September 08, 2004

• Perhaps the extra moisture helps the graphite leave a darker mark -- but this seems to be a unique habit of older people. Maybe they used to enjoy that special tingly sensation of slow lead poisoning and find it hard to break the habit?
• Because they like having a dark tongue? Because they don't know any better? Because they do know better and don't care? Because they think it beats biting their fingernails? /Once I woz the spitball king But now I'm far too dignified to do any such thing. Mostly.
• Because ideas are hard to squeeze out our minds, and saliva is a fast shortcut. You rub some of those pesky ideas on yor pencil's tip, and voil
• Perhaps, it might be a relic from the era when we regularly used pens. It makes sense to slobber a bit on a device with dried-up ink to "prime it", as it were. Why wouldn't the habit persist over to similarly-functionining writing devices? And, by the way, a google search for "lick", "tip", and "pencil" does not yield any valuable results.
• "pencil licker" rewards you with 1800 sites, though.
• BTW, small amount of graphite builds up human body temperature, and in school times we used to use it for not going to school sometimes. May be somebody just get used and can't get rid of that pernicious habit :)
• Pencil lead is made from graphite and clay, contains no lead whatsoever. You cannot get lead poisoning from pencils, no way no how. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff/7942sci4.html The licking is to make the pencil darker. Cheap pencils in the past were made of low quality clay and dampening them helped with writing.
• Fun's over. Thanks alot, xott.
• Why do some monkeys lick their young>
• It has to do with the adjacency of some areas of the brain. Room has been made for certain language functions in the human brain by squeezing up areas which were formerly used for smell and taste. From time to time there's a bit of signal leakage, and people find themselves licking the pencil, sticking their tongue out, or sniffing, in order to 'help them concentrate'. My source on this is Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht.
• Yes, but the original pencils were Roman styli made from real lead so... ahh, forget it.
• This is a strange habit that seems to have been passed down simply via seeing old movies or watching older people do the licking business. It's a very interesting phenomenon in itself, that people still do this, without really knowing why, or when they learned the habit. It relates to the early forms of pencils when graphite was rather expensive &/or the manufacturing process had not been fully perfected. (Early on, the English had a monopoly on the production of pencils since no other pure graphite sources were known outside Blighty at first, & industrial milling of graphite sticks had not been accomplished.) Originally soft metals - of course like lead - were used for writing implements - & they continued to be right up until the Victorian era & later. Only when more sources of graphite were established & the manufacturing process improved did the material become cheap enough to be ubiquitous in all pencils. Cheap pencils used by the hoi-polloy in the old days were made out of inferior graphite, or other materials. Milled graphite marks easily under friction with the paper. Cheaper materials used for some early pencils did not leave much of a mark on the paper due to high density/impurity etc. Prob'ly based on shittier ratios of graphite & clay with bismuth & other crap, they were thus water soluble, & on contact with water would dissolve a bit & make a darker mark. To leave a clear mark on paper you could moisten the tip of the pencil core with saliva, creating an effect a little like ink.. I seem to recall my Grandmother explaining this to me when I was young. She grew up in the 1920s, so presumably the inferior crappy pencils were still around in the Charly Chaplin era. (An early name for graphite was 'black lead'. This is how the term stuck with pencils.) My memory is a bit confused, but I believe there was also a kind of 'indelible' pencil, which could make a permanent mark, which was kind of blue, when moistened. This is before the days of biro. I can't be totally sure but perhaps the moistening of the pencil tip is related to this form of scriber, rather than the common-or-garden variety. Needs more research. Sorry for long post.
• "Pencil licker" sounds as pejorative as "mouth breather," somehow. But in a topsy-turvy way.
• "Pencil licker" sounds as pejorative as "mouth breather," somehow. But in a topsy-turvy way.