Five Things You Definitely Need Teeth to Do

January - 14 - 2010 - Teeth, right up there with other common household tools like the screwdriver or the socket wrench, have been around for so long that people have a hard time remembering what it was like not to have them.

Whether they’re used to bite off a piece of packing tape or to snarl at the neighbor kid, they’re in every way as useful today as they were 10,000 years ago. But just in case just you don’t see their relevance anymore, let’s take a look at these forgotten uses.

1. Smiling: Smiling just isn’t the same as looking pleasant. Smiling involves actually displaying the teeth. Try to imagine smiling without teeth. If you were to look in the mirror, you would notice that – if you have teeth – that they’re quite visible to the naked eye. Now, heat up some tar on the stove – being careful not to get it too hot so as not to burn yourself – then smear the tar on your teeth and wait for it to dry. When it’s dry, go ahead and smile again while looking in the mirror. If you’ve done the exercise correctly, you’ll see that the effect is quite unusual. Clearly smiling has a much greater and more positive impact when the teeth are visible.
   
   
2. Being Cold: How would anyone ever know how cold you truly were if your teeth weren’t chattering? (Never thought about it before? I didn’t think so.

) That tired old gesture of blowing steam out of your mouth on a cold day, or of briskly rubbing your hands together while exclaiming, “Hot dog, it’s cold!” doesn’t really cut it anymore. Today we’re talking about Global Warming. To show how really darned cold it is, or to indicate that you’re about to die from the cold, chattering teeth are an absolute necessity.
   
   
3. Saying Cheese: Face it, it sucks to say cheese without teeth. (It sucks to say “sucks” without teeth for that matter.) It would end up sounding like “feeve” or “heeb” or something like that. Sure, you could come up with some lame substitute when you’re about to snap a pic, like, “Fay beef!” But seriously.
   
   
4. Lisping: Go ahead, try it. You know it ain’t the real thing. Teeth are indispensable in the execution of this time-honored speech impediment.
   
   
5. Giving a Lecture About Tse Tse Flies: This is a no-brainer, any entomologist will tell you so. And if you do a little research, you’ll notice that virtually all entomologists have teeth. The ones that don’t are probably failures or simply wannabes.
   

So, by now it should be clear that teeth aren’t just vestigial enamel reminders of a distant primordial past residing in our evolved mouths. Indisputably, they’re here for a purpose, and they’re probably here to stay.

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