Granted, I left a 4-year-old unattended with a pomegranate. Mea culpa on that one. But baby was crying. Isaac was happily eating the thing, and not for the first time. What I expected when I returned with baby in a sling five minutes later was that there would be a few seeds on the floor as a natural consequence of the process. What I found was more like a murder scene. The walls, the floor, the table were all splattered with red juice. The pictures on the walls, the baby's pack-n-play, and as far away as the chopping block (a good 8 feet), the whole room was splattered in red juice. Isaac was splattered, his face, his forehead, his shirt, and his entire hands were dyed red.
Suppressing a strong desire to swear and cuss, I asked Isaac what had happened. "Look at this mess!" I scolded. "Did you throw those seeds all over the place?"
"No, Mama, I didn't throw them. I FLICKED them." (I think he actually POPPED them, one by one…)
Thus it is lately with all this hair-splitting and quibbling over precise terms. I think it started with the razor-thin difference between saying someone was stupid and STUPISK. As you can see, "stupisk" is not technically a word, and so therefore it's impossible that it could be a bad word. So, too, with saying "idi" instead of idiot. "Mama, you IDI!" This is not technically a bad thing to say, you see, because there is no such thing as an idi.
Life is now one big exercise in plausible deniability.
Others…
(When told not to jump) "I'm not jumping, I'm galloping!"
(When told not to hit) "I'm not hitting, I'm punching!"
(When told not to throw) "I didn't throw it, it flew!"
What's next? "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is"?