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On Language and Monkeys Who Don’t Eat Bananas

Fighting against the conformism of life

When I was a kid, I had an obsession with questioning everything that was handed down to me with unshakable certainty.

I hated the answer “because I say so” or ”it has always been that way”. I wanted a clear answer as to why things were the way they were.

I know that today we associate the age of the why with a certain part of childhood, but in my case, this attitude has become an integral part of my personality, even to this day.

I remember two situations in particular that illustrate well this obsession with the why of things:

• the first, was when I was about 10 years old. I discussed with my father the possibility that I could cross the road outside the crosswalk. He told me that I could not cross the road outside the crosswalk. I countered, saying, yes I can, but I won’t, and that’s the catch;
• in the second situation, in a conversation with my mother, I told her, somewhere around mid-adolescence, that the economic value of the engagement rings was based on a historical value: if, in the past, socks had been exchanged during the first marriages, today socks would cost several hundred euros or dollars.

Apart from the image of an insolent child that the reader may be creating in his head — and with which I will not disagree — I was…