To find out the temperature eat a thermometer

A conversation between my two year old neice and her mother (my sister).

"Let me check your temperature, Nethra."

Nethra waits patiently as my sister sticks the thermometer into her mouth. After the thermometer is pulled out Nethra makes a motion as though she was eating the thermometer.

"No, Nethra! You can't eat temperature. It's not like food. You have to read it."

A harmless category error (ascribing a property to something that cannot have that property). Adults make category errors too - claiming Creationism as Science, for instance; a bit more subtle but certainly not as harmless as the ones by kids.

More like this

It is only on really stressful days when I refer to them as my unholy army of the night.   The rest of the time, at least at meals, it is just "my army" and we really do go through a stunning amount of food.                   For example, in late August, right around the time this photo was taken…
Writing books and essays about food, I hear a lot of stories about what people ate growing up. Because cooking was mostly women's work, those stories are almost always about mothers and grandmothers, and how the food made them feel - and how the memories of that food still do make them feel.…
I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on…
In the last few years, a number of political leaders have tried to live on a food stamps budget.  Among others Newark Mayor and political heir-apparent Cory Booker and current and former governors of Colorado and Oregon.  Some have done so to draw attention to the limitations of food stamps, others…

on bitterly cold days.....I still succumb to an old, old childhood habit, though I know better now.

I try to "eat" warm air......as a kid i tried swallowing hot air from an airdryer, or hold my breath for a while, and then swallow.

It didn't really work.....but I still sometimes do that, for nostalgic kicks.

I often restart my computer to see if a crashing application would work. :-). Amazingly somtimes it does. I reckon we live in a strange world that defies reason and philosophy.