Posted by My daughter, Quinn, is awesome. She’s also a fan of spelunking as you can see –
I keep track of her oddball comments, called “Quinnisms”, and post them on the Bookface that all my friends and family might share in the hilarity.
I’ve compiled all of these on my blog, they can be found HERE. I’ve also written some explanations as to how I conjure the Quinnism was conceived; I’ve posted one of these explanations HERE.
I do so enjoy her and thought I’d share more of her uniQueness with you –
Quinnism #34 –
Who’s on first, Q style:
*Daddy hands Q a sucker*
Q: “What flavor is this?”
Me: “That’s a mystery flavor.”
Q: “Why it’s a mystery flavor?”
Me: “You have to taste it to figure out what flavor it is.”
Q: “Why you have to taste it first?”
Me: “Because it’s a mystery flavor.”
…and so on.
This conversation is still hanging over lake Texoma somewhere.
The “why/what is” gambit will swallow your mind if you allow yourself to get sucked into it. It’s like a maze with no endpoint and no cheese; there is no reward and no way out.
I can’t promise any cheese (cheesy jokes, perhaps), but I have found a few techniques to point you toward the exit.
Technique #1: “The loop”. The seeds of this technique can be found in the Quinnism above.
The key is to find a loop where the answer leads to a question that leads to the same answer. This is not as easy as it sounds.
It didn’t take Q very long to figure out how to confound the loop – ask questions related to the topic, but make subtle movements towards a different topic. For instance, she frequently asks about traffic cones. Such a conversation might go like this –
Driving down a road under construction
Q: “Why there’s cones?”
PnQ: “They’re fixing the road. They don’t want cars to drive there.”
Q: “Why cars can’t drive there?”
PnQ: “It probably has a bunch of potholes”
Q: “Why there’s potholes?”
PnQ: “Well, water gets into small holes in the road, then freeze, and makes the hole bigger.”
Q: “Why’s water freeze?”
…and so on.
I could continue this conversation for the rest of the post, but I won’t do that to you or myself.
Let’s analyze this conversation; we started with traffic cones and ended with a question about ice. Clearly, Q is in control of this dialogue.
If you’re going to be successful employing “the loop”, you have to strike early; like this –
Q: “Why there’s cones?”
PnQ: “They’re fixing the road. They don’t want cars to drive there.”
Q: “Why cars can’t drive there?”
PnQ: “Because there are cones.”
Q: “…”
You might be thinking that no child is curious enough to want to know why water freezes. Let me tell you something, EVERY time my windshield has condensation on it or there is dew on the grass, she asks if it rained. I tell her it’s condensation, she asks me what that is, we do the condensation dance all the way to her school.
Let’s say you miss the loop window, you still have one chance.
Technique #2: The laws of science and nature.
For some reason, natural law is an ironclad stopper in the ginormous, ever refilling bottle of “why/what is”. Let’s look at the previous example and insert this technique –
Driving down a road under construction
Q: “Why there’s cones?”
PnQ: “They’re fixing the road. They don’t want cars to drive there.”
Q: “Why cars can’t drive there?”
PnQ: “It probably has a bunch of potholes”
Q: “Why there’s potholes?”
PnQ: “Well, water gets into small holes in the road, then freeze, and makes the hole bigger.”
Q: “Why’s water freeze?”
PnQ: “Winter makes fools of us all.”
Q: “…”
FIN
@JarrettLWilson
My Brain Injourney 