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'Avocado Hand' is the most mockable injury on the internet

Holy guacamole, indeed. If you can't use a knife correctly, social media is going to carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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Celebrity "Avocado Hand" victim Meryl Streep.

Getty Images/FilmMagic

If you cut yourself slicing food for a meal, you can usually garner a little sympathy -- especially if you're bleeding all over your dinner. But if that injury occurs while slicing avocados, you're out of luck.

That specific owie was named "Avocado Hand" on Wednesday, and social media does not have a lot of bloody sympathy for its sufferers.

The Times of London kicked off the controversy by reporting that the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons wants safety labels on avocados. Seems the giant pit in the middle of the fruit (yes, botanically avocados are large berries) causes a lot of trouble. When home chefs slide a knife into the pit, they sometimes miss, and give themselves a bloody hand instead. High-profile sufferers include actress Meryl Streep, who Avocado Handed herself back in 2012. Don't Google for photos of the results (Streep's or anyone's), they can get seriously graphic.

Seem serious? Not to most uninjured folks on social media, who've managed to get this far in life without amputating themselves over an avocado.

Naturally, there are solutions, from the simple to the state-of-the-art.

So if you've never once cut yourself slicing avocados, give yourself a hand. Unbandaged, of course.

And then enjoy a big scoop of guacamole. You've earned it.

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