There are alternatives to biting, as I’m sure people have told you only too often if you are a fingernail biter. Those fingernail scissors with the little crescent blades are often good. The trick is to invert them so the curve of the blade goes down towards the little piece of nail you’re trying to catch. At the edges you can turn the blades down so they are pointed directly at the quick and slide one blade between the margin and the nail which will almost always give you a starting point.
As long as I’m musing on mainstream nail-cutting tools, those clippers with the lever-action bar on top are useful too if you use just the very edge, turning it sideways and sliding the edge against the fingernail in search of an area loose from the underbed.
Of course nothing works as well as the teeth for finding a good starting point and then peeling it across. Of course my teeth have themselves gradually worn from this practice, with the top incisors now crescent shaped across their bottom surfaces with the sides longer than the middles of the teeth which have met fingernail after fingernail over the years. I may have them capped or something. If I do, I’ll find out how hard they can make the caps. Be good to have very tough caps there. For biting fingernails with.
The fingers themselves all go back more than a quarter inch before the vestigial nails make an appearance. I can turn my fingers over and type upside down without my nails touching anything. While other folks’ nails are usually oval shaped, mine…are oval shaped too, actually. But most peoples’ ovals are longer than they are wide. Mine are about half as long as they are wide.
Don’t you hate it when you carve too deep and it peels back over the raw quick, and then you’ve got that little piece of nail that wants to be peeled, its nasty catchy-edge flapping loose in the wind, but there’s no going that way without continuing to peel right off the quick? And then it’s going to hurt for a day or so. Of course, chances are good that if you just go ahead and get it over with, the quick will retreat just that little bit more and it will only hurt for a day. May as well get it over with…
My Dad still makes fun of me because I can’t do things like pick up a dime off the floor because I have no fingernails. This isn’t really true, since I can use a second dime like a pry bar. It’s not like you need them often enough to matter. And I’ve never ever had one CATCH on something and BEND BACKWARDS ::shudder:: and I never will.
Nor will they snag on fabric. I never leave any fingernail extending past the quick or any loose snaggly edges. I keep going until it’s peeled smooth.
Sometimes I wonder if I could just get them surgically removed once and for all, do you think?
OK, all done with the fingernails now. Now comes the hard part…
::sits “Indian style”, grabs ankle, lifts the foot to the mouth::
…I’m not as limber as I used to be, you see…