@ghost-of-a-duke saidTU from me Ghost,
When I was a boy, I had a disease that required me to eat dirt three times a day in order to survive.
It's a good thing my older brother told me about it.
I relayed your joke to my younger sister and a good friend. I received the following replies:
<<All us younger brothers have been there. Although, in my case, it took a different form. A circus came to a neighbouring town. That town and mine were separated by an extensive wooded area. Anthony [name not changed to implicate the guilty] and his best friend were annoyed by me (the fat little brother) tagging along when they went into the woods to go tree climbing. I couldn't climb the tree they were up so they decided to have some fun and started discussing the news that a man-eating tiger had escaped from the nearby circus and might be in the wood where we were. I (probably aged 7) listened with increasing alarm and eventually hysterical panic. I burst into tears and fled for home tripping, being scratched by brambles and arrived home in a state of gibbering terror from which I had only partially recovered by the time I went to university.>>
<<I have a friend in Homer [Alaska] whose older brother told her that rubbing cow patties on her face would get rid of the freckles. It didn’t work. Her grandpa had to tell her. That it was a mean joke.>>
๐