language

I used to believe…

When I was 4 I was very angry at my older brother and told my mom that i was "Happy as a Clown" until he hit me, she laughed and said it was "Happy as a Clam" i got angry and asked "Why would a Clam be happy?"

I used to believe…

When I was young I had a computer game that taught you reading skills. On of the words you could click on was "sax" which I confused with "sex". I was very curious to learn was sex was but didn't want my parents to see me click on it cause I thought it was bad. I was very dissapointed and confused to see a picture of a saxophone!

I used to believe…

When I was about 3 or so, my dad would take me to the park, where they had this donkey on a large spring that you would sit on and rock back and forth to pretend like you were riding it. He got tired of me riding it all the time and once he said to my Aunt "She's gonna go ride the damn donkey again." Some time later, I don't remember if it was to them or to someone else, I said "I was riding the damn donkey!"

I used to believe that, in Algebra, every letter was assigned a number and it never changed. Like A would be 1, B would be 2, etc. So all you had to do was memorize the number that went with the letter and put it in every time you saw it...I never quite got the hang of Algebra...

I remember in gr.1 learning to make the number 8 as 2 circles. Then in gr.2, my new teacher said to make it like a figure 8.
For the longest time I thought my 2 teachers would get in a fight about which way to make an 8.

I use to believe that I had written the version of the Three Little Pigs were the wolf was a good guy. I made a big stink about it when I saw the book in the library. I told my parents that they had stolen the idea from me.

i believed that every colour had a number.. i know that this had something to do with spoons we had indifferent colours with small hearts on top in the opposite colour..

the blue spoon with a yellow heart was number 63
the yellow spoon with the blue heart was 36
green with a red heart was 45
red with a green heart 54..

when i think of these numbers i still see the colours

I used to believe…

In my grade 1 class there was a girl who needed speech lessons because of a lisp. One day I heard the term "voice box" and put together the idea that the doctor was shoving a shoe box down her throat, and it scared me. I asked her if she wanted one of my shoe boxes because my feet were small.

I used to believe…

my childhood was complete wreck (due to parents who were still children emotionally). I loved to read. I would read Dick and Jane and all those great books about life. I used to believe that if we would just move to a street named after a tree our lives would be perfect, just like in the books I read. My all time favorite was Maple Street.

I used to believe…

When I was very tiny, I used to think that a portrait was just a rubbish picture of someone. Clearly I had deciphered the meaning correctly from the context, but added a bit of my own. I was outraged at the shoddyness that the people talking would accept when they said that they would like a "poor-trait", so I insisted that I would only accept a "bettertrait", oh yes indeed.

I used to believe…

Once, when I was little, I watched this g rated movie (it was animated) and the person on the phone said the word 'crook'. From then on, I thought 'crook' was a swearword.

I used to believe…

When my brother was little, my dad took him to a sauna, the kind with the benches, and he was fascinated. Later that evening, while company was over, he told my dad, "Tell mom about the hot bitches we saw today!" Her face was priceless.

I used to believe…

When I was little, my older brother told me that "ditch" was a swear-word. I used to call people 'stupid ditches' under my breath (stupid was also a really bad word)

I also believed that 'Fuddruckers' was a curse-word. (Fuddruckers is a restaurant, just in case you didn't know...)

I used to believe…

When I was reading a biography as a fourth grade reading assignment, I first encountered in print the word "determined", as in "He was determined" (meaning firmly resolved), and that phrase occurred a lot in the book. Most of the way through the book, I was reading an extra "d" into the word near the end, and thinking I was encountering a brand new word "determinded", which I was thinking of as rhyming with "better minded". So I assumed it meant some state of mind implied by some prefix, "deter-" (rhyming with "better") and previously unfamiliar to me. Since the word occurred frequently in the book, I came to understand it from the context to have pretty much the actual meaning of "determined" in that context. So I assumed the prefix "deter-" meant something like firm and unchangeable, so "determinded" would mean having such a firm and unchangeable stste of mind. So I was pretty much understanding the correct meaning, in spite of reading it into an imaginary word. Near the end of the book, I finally noticed that the word lacked the extra "d" that would have mad it it end in "minded", and pretty soon thereafter, I guess I realized that it was the familiar word "determined". Guess I was a bit disappointed that I hadn't learned and deciphered a new word after all.

I used to think that the worst thing you could ever say was "fudge buckets", because thats what my mom said when she was really angry instead of swearing in front of us.

I used to believe…

The first time I ever heard of doing somersaults, I guess it was summer, and I thought somersaults were so called because someone was doing them in the summer. I supposed that if someone did the same thing in the winter, it would be a wintersault. As time went on and I never heard of wintersaults (or springsaults or autumnsaults either, for that matter), I assumed that there was some reason why somersaults were most likely to be done in the summer, hence the name. It seemed to make sense to the extent that summer is associated with outdoor activities, and I'd seen somersaults done primarily outdoors, probably because few people I knew would have had ample room to do them inside their houses.