The fingernail menace

Posted by Max Robinson on Apr 11, 2012 in Telegram Past News

Long nails? More like unkempt troll fingers. First identified in 55.8 million year-old specimens of Teilhardina brandt (really old lemurs), paleontologists believe our nails evolved to improve our dexterity. They’re the reason we can peel an orange. When you allow yours to grow a full inch long, through negligence or vanity, you are disgracing these proud creatures.

Not only are you losing functionality, you’re also exposing yourself to contamination by any number of pathogens. How many different items do you touch a day? Your mom, a bathroom door knob, a stray dog…any one of these could be hosting potentially lethal bacteria. When your nails are long, they’re basically filth magnets. There’s probably entire colonies of stuff living in there. One notable threat is pinworms, parasitic white worms that live in the large intestine. They are spread when someone scratches their anal region, trapping eggs under their fingernails. The pinworm threat could easily be eliminated if fingernails just stopped being a thing.

Unsure how the general public felt about this horror, I took to the streets. In an informal survey, 83% of respondents agreed that nobody looked good with talons.

“They’re creepy as hell,” Isabella Young Mee Choe explains. “I don’t understand how anyone finds them attractive.”

We’ve established that long nails are disgusting for at least a thousand reasons. But what exactly constitutes long nails? If the length of the lighter “danger zone” portion is more than 1/8th of the total nail, that is too long.

Nail clippers are really cheap, you guys. If you are unable to find or purchase a pair, email me at abigailerobinson@gmail.com. You can borrow mine.