The troubles with pinkies.

I n my personal series of 3006 children with congenital hand abnormalities, the most common defect was extra digits (528 cases), next was webbed fingers (429 cases), and third was abnormalities of the little finger (354 cases). Any of the digits of a newborn may show deviations in alignment to the palm. However, it is the ulnar side of the hand, and usually the little finger, that most commonly shows skeletal and soft tissue changes. The fifth digit, affectionately known in North America as a pinkie (probably from the Dutch pinkje), is quite often in trouble in the sense that it may be permanently flexed at its proximal in-terphalangeal joint or may be deviated laterally to one side or the other at either interphalangeal joint. Clinically, a bending or curvature of the finger in the plane of the palm is described as clinodactyly, a word derived from the Greek kliner, " to bend, " and dactylos, " a finger. " A flexion deformity at the proximal interphalangeal joint is known as camptodactyly from the Greek " bent finger. " Only rarely do both abnormalities occur at the distal interphalan-geal joint, a deformity first described by J. Kirner in 1927 and now named after him. There is an enormous lay literature concerning our little fingers , with discussions varying from palm reading to the works of 15th-century Dutch artists (1, 2) (Figure 1). In Cheiro's Language of the Hand, the little finger, when well shaped and long, is said to indicate the power of the subject to influence others. When very long, it shows great power of expression in both writing and speaking ; its owner is more or less the savant and philosopher (3). Fred Gettings, in his illustrated history of palmistry (4), reports that " when the little finger is quite obviously isolated from the others a difficulty in relationships must be immediately suspected. " If, in addition, there is a large, well-developed mount of Venus and a deeply marked long or broken girdle of Venus, then one can be certain that the root problem is too great a preoccupation with sex. If the little finger is long because the first phalanx is very well developed, it will, according to the old traditions, indicate a love of knowledge and of education. A square ending to the little finger " adds a love of research and logic to his oratory. …