Sunday, November 12, 2006

whY - oh whY ?

and once again we have to ask: whY has Chaka died?

...

oh, i mean um, whY has Ask Chaka died again?

- sorry for the dramatic confussion to all of yoU that thought Chaka actually died there for a second.

6 comments:

Chaka said...

The real question is, why are you so eager for me to be dead when I'm obviously posting much more often than a dead man would.

PopStar said...

only slightly more often - and that may be pushin' it a bit.

Special K said...

The more important question is how to explain the concept of death to an 8 year old autistic kid. After finally inculcating that the computer game he happened upon, Kindergarten Killer, is bad because we should never ever even talk about killing people, he heard a song called "me matas". Now he's trying to make sense of why one can be killed by someone else (and yet live to tell the story!). I tried to explain that the translation for matar is to make suffer, but he didn't buy it for a monolingual second. He may be autistic, but he's confident in what he knows. Aconséjame, o Chaka sabio.

Pirate Jimmy said...

Certain video games are not meant for kids.

Though I'd like to think that gladiator bouts made people heartier in roman times.

Chaka said...

My expertise is not in autism, and I've never quite known how to explain metaphors. You kind of just get them or you think they're stupid.

Is the problem that he doesn't see that a Spanish word can have more than one meaning in English? If so, you might be able to provide another example, but that might be too abstract.

Finally, (and long after exhausting my credibility to comment on anything) you may have staked out a bit too much territory to defend rationally when you said "we should never ever even talk about killing people." If he's not at the stage of development where he can even encounter the ideas, he might not be at the stage where he's going to buy any abstract rational argument. I point you to people who know better than me: Piaget, Kohlberg, your sister, etc.

Pirate Jimmy said...

I am considered an expert in many countries.