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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

>Little kid logic

My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt them selves, and they point to the table they just walked into.

Edit: Or have a paddy because they can't join the banana they've just cut in half, back together again.

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Well, your question is ambiguous. No wonder the child is giving you a weird answer. The proper question is: “Where is it hurting?”

That's what I ask my son. He still points to the table.

It's a fine answer, though. Not to the question I asked, but it's something I can work with.

As a non native speaker, I could not understand what was wrong in your child's answer, until I read the replies to your message. Even now, it still sounds a perfectly reasonable answer (and question too - maybe you want to put protections on that table or whatever)

This last one comes back to bites as adults too... with relationships and lots of other things entropy finally took.

The first one's just ambiguity isn't it? "Where did you hurt yourself? At Timmy's place"

Yes, but its an example of how small children think

Sometimes adults also think like this, in slightly less obvious ways.

Right, there's that old joke about the radio show that separately asked the husband and wife of a couple "where they had sex" and the second one interprets it as "which orifice" rather than "where were the two of you located when it happened".

Mallrats:

"He wants to have sex in a really uncomfortable place"

"Like in the back of a Volkswagon?"

Right, but so is most language. We've just developed more or less conventional disambiguations — there's a lot of humour that comes from subverting those conventions — and small children haven't acquired that cultural baggage yet.

I had this exact situation yesterday with a 3yo child, "where did you bump yourself?" "[points to shelf] there".

After asking twice I reworded and he got it eventually "where on your head did you get hurt" or something.

The first one's just ambiguity isn't it? "Where did you hurt yourself? New York"

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