Floss religiously

Sunday bites

I had a lecture about "Sunday Bites" today.

Somebody with a Sunday Bite has a mandible that is actually too small compared with the rest of their head. When your mandible is too small for the rest of your head, your teeth don't quite line up correctly. Small mandibles are actually fairly common, but people with Sunday Bites unconsciously make up for their lack of mandible by moving their mandible forward when they bite down so that the teeth line up as if the mandible were actually normal size.

Apparently, they're a little hard to recognize at first because the person appears perfectly normal at first glance.

In order to elicit the disorder, a dentist has to "deprogram" the muscles so that the mandible can be positioned in it's correct closing position. Deprogramming makes the muscles "forget" what they've been trained to do so that the jaw will move to it's designed position.

What strikes me is that attaching the prefix "Sunday-" to something is synonymous with "fake."

It seems that our superficial Sunday faces (I'm smiling cause I'm miserable), Sunday clothes (Play dress-up if you love Jesus), and Sunday cheer (I'm really happy that you're fake-happy too) aren't the only evidences of the failures of the church.

Maybe it's time for a few Sunday Deprogramming services. It seems heretical at first, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Or, maybe we can just keep tolerating Sunday faces., Sunday clothes, and Sunday cheer.

Speaking of Sunday faces, can you tell a fake smile from a real one? Try the Spot the Fake Smile survey from BBC science. I was mediocre, at best: 12/20. How about you?