The other morning, after recently watching A Bug's Life, my son declared, "You know, mommy, mean guys squish things." In the movie, there's a "mean guy" named Hopper who tries to squish the protagonist, Flick. I can only assume that's what he's referring to. I thought about how to respond to this.
Suppose I wanted to address the message contained in this statement. Where to start... "Well, Jack, there are no mean guys, but guys sometimes do mean things. Hopper is very hungry, and lazy, and he's trying to get the ants to do the work of gathering food for him. He's bigger than the ants, and he's trying to bully them into giving him their food by scaring them and threatening to squish them. Bullying is not nice, and you can see that Hopper has no friends because of it. The other bugs are afraid of him, but no one really likes him very much."
Now, suppose I wanted something less complicated. Something like...... "Yep." Simple. Concise. I don't need to think about it anymore. In fact, I don't even need to have heard the question to use it. "Yep", works even when my brain doesn't.
Guess which one I went with? It might help to know that it was 7:05 at the time and I was still wiping the sleep dust from my eyes.
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