“After listening to him go on and 
on about that for a couple more        
minutes, I asked, for the sake of the  
argument, let’s pretend that they’re   
smart enough to conceptualize like us? 
Could they then talk like us?          
     “He finally admitted that because 
it was such a highly controversial     
subject, until a non-human animal      
became that smart and did talk, no one 
had a clear-cut answer yet, but he did 
tell me that parrots and crows sort of 
proved it was possible.”               
     “I'll bet,” Darryl said. “I       
remember reading somewhere that it's   
mostly because of their lack of a      
highly sophisticated larynx and supple 
tongue,” he said as he stuck his tongue
out, wiggled it, and then sucked it    
back in with a wet sound, while        
* wiggling his ears.                       
     That got us all laughing again,   
but I was also wondering how hard it’d 
be to pull someone's tongue out of     
their head. Would it just snap out, or 
would it come out stretchy like gum,   
and be hard to pull out?               
     “I also remember reading something
like that,” I said, trying not to think
about pulling someone's tongue out.    
     “Many of them can make the sounds,
or mimic them, but only a handful can  
actually understand what is being said 
to them, and besides that gorilla that 
can sign, most of them are dogs.       
     “My favorite part was about a     
parrot. Alex, I think his name was. He 
had a vocabulary of over 150 words,”   
and also remembered something else that
was a little sad.                      



CHAPTER 10: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29th
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