language

I used to believe…

It was only at the age of 5-6 that I understood that to translate a verse into a foreign language you have to reconstruct it completely and it's impossible to translate word for word

I used to believe that sexual terms were bad words. I remember my friends and I would go into the girls' bathroom and whisper stuff like, "Vagina! Sperm! Periods!".

Imagine how shocked we were when the lady teachers taught us girls about periods and whatnot in fourth grade.

I used to believe…

My dad had a very bad vocabulary when I was little. Every time someone beaped at him in traffic he would say "f you". My mom never knew about his bad vocabulary. So one day I was driving with my mom in a convertible and a corvette was behidn us beaping. I turned around at them and screamed "f you" as loud as I could. My mom was embarassed and the people in the corvette were laughing histerically.

I used to believe…

As a child I played videogames, especially poorly translated ones from Japan. I sometimes tried to adopt some of the bizarre syntax and grammer of these games, assuming that while it seemed akward and at times incomphrehensible, it MUST be right.

I used to believe…

In elementary school we had to arrange lists of words in alphabetical order. I thought you did this by asigning a certain "alphabetical value" to each letter, with A having the highest value, then B and so on. Things got complicated because the value was effected by the letters position in the sentence, with the higher values at the beginning. Thus, you would need to look at each letter and average its value depending on these components. According to this system the word BAAAA would be arranged before AZZZZ because the second word had so many Z's, which lowered the value. This system demanded that I write out each letter in the alphabet and also write it's numerical value above it, then develop some kind of formula to figure out a word's whole value. I failed many, many tests at this point.

i guess im not the only one who made personalities for numbers, here i thought i had a problem or something. I always thought 9 was mean, because when you add 5 and 9 you get 14 instead of 15....yeah...and i always thought that the adding was a way of numbers helping other numbers, and subtracting was like numbers fighting( 6 says to nine "i dont like you, were not 15 anymore!!") i was so messed when multiplying and dividing came along.

I thought that kids who lived in other countries thought in English like we did and had to learn to speak their other language fluently by the time they were five or they'd be sent out of the country. I used to think how amazingly smart they must be to be translating their thoughts from English into a different language every time they said something.

I used to believe…

My father always used to say "save your breath" if we talked too much, and as a result I grew up thinking we had a limited amount of breath and that once used up it was curtains !

I used to believe…

When I was just learning to read, I used to see the signs that read 'Menswear', 'Womenswear' and 'Childrenswear' in department stores and would refuse to go into these areas as I was always taught that swearing was wrong.
I only had my mistake pointed out to me after my dad returned one day to find me stearnly telling a shop assistant that they shouldn't be teaching children to swear.
It never put me off shopping though.

I used to believe…

When we were little, one of my dad's favorite comebacks was "You & what army?"; he used it any time one of us would threaten to beat him up, or take something from him, that kind of thing.

My youngest brother just confessed to me a couple of years ago (in his early 20s) that he always thought Dad was saying "You, and what, are me?"; the poor kid could never, ever make sense of that question! It was all too deep & philosophical for his little-kid brain.

Ever since he confessed that, every time I mail him anything, I put "You + what = me" on the envelope flap.

I used to believe…

When my sister, aged 10,was reading a book in the 1940's she said 'Dad, whats a brothel?' My father replied 'a sort of soup kitchen'. She believed this until she was married!

I used to believe…

when I was little I heard my dad yelling at my uncle (his inlaw) he told him to f**K off. later i asked him what that meant. He told me it meant to go away or something like that. the next day at school my teacher was trying to help me with something I already knew how to do so i was going to ask her to leave then i remembered my dads way of saying that i thought it was the cool way to say it i told her to f**k off and she called my dad he was so embarased

I once told my younger sister a lie to stop her from swearing ..and she believed it!

Basically you were only allowed to swear once you had a swearing licence, and you were only allowed to apply for this once you had turned 16.

If you swore before then the swearing police would take you away!

I used to believe…

when i was young i used to believe that the 'carry-over champion' on game shows was in fact a 'karaoke' champion. It wasnt until i was 17 and asked my boyfriend what on earth a 'karaoke' champion was, that i learnt the truth.

I used to believe…

Shortly after I learned to read, I noticed all of these banners hanging in front of banks. They all advertised "Free Checking". However, I thought they all said "Free Chicken".

I was so confused as to why banks would hand out free chicken to their customers. My mom occasionally left us 3 kids in the car while she would run into the bank to make a quick deposit. I would get so mad, because I just knew that she was in there eating the free chicken and she never brought us any.

(she did, however, bring us dum-dum suckers)

I believed that if I used bad language God would strike me dead. I was 15yrs.old before I realised that my father swore with ease and was still alive.It never became a habit though.