I used to think that certain quantitative words had numbers assigned to them. If 'a couple' was two, 'a few' was three and 'a lot' was four. Naturally, 'several' was seven. I still adhere loosely to this hierarchy of counting.

queeneve

up till i was about 15 i didnt realize that several just ment a few of the items chosen i thought it ment that i had to get seven of them. Its very logical in my thinking because 'seve'ral has the begining of seven in it. I was still embarassed.

ps. i am now 16 and every time i hear several i think of the day i learned it wasnt seven.

Emilie Dale

I had a friend one time who thought "one pillion" was the highest possible number. There is no number higher. I said to him, "All right, then how about one pillion one, one pillion two, one pillion three...". Then he said, "Aw, shut up."

Anon

I used to think that as 'a few' rhymed with two, therefore it meant two. My brain didn't register that a couple of people weren't three of them.

anon

As a child i once arrived at the conclusion that the area of a given circle would be equal to that of a square with a distance around it equal to the circumference of the circle. So the area of a given circle with a circumference C, would be (C/4)^2.

I stubbernly tried to defend this principle during math class. A countering example was quickly found...

Jens

I used to believe that while 'a couple' meant two, that 'a few' meant three. I thought this at least until I was 8 years old.

Even more embarassingly it was my younger brother who clued me into the fact that 'a few' didn't have to be just three. I argued with him that it even made sense since the word 'few' had three letters in it. Of course, I hadn't considered that 'couple' had more than two letters.

At any rate, my mother settled the argument.

Glen

When I started kindergarten, I believed that 100 came directly after 29. Because 29 was the highest number I could count to. I just believed that that was the highest number there was. All the other numbers weren't really numbers, just adjectives, like if you had 36 bananas, 36 was just something that described them, not the quantity.

Jamie

As a child I always thought somehow that the gap between seven and eight was somehow bigger than the gap between other consecutive pairs of integers. Even when I learned arithmetic and knew that 6+1=7, that 7+1=8, and 8+1=9, knowing that the one in each case is the same "one", It still seemed in spite of that the gab between seven and eight was in SOME sense bigger than other gaps between consecutive integers. Kind of contradictory, I know. But I still probably think of seven as the largest small integer and eight as the smallest large integer, the gap SEEMING extra big.

Joanne

I used to believe ther was a "One-teen" and "Two-teen"

Like this: Nine, Ten, Oneteen, Twoteen, Thirteen...

Lecia

My sister used to say "eleventeen" (i think it was eleventeen...)for 21. it was soo funny!

KrazyK

when my 3rd grade teacher taught us about geometry she gave us little tips for remembering which one was which.


Obtuse and open


acute is "a cute" and little angle



when i associated anything with cute those days it was bunnies.

i do not know why.


well when u make an angle you know you have to make a square(for a right angle) or a curved line(for acut and obtuse angles), i always tried to find the little bunnies and neon open signs inside of the angles on tests.

Anon

I used to believe that several and couple meant the same thing. (example: several things versus a couple of things) I was always confused why when I asked for a couple of things that I would be given only 2 every time. LOL!!!

Sharon

I thought several was a specific large number because I never learned exactly how many it was and I knew the smaller ones. Once when I was about four years old, I threw one of my toys on the ground and it broke. My mother yelled at me, "That cost several dollars!" So I said, "I can't count that high!"

Colin T

Up into about the 3rd or 4th grade i thought the number three was pronounced "Free"

Ady

When I was little, I was confused with the decimal system. It's easier to show as an example how I counted: "..., twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve", and so on. When the count reached "twenty-nineteen", the next number (twenty-twenty) just didn't seem to make sense. It took me over a year to realize that the number after 29 is 30.

Anon

I used to think that once meant 2, and twice meant 3.

John

When I was very small, I couldn't deal with the fact that there were "number words" that weren't definite. I mean words like "a couple", "a few" and "several". I pestered my mother about this until she told me that "a couple" was 2. Eventually I made up a whole system where "a few" was 3, and "several" was 7. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that people were sometimes just talking about an unspecified number!

PsyXe

I can't believe how many people associated numbers with gender! Although I know that there's no real connection, I still can't help feeling that even numbers and 0 are feminine, and odd numbers are masculine. Some, like 10 and 30, are a bit ambiguous.

PsyXe

When I was little I thought ten was the highest number in the world.

Anon