From this thread
Regarding the colour of tongues. Skinks, some dogs, black tongue. People, pinkish…what other varieties are there? Why do bird tongues look like dried pieces of poo? Can someone explain tongues to me in this regard?
And please tell spellcheck how colour is spelled.
I would like to know why doctors (or someone pretending to be a doctor) in old cartoons always ask to see the tongue of the “patient.” What exactly about the person’s health can you learn from looking at their tongue?
Speaking as a British person, I think it is quite reasonable that on an American based, and run, website (such as this), American spelling conventions should be applied.
Anyway, it is not as if it stops you spelling anything any way you please. All you have to do is ignore the little red underline, as you appear to have realized.
I think the doctors are not so much looking at the tongue, but looking at the far back of the mouth/throat where some lymph nodes are.
But that area is hard to see normally because the tongue is in the way, so the patient needs to move their tongue forward and down. Doctor says “stick out your tongue” and then uses a flat popsickle-stick sized stick (called a ‘tongue depressor’) to push the tongue down so the doctor can see the throat.
In cartoons, this gets stylized to ‘stick out your tongue’ (after which various indignities to the tongue are performed in cartoon fashion).
In a completely different regime, Traditional Chinese Medicine (acupuncture, etc.) uses the color and coating of the tongue as a diagnostic tool.