Watched A Christmas Story last night with the kiddoes. One scene features a dare and then a kid freezes his tongue to the flagpole. My question is when this does happen, how do they deal with it? In the show they yanked the kid’s tongue off the pole and then he came back in the classroom a bit later with his tongue wrapped in a bandage. Maybe they just do this, is there a better way to remove kids’ tongues from flagpoles, cyclone fencing, etc?
[sub]I grew up in Florida, I assume this must happen often enough to be a problem…[/sub]
Experiment at home. Get your hand very wet and then stick it into your freezer against some metal part. You will likely stick. The best way to free yourself is to yank very hard.
Then check to see how much skin is missing.
I don’t believe the CDC tracks frozen tongues on flagpoles.
I would assume that if you did get your tongue stuck on a flagpole you could have a bystander pour warm water on your tongue to free you.
Didn’t the fire dept. dribble water on the flagpole in the Christmas Story?
Also, wasn’t there another movie where this gag took place on frozen train tracks - and the kids had to pee on their friend’s tounge before the train came?
The traditional danger for little kids was the tongue on the pump handle. Since few people have pumps any more, a flag pole is the modern substitute. The dare to put your tongue on a sled runner was standard in my childhood. There was always some dummy who would do it. A guy can’t chicken out on a dare after all.
On this subject, there is a reason that you do not mess around armored vehicles with bare hands in cold weather.
Cite? While I can imagine that parents in times gone by told their children this, did it really happen? At least, did it happen more than in a few isolated incidences or in the minds of the parents?
My father was on a troop carrier crossing the N Atlantic during WW2. He says if anyone held the railings on the side of the ship, they would have to chop the hand off with an ax. I’m sure there would be fewer tongue-on-flagpole incidents if the younger generation knew about this.
We had an aluminum door and one winter for some unknown reason he decided to lick it. We heard him whinning (obviously, he couldn’t bark.) We poured some warm/hot water on his tongue/door to get him free.
He was fine, and apparently wiser since he never licked the door again.
In the movie it looked like they really were outside on a cold day and the kid really did stick his tongue on the pole. So, I am assuming they used a pretty harmless way of extracting the tongue, or made sure the pole was less-than-freezing before sticking the actor’s tongue on it.
My tongue once got stuck to the inside wall of our freezer. My brother told me to place my tongue there, and I… well, I don’t do too many things on dares anymore. I yanked it off, and now the top layer of my tongue is about ten years younger than the rest of me. As others have mentioned, using warm water on the tongue is a much better way to solve the problem.
There was an outdoor scene in A Christmas Story during which a Toronto streetcar can be seen in the background. So it’s likely the tongue-sticking episode really was shot outside. Wasn’t exhaled breath visible?
A member of my family who shall remain nameless but he’s my stoopid brudder, stuck his tongue to a stop sign when he was a kid. “They,” whomever they were, freed him with a glass full of warm water. I’d provide a cite from him, but he’d shoot me.
My father likes to tell the story from when he when hunting as a kid… This all takes place after they shovel two feet of snow so they could pitch the tent, of course…
OK, so a guy in one of the other tents falls asleep with his head up against the canvas, and frost adheres his hair to the tent by the morning. When the ex-drill instructor wakes everyone, this guy jerks his head up, leaving a good patch of hair…
I just checked IMDB, the film was shot in Cleveland, Ohio, Toronto and St. Catherine’s, Ontario.
It was still probably cold enough to stick a tongue to a flagpole though. I was also curious as to how the shot the scene without actually sticking the kid’s tongue to the pole. Maybe they did stick it there.
When I was a kid I stuck my tongue to a clothesline pole (Minnesota…you betcha it was cold). It must have been only the very tip because I just yanked away and there was a little blood, but not much. Nobody dared me to so it, I was a very stupid little girl. I licked icicles too, with the same result. No major damage and never used the hot/warm water trick.
When I was a little kid my brother and I were at the ice rink. I was cold and bored (no warming house back then) and he wasn’t ready to leave yet. So I watched him and his friends play hockey. Before I realized it, I managed to get my tongue stuck to some metal. I was sooo scared. My brother ended up taking a chunk of ice and rubbing it on my tongue so the ice would melt and eventually cause my tongue to let loose from the metal. It worked, although we did pull it the last part of the way and so there was a little bit of bleeding. I suffered no ill effects though, and have never gotten myself near that situation again.
Don’t have the exact cite handy, but in the Time-Life library book “The Poles” there is a story that in the early days of Antarctic scientific exploration, a sign was posted with rules on going Outside. One said that if you get your bare hand stuck to metal, the best way to get it off is to urinate on it. If you get both hands stuck, you’d better hope you have a friend nearby.
My friend and I once got our mouths stuck on puddin’ pops. She yanked, taking parts of her lips off, I let my spit melt it, leaving me with frost-nip. Oh, did I mentin we were in college and should have known better?
