Personally, I'd have called it 'mad tongue'. For when the tongue seems to be going... mad, as erect tongue might cut out a lot of material along the same lines.
Then I guess I had been correct the second time around in terms of which one would've been right for the sentence, which was what I had been aiming for when I had posted that. Now that I think about it, I'm fairly sure that "What are the criteria" would have been more significantly more accurate than "What is the criterion" anyway.