forehead marks (humor)

[thompson at handel.jlc.net]

Children often say interesting and revealing things.  In Berkeley, I once
overheard a toddler [two or three years old?], ask with great concern
whether a woman with a tilaka on her forehead were bleeding.

I take this to be a good example of folk semantics.

Also, my response to the joke was similar to Julia Leslie's, except that I
assumed that the humor was "disrespectful" to Western "fieldworkers" in
particular, with their nagging questions about "obvious" things....