Friday Sprog Blogging: you slay me.

As a fund-raiser for the youth soccer league to which we belong, the younger Free-Ride offspring’s soccer team has been selling chocolate bars. Among other things, this means that each morning the younger Free-Ride offspring has packed up a selection of chocolate bars to bring into school, and each afternoon has returned with a stack of dollar bills. (Honestly, it makes me feel a little like Nancy Botwin. But I’ll work through it.)

Anyway, in connection with this candy-peddling, the younger Free-Ride offspring mentioned a customer who bought an extra bar for an older sibling “so he wouldn’t get killed.” I suggested that this was exaggerating the danger of a sibling’s displeasure, or that the younger Free-Ride was not using the standard definition of the verb “to kill”.

The younger Free-Ride offspring’s full reply to this is transcribed below.

Well, my sibling kills me all the time — [the elder Free-Ride offspring] actually does.

See, [the elder Free-Ride offspring] eats all my body except my soul, which is saved.

Then [the elder Free-Ride offspring] gets this ghost-like material that can be shaped like any human, and shapes it like me.

And then [the elder Free-Ride offspring] got this, like, plaster that can move, so I don’t feel like a ghost. And then [the elder Free-Ride offspring] got this paint called “[The Younger Free-Ride Offspring] In a Can” and just sprayed over the plaster, sprayed all over me.

And [the elder Free-Ride offspring] saved the soul so you wouldn’t get suspicious and [the elder Free-Ride offspring] wouldn’t get busted. Because the soul is what makes this plastered painted ghost sound and behave like [the younger Free-Ride offspring].

This all raises some interesting questions, of course, among them:

1. What kind of thing is this “soul”? The younger Free-Ride offspring, upon further question, identified it as being material stuff, and also as essential to reproducing consciousness and personality, yet it seems, in this telling, not to be exactly equivalent to the brain. (Is it possible that the “soul” in question is some manner of artificial intelligence, an uploaded consciousness? Is my elder offspring making Cylons?!)

2. More disturbingly, how is it that the elder Free-Ride offspring, who has been raised vegetarian, has now apparently turned to cannibalism?

3. Where can I get me some flexible plaster? What kinds of materials have such properties?

4. Finally, if I were selling “The Younger Free-Ride Offspring In a Can,” you’d totally line up to buy it, right?