“Daddy,” asked little girl of six, “what is the difference between teasing and lying?”
Hmm. I had to think about that (like Susan Boyle did). After thinking about it, I came up with a good reply. I said, “I’m not quite sure. Let me think about that.” And now that I’ve thought about it, I’m really not so sure anymore. I looked up teasing in the dictionary. It says things that boil down to “annoy by constant bothering”. The silly dictionary people – they don’t even include the meaning I mean. Suddenly I’m Tweedledum.
By teasing, I mean that when the little girl asks, “Daddy can I go to the zoo?” and Daddy replies, “if the zoo wants you they can come and get you.” The tease is that Daddy is pretending to misunderstand. It’s when the little girls says, “I’m learning to lead,” Daddy says, “that’s good, the country needs good leaders”, even though he knows she meant “read”, but is still finding the some letters lather ploblematic. It’s not true, you see. Daddy did understand. Daddy is just … teasing.
In teasing, the thing is not true, and everyone knows it’s not true. “Kidding” is maybe a better word – but it’s rather American. We don’t kid on this side of the Atlantic. We have kids though, and they are not goats.
That’s the rub. It’s not true. It is a lie. A mini-white lie. So what is this toying with the truth then? If we believe the dictionary people, it’s not even part of the word “tease”, so how did it become part of our lives?
Learning to be a good teaser takes a lifetime of practice, and is part of our family traditions. Seriously! We take teasing very seriously. We even have a couple of long-term jokes lined up for our children, such as what the business of the vening people is who drive past in vans with refrigerators. (That’s like vending people, just without the “d”.)
My dad told us one day that the car was not parked in the same place as before, since the shopping center used fork lifts to pick up the cars and move them from place to place according to capacity. I think he thought we would know that it was clearly beyond the realm of possibility: a joke, and a funny one at that. The interesting part is that both my sister and I believed him for years, and kept an eye out for those sneaky forklifts. We supposed that they were not used very often. My dad would tap on the roof of the car while driving, “to keep the elephants away.” In many years of tapping, not one elephant landed on our car. My mom said to cut it out when the children also started tapping on the roof.
There is a whole branch of psychology dedicated to assigning blame for our troubles to others. I think the next generation will have plenty to say about us.
