn offers more surface area and that in turn provided additional stability.

Maybe toenails were put there for the purpose of giving us something silly to consider. :)