language

I used to believe…

When I asked for something or acted like i was the best when I was younger my dad would say "who do you think you are. the queen of sheeba?!?!" for some reason,no idea how, i always thought the queen of sheeba was a small white poodle that sat on a velvet cushion, and that she had servants. I thought this for a very long time,oh dear.

I learned to count with a deck of cards. When I got to school and was asked to count, I went "Ace, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king, ace."

I used to believe…

When I was around six or so, I got the words hamper and hamster mixed up. My parents would get very confused when I told them the hamster was full, because we didn't own one.

I mix up the words impotent and incomptent. Or at least, I used to. This was a conversation, right after mid-terms, while walking home with a male friend. it went something like this

me : what'd you get on your mid-terms?
him : needs improvment for everything, exacept in Fasion. The teachers hate me because Im incompotent.
me : why would they know you cant get a boner?

I used to believe…

my son who is now 15 used to say "can i have a bowl of colins " instead of cornflakes !! WE DID NOT EVEN KNOW ANYONE CALLED COLIN so god knows where that came from,he also used to think that the postman brought the snow with him in his bag (we are from u.k where it obviously does not snow alot)

I also had trouble hearing and still do but anyways around 4 or 5 I always thought Wind Sheild Wipers was pronounced Win sheer wipers, K-Mart was Kane Mart, and Mix 95.1 (a local radio station) was Nix 95.1. It took untill about I was 7 or so to find out what the real names were.

I used to believe…

When i was really small, i used to believe that if you wanted to put a word in the dictionary then you had to que up and then tell a man at a little table what the word was. If they liked it, your word got put in the dictionary, if not you got thrown out!

I used to believe…

When I was maybe eight or so, I found a piece of paper that had instructions for something in English, and the below that in Japanese. I decided that each one of those Japanese symbols must be the equivilent of an English letter, and I was always mystified as to why the Japanese words had so few "letters", even if the English word for it had ten letters.

I used to believe…

My dad had a number of words and phrases to replace bad ones when swearing at the Philadelphia Eagles playing football. Some were typical: "sugar", "son of a gun", "darn it anyhow"... But he had this one, "Jeepers Pelts", which I think is actually some derivation of a Polish swear. But as a kid I thought there was an animal called Jeeper whose pelt (fur) was poisonous, so if it touched you it would make you mad and say "Jeeper's Pelts!!"

I used to believe…

okay, this is gonna sound very wrong, but I swear I believed this at like 3 or 4, tho I have no idea where I got it from.
I had the word nun confused with a certain word that is used as a derogatory racial comment, n****r. (I wont even say it now, let alone type it.) One day while my mom was on the porch sewing and talking with some of her friends, I picked up a spare piece of cloth, that was black, and put it on my head, like a nun, and exclaimed, "Look, mommy, now I am a n****r!"
My mother was horrified, and had no idea I meant nun. (One of her friends who was sitting there was black.) She told me that it was very bad and I was to never say that word again. I couldnt understand why someone I had seen at church was a bad word to say. This didnt get cleared up until I was about six and started religous education classes at school.....

I used to be very talkative when I was young. I remember that I was going on and on about something and my sister was getting really annoyed. So she told me that you were born with a set amount of words you're allowed to say in your life and then you go deaf. She said that's why there are deaf people; they didn't have any word management skills. She also told me that she'd been counting and I was dangerously close to running out of words.

That shut me up.

I used to believe…

When I started 4th grade I didn't know that sticking up your middle finger meant "F**k off". I cut my middle finger on a fork at lunch and it hurt bad and was bleeding. I hopped up holding up my middle finger, not knowing that I was flipping everyone in the caf off. The luch lady came over and told me off.I was in tears by the end and still didn't know what I had done!!!

I used to believe…

When I was kid visiting at a friends house with my Parents, and it got late, they would say, well we have to hit the road now, and I thought they were getting ready to go out and slap the pavement.

I used to think Japanese people had funny ears, and that when we said something in Japanese they heard it in English...I also thought their mouths were deformed or something, so that when they spoke Japanese they were actually trying to speak English.

I used to believe…

My mum is from Austria and she never taught me German, I'm embarrassed to say that I thought Austrian was a language and told me teacher that it's a very different language to German, I was about 10, how stupid

I used to believe…

When I was little, I played a video game called "The Legend of Zelda" in which the hero must rescue the kidnapped Princess Zelda. From that I divined that this new word "legend" meant that someone was kidnapped and you had to save them; I thought that a game called "The Legend of Your Pets" would be pretty fun.

(Eventually in school they taught me that a "legend" was something found on a map. This didn't help.)