Is sticking your tongue out now hip?

By John Toth

The Bulletin

Have you noticed recently that people stick their tongues out more often than we’ve seen in the past? I don’t mean you or I, but sports figures, entertainers, YouTube content creators and young people in general.

It must be a new fad that passed right over me. It’s not done in anger, but in celebration, or just to ham it up for the camera. We used to do it to tick someone off after becoming frustrated. That’s a different type of sticking out your tongue. I think I finally stopped doing that at age 8.

I was researching Houston Astro Jose Altuve the other day and came across a photo of him sticking his tongue out all the way, I guess after he hit a home run. It looked like a home-run tongue - an ugly tongue.

Getty Images, which is a photo service, offers a library of 269 photos of people sticking out their tongues. The photo services we subscribe to also have a good selection.

An athlete who sticks out her tongue a lot is Caitlin Clark, the guard for the Indiana Fever WNBA team. Many credit her with jettisoning the WNBA into the profit margin. I’ve watched several Fever games, and she never disappoints. I would venture to say that many people watch the WNBA now because of her.

And when they watch her, they’ll often see her sticking her tongue out in celebration after shooting another three pointer. She gets a lot of them. Maybe I’m just not hip enough any more, but the tongue bit doesn’t impress me. And, I hate to say this, but she has an ugly tongue.

I don’t like to see someone’s tongue, especially not the whole tongue. Tongues are not pretty. That’s why they are inside our mouths and not outside (that would be weird.)

“Is anyone else grossed out by seeing other people’s tongues? I feel super grossed out when someone has their tongue out,” commented someone on a Reddit thread.

“Yeah. I don’t understand people who stick their tongues out in photos, especially if they’re trying to look cute or sexy. It’s just gross to me (plus it’s pretty childish),” replied another poster.

I agree. It is not cute or sexy, but I could rattle off a bunch of things that also weren’t when we grew up in the 1970s. We did some crazy things, but we didn’t stick our tongues out, we didn’t split it in half, and we didn’t pierce it and put a tongue ring in it. Just thinking about the last two is painful enough.

I may be too old-fashioned (although growing up in the 1970s, I don’t know how that is even possible), so I asked the Internet machine if tongues are considered ugly and why people stick them out when photographed.

“Whether tongues are considered ‘ugly’ is subjective and depends on individual perception,” popped up an AI answer from somewhere. That didn’t help.

“Just like any other body part, some people might find the appearance of tongues less appealing than others. There’s no universal definition of what constitutes an attractive or unattractive tongue,” popped up another genius AI reply.

“I seemed to notice it more after seeing pictures of Miley Cyrus doing it. Either they want to emulate her, or they think they’re being funny or cool, I’d guess,” someone other than an AI posted on a blog. Now, we’re getting somewhere. That makes a lot of sense, mostly because I agree with it.

Our tongues are one of nature’s miracles. We need it to speak, swallow, taste and eat. God created a multi-function part of us, except He made it ugly, probably thinking that there was no need to pretty it up, since it just stays inside the mouth anyway.

Then, man (and woman) came along and ruined that part.