Tip Tongue facts

While investigating facts about Tip Tongue, I found out little known, but curios details like:

If you're bilingual you experience the "tip-of-the-tongue" sensation more often, basically because your brain has more words in it to keep track of

Bilinguals experience tip-of-the-tongue moments twice as often as monolinguals. Processing two languages at the same time comes with a computational cost. Although, this kind of “multitasking” trains the brain.

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 17 of the best facts about Tip Tongue I managed to collect.

1. When a word is on the 'tip of the tongue', your brain is actually trying to help you by blocking out similar words, but in doing so, blocks the target word.

2. Sign language users experience "tip of the finger" just like how English speakers experience "tip of the tongue".

3. When Mick Jagger was 16, he bit off the tip of his tongue playing basketball. It changed the way he spoke, changing it from a more posh accent to a more “street” accent. It comes through in his singing voice too and is the reason for his distinctive voice.

4. Red-sided garter snake has large eyes and long, slender body. Its red tongue ends with black tip.

5. Cape sugarbird has long, downward curved beak, long, brush-tipped tongue, sharp claws and long tail that exceeds body length two times (in males). Females can be recognized by shorter beaks and tails.

6. The tongue's anterior accounts for two-thirds of its total length and extends from the tip towards the back of the mouth.

7. Until 1667, people used to believe that tooth of C. megalodon is actually tip of dragon's tongue. Teeth were often used to cure poisonings and snake bites, and worn as good luck charms. Danish naturalist Nicolas Steno discovered true nature of these fossils in the 17th century.

8. Tip of the tongue" states where you can't remember a word are a common experience across languages. Even deaf users of sign languages experience “tip of the finger” states when they forget a sign.

9. Cape sugarbird is specialized for diet based on nectar. Brush-like tip of the tongue and long, curved beak facilitate extraction of nectar from various, tubular-shaped flowers. Besides nectar, cape sugarbird hunts and eats insects such as aphids, grasshoppers, beetles, bees and flies (important source of proteins).

10. About half of Americans make their "s" sounds with their tongue tip down, and about half with their tongue tip up.

What is true about tip tongue?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

Lemurs (and some other primates) have a secondary tongue underneath the main one called a sublingua. This muscular structure is keratinized and serrated at its tip, and is used in oral grooming.

Many women in 1910's and 1920's in USA used to paint radium on dials of watches through "lip-pointing" meaning using their lips and tongues to shape their paintbrushes to a fine tip and suffered many adverse effects of radioactivity. Many of them were not even compensated, initially. - source

From 51 surveyed languages an astonishing amount of 46 have an idiom referring to the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon that also references the tongue, mouth, or throat as a metaphor. Only exceptions are American Sign Language, Amharic, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kalenjin, and Kiswahili. - source

You can make the "s" sound with the tip of your tongue up or down.