HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES AND WHAT?

Okay. Pop quiz.

What's the name of the walky bit on the end of your leg?
And the name of the joint connecting the leg to that bit?
Your arm bends in the middle. What do you call that?
And where your fingers bend. What do we call those knobbly things?

I hope that you answered, in this order: foot, ankle, elbow, and knuckle.

I have been trying to teach my Russian students vocabulary for parts of the body, only to be hampered by the fact that Russians either don't have a word for a body part (foot!), have it but can't remember it because it's so obscure (ankle, elbow), or worse, don't know if they even have a word for it or not (knuckle).

It seems that, in Russian, everthing from the hips down is 'leg'. There's also little distinction between fingers, thumbs and toes (if you want to talk about toes, you have to say 'fingers on your feet', which is quite a scary mental image).

On the plus side, there is a word in Russian for the back of the head, which is something I'm pretty sure we don't have in English.