Wisdom?

(February 2, 2010) I went to the dentist. I had to have one of my wisdom teeth extracted, the upper left. Actually it went quite well along with a deep cleaning for part of my teeth. The extracted tooth had an unfixable cavity. It did remove the tooth ache pain I had been having for several days. I only experienced soreness and tenderness of the gum for a time.

I made several comedic remarks on Facebook about the loss of some of my wisdom. I know it really is only a moniker for the tooth identity.

According to Wikipedia, “A wisdom tooth is in humans any of the usually four third molars, including mandibular third molar and maxillary third molar. Wisdom teeth usually appear between the ages of 17 and 25. They are generally thought to be called wisdom teeth because they appear so late—much later than the other teeth, at an age where people are presumably "wiser" than as a child, when the other teeth erupt. The English wisdom tooth is derived from Latin dens sapientiae. The same root is shared by numerous other languages. There exists a Dutch folk etymology which states that the Dutch word for wisdom tooth verstandskies is derived from "far-standing" (ver-staand) molar, and that mistranslations of the Dutch word (in which verstand translates to wisdom) are the root for corresponding words in other European languages.”

I thought this was interesting information. Further etymology of “wisdom teeth” can be found on the Wikipedia website as well as other sites.

I did enjoy having fun with all my friends and playing on the word usage. The nice thing about the extraction was the removal of pain. This reminds me of life, when we get rid of the source of our trouble things are improved. It’s kind of ironic to discuss the removal of a “wisdom” tooth to lessen our pain.