The muscle lengthens as it squeezes down on the tongue bone, a stiff cartilage in the core of the tongue, that it envelops.
Last year my youngest daughter, who was then 3, went so far as to claim that the stiff tongues on one pair of boots "cut my legs," which she clutched dramatically while moaning, falling to the ground and shrieking, "It hurts, it hurts".
They breach, "the black pyramid of a vertical whale's head towering above the boat," baleen and a stiff pink tongue exposed.
He'd go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accent — though it probably would have made life easier for him if he'd adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dad's stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks).
In the 1600s, for example, scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon proposed that stutterers have tongues that are too stiff and prescribed warm wine to make them more pliable.
On Andrew Marr on Sunday, when the shadow chancellor Ed Balls joined Osborne on the sofa and paid him some unexpected, possibly mischievous minor compliments, the chancellor sat stiff and suddenly tongue-tied.
The patient's mother stated that her daughter said her tongue felt swollen then she became stiff and fell to the floor.
If you find that your articulation also needs improving, do "articulation exercises exaggerating consonants and vowels and exercise reading tongue twisters out loud to loosen stiff jaws, lazy lips, and a sleepy tongue," D'Arcy suggests.
Although that sounds as if it would hurt (and tongues bleed, right?), the scraper would still face stiff competition from another haunting entrant in the personal hygiene category, the Flowbee Precision Haircutting System.
Doubles from $75 room only A hipster favourite in the centre of the Art Deco District of South Beach, this flamboyant boutique hotel has a tongue-in-cheek slogan: "Clean sheets, hot water, stiff drinks".
