We all know that fingers and toes have a lot in common, both in terms of the way they look and how they work. In French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, toes are even referred to “foot fingers”!
But when a young woman posted some curious pictures online, people couldn’t figure out what it was that they were looking at. The first picture appears to show hands (or feet) close together with fingers (or toes) open wide in a fan. The second picture shows the hands (or feet) clasped together with interlocking fingers (or toes).
The student in question is from Taiwan and she’s a petite woman to be sure, measuring only 4 feet and 11 inches. But while she may be on the very short side, there’s one part of her body that’s unusually long. It’s not her fingers, though; it’s her toes!
The student talks about the fact that long toes have a long history, both in her family and the world. Both her father and mother have similar feet. As she wrote on Dcard, “When I was young, I thought they were normal toes. When I first saw other people’s toes, I thought ‘how come their toes are so short?’”
She even discovered that ancient civilizations were known for their different toe patterns, identifying her family’s with the Greeks. “I’ve heard that longest toes of all belonged to the Greeks. Here’s a beautiful example.”
But unfortunately, the student, who was attending Tunghai University in Taichung, had had lots of trouble from the short-toed over the course of her life. “Since my childhood, I have always drawn attention whenever I wear flip-flops,” she wrote on Dcard. Rather than seeing the different length as something interesting, people tended to make fun of her.
The most common insults were those that compared her to monkeys or other animals. “[I] have even been told that I hadn’t evolved properly. Some people would ask me to use my ‘four hands’ to climb a tree.”
While attitudes about the “normal” length of toes didn’t seem to be much affected by the girl’s post, the shape of our feet and toes can say a lot about us. Let’s look at a few of the possibilities:
1) The Egyptian Foot - each of the toes is shorter than the one that came before it, making a perfect diagonal line. People with this pattern are often introverts, prone to holding back information from others, and preferring to be on their own.
2) The Roman Foot - the big toe and the next two toes are the same length, while the last two toes are shorter. This kind of foot shape usually goes with a big, outgoing personality. This person enjoys the company of others and being in public.
3) The Peasant Foot - the toes appear to be the same length all the way across. This gives the feet a boxy, rectangular shape. People with peasant feet are close to the earth, practical, and sensible.
4) The Greek Foot - this is where the second toe is the longest, just like in the example of the Taiwanese student, and the last three toes are each shorter than the one before. People with this pattern often have a creative bent and are in touch with and inspired by their feelings.
So if you can stand it, look at the length of your toes and other people in your family. Maybe you'll discover something you didn’t know about them!
