Funny Bone: Not Funny, Not a Bone

Hit the inside of one of your elbows on the right spot and you’ll feel a tingling or prickly sensation. Do it hard and the sensation can feel like a dull pain shooting through the arm and into your fingers.

We call it the funny bone, but the pain actually comes from the ulnar nerve, not a bone at all. It’s the nerve that runs through the arm and down the inside part of the elbow. Its purpose is to transmit feelings to the brain from the pinkie and ring fingers. It’s also part of the nervous system that allows movement of the hand.

The funny or painful feeling comes when the ulnar nerve is bumped against the humerus—that’s the long bone located between the shoulder and the elbow. That contact with the bone causes no harm, but it can be annoying and sometimes uncomfortably painful.

Near the elbow, only skin and fat give the ulnar any padding. It’s the longest unprotected nerve in the human body.

People often reference the funny bone when talking about a sense of humor. The phrase It tickled my funny bone probably came from the close vicinity of the humerus and the similarity to the word humorous. It feels funny when you hit it. However, there’s no documentation available to verify this origin of the name.

The ulnar nerve is the cause of a not-so-funny affliction. Called the ulnar claw, the pinkie and ring fingers of either hand can curl up from muscle weakness in the forearm. A splint can provide pressure to the arm and help reduce the curling. Often surgery is required to correct the condition. Nothing’s funny about that.

Having a funny bone is natural, but having a sense of humor is an acquired characteristic of humans. A sense of humor is the ability to see the funny side of life and even death experienced by other people and ourselves.

My favorite example of a sense of humor is found in a scene from the 1948 movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” This dramatic adventure is set in 1920’s Mexico where three gold prospectors seek their fortunes. Humphry Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston play the main characters.

Near the end of this excellent film, the Holt and Huston characters find that bandits cut open the bags of their hard-earned fortune.  The ignorant bandits thought the unrefined gold was simply sand. It scatters away in the stiff winds.

Huston begins laughing and explains to a stunned Holt that the joke is on them. The mountain took back all the gold they spent months working to get.

The scene goes on a long time with the two men just laughing. They get overcome by the irony of the wind taking the gold back to its origin.

Having a sense of humor makes life easier to tolerate. Even bumping your funny bone hard on the handle of the refrigerator seems tolerable when you have a sense of humor.

My next blog is about a precious American symbol—the Liberty Bell. Read how the bell was almost sold for $400.00 of scrap metal. That blog will be posted during the first week of September.

Thank you for reading this blog. See my web site at www.joevlatino.com. My book of short stories “The Device” is available on line and at Amazon.

Taps: Three Distinct Notes

It’s only 24 notes and the first three make it recognizable everywhere.  “Taps” is the languid, melancholy sound of a bugle at military funerals. 

The unique music has a second use. “Taps” is played everywhere at camps to signal troops that their work day is done and the final order of the day is lights out.

Originally called “Extinguish Lights” prior to America’s Civil War, it became the music of mourning since the beginning of the 19th Century. An incident on the battlefield of the Civil War resulted in a name change and modification of the music.

The original music dates back to France in1809. Union General Daniel Butterfield revised the music with the help of a 22-year-old brigade bugler named Oliver Wilcox Norton. The general felt that the music was too formal and sounded similar to a funeral dirge. Butterfield hummed a version of the music to an aide who knew how to write music. Norton played the music to the general who lengthened it and finally shortened it to its present form, using his own melody.

Butterfield and Norton finalized the tune with its present two dozen notes. They made minor changes to the music to lighten it somewhat. The U.S. Army named the ceremonial music “Taps” in 1874. The “Taps” designation came from the French “Tattoo” that was the name of music used to call off duty soldiers back to their garrisons.

Jari Villaneuva is a “Taps” historian and a retired trumpeter for the U.S. Air Force. He played “Taps” at military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery for 23 years. He’s now director of the Maryland National Guard.

Please enjoy this performance of “Taps” by Jari Villanueva

The official music for “Taps” can be found in military manuals. That makes it uniform and played the same way everywhere.  Sometimes a chorus can sing words to the music. The lyrics can change, because the military never established what the exact words are. 

The most popular and semiofficial form of the lyrics is this:   

Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep. Put out the lights, put out the lights, put out the lights.

Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well. 

Safely rest, God is nigh.”

An overly romanticized story of the origin of “Taps” pops up frequently. The story goes that a Union officer helped drag a wounded soldier into his camp during a very dark night, not knowing that the soldier was in the Confederate Army. The soldier died before the officer could get him into a lighted area. The officer recognized that the dead man was his son. A rift in the family split the family members’ loyalties in the war.

The story gets really absurd as it recounts that the officer found a piece of paper in his son’s pocket. The dead youth wrote the notes for “Taps” on that paper. The camp commander refused the officer’s request for a formal funeral for his son. Instead, he was granted one musician to play at the simple ceremony.

Wouldn’t you know that the officer picked a bugler to play the music that his son wrote.  That’s how we get the tradition of a single bugler playing “Taps.” Yeah, sure. This tale has been printed in respectable publications for years. If you come across it, realize it’s a hoax.

Thank you for reading this blog. See my web site at www.joevlatino.com. “The Device” is my book of short stories. It’s available through the web site and in e-book form from Amazon.  Visit my blog later this month for another interesting report.