Pink Astronaut and Aryan Girl

Rhetoric and Dialectic illustrated

Aryan Girl, being a good little Nazi I mean, sweet blonde girl with striking blue eyes, when I tell her:

“Would you like to go and ask your sister if she wants to finish this yoghurt?”

AG: “No.”

Me: (Momentarily stuck in British thinking mode, I have been editing the final stages of a very long book)… “Uhh… hmm… ok, do you want to ask Pink Astronaut if she wants to finish this yoghurt?”

AG: (With little open hand movement to display frustration) “No!”

Me: “I don’t care! Go ask your sister if she wants to finish the damned yoghurt!”

AG: (Perfectly calm and reasonable as she starts to head off to look for her sister.) “Oh. Well you asked if I wanted to go and do that, so I said, no, as I don’t feel like it, but if you wanted me to go and ask her, you should just have said so.”

No animosity, no irritation, just a very Germanic way of putting it.

Me: (slight silence, possibly tightened lips on my face into a straight line) “Fair enough. You have a point. You’re right.”

She nods as she heads off to look for her sister.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how dialectic thinking works. In fairness it is my own preferred mode of thinking and probably why I understand the Young Viking and Aryan Girl the most. The Little Wolf also seems as if he will be pretty direct in delivery. But the Pink Astronaut is mostly rhetoric. Along with a quite brilliant imagination. Earlier today she wanted an apple and I asked her to get her mom to give a slice of it to the Little Wolf, but for her to stay near him as he ate it, as apple can be a bit dangerous as a chocking hazard.

She came back with an apple with a slice cut out of it and two “eyes” so it looked like pac-man. She had asked her mom to do it that way.

This morning however, she gave the best explanation of a dialectic point using physical rhetoric.

Her mother, as I may have noted at other times, is English.

These primitive people, who still lived in trees when my Roman ancestors conquered them with a couple of slaps and a loud voice, have remained far behind in many technological respects compared even to the now defunct Roman Empire’s technological advancements of a few thousand. years ago.

For my wife, the tragic lacunae of understanding appears to be the concept of time. Like many primitive people of the jungles of the Amazon, probably the inhabitants of Sentinel Island and so on, the idea of minutes, hours, days, just blends into a mysterious fog of “time” which is essentially always NOW and also, always NEVER. A kind of superposition of quantistic behaviour where the only constant is the impossibility of being on time.

So when Pink Astronaut asks the wife to play with her, or teach her to read, or build a tower, the wife, promises to get to it in “just a second/minute” which, due to her primitive nature, can be anything from 75 minutes to never. And Pink Astronaut has suffered these indignities with quiet stoicism. Possibly the occasional frustrated tear. The Young Viking, possibly due to having a stronger percentage of my DNA, will instead repeatedly harass his mother, at increasingly shorter intervals of time, when she told him something “almost definitely” would happen; until she breaks down and gets to it. What can I say, the boy learns from observation, obviously!

But not the Pink Astronaut, so this morning, she made her point…

PA: “Mom, can you read that book with me now?”

Wife: “Yes darling, let me just finish breakfast (she was eating) and then I’ll clear up and come down to you.”

PA: (looks at her mother, who is now distracted by the little Wolf trying to pull food off her plate, and/or climb on her/her chair, and I see the gears turning in PA’s pretty head. She starts talking even as her mother is basically oblivious to the words being said to her, as she tries to wrestle the little wolf, eat her breakfast, and knowing her, probably thinking about three other things, totally unrelated to anything going on here.) “Mom, you always say that and then it doesn’t happen…”

Wife: (Still deep in her pinball-like internal thought processes)…

PA: “…and I feel like this: I say… “I’m not going to slap you in the boobie”… (pauses a couple of seconds, then…) smacks the wife’s left breast (not hard at all, just enough to make someone pay attention) then stands there with a satisfied little face, waiting for a reaction.

Me and the YV burst out into laughter, the wife is partially shocked and doesn’t even know what happened. I literally had to tell her what PA had just said so she understood what had just happened.

Wife: (Sheepishly) “Ok, you made your point, Pink Astronaut.”

And that ladies and gentlemen, is how you talk to people who can’t process dialectical facts by the use of rhetoric. Aristotle would be proud.