language

I used to believe…

When I was young my uncle had a big book of the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. It had the name "Poe" on the spine in huge letters. Inside it had both short stories and poems. Once I saw this I assumed that Poe had invented poetry and people had named it after him.

I consistently misheard "Dracula" as "Jack Lear" and that's who I was every Halloween until the third grade. I also believed that "The United States of America" was both spoken and spelled as one long word, and I spelled it phonetically for all of the 1st grade.

I used to believe…

when i was about ten, my parents bought tickets to see the musical version of 'les miserables.' i was so upset that they weren't bringing me, that i wrote my mom a very angry note and pinned it on her bedroom door. she saw the note, and started laughing, which incensed me even more. when she showed me the note and why she was laughing, i understood, but became even more enraged. in my blind fury, instead of writing 'i HATE you' i had written 'i HAT you'. how's that for being a mean kid?

I used to believe…

When I asked my father the meaning of the word "peon," he said it was something that you would "pee on." Like an idiot, I not only believed this well into my teens, but was only corrected after I announced it to my whole physics class.

I used to believe…

for as long as I can remember, I've counted the number of letters in words. I think it's because my grandmother taught me to do crosswords at a very early age.

And so, I firmly believed that it was much better to be a woman than a man, because 'man' was only half of a 'human', whilst 'woman' had the full complement of letters.

I still try to convince people to follow this viewpoint...

I used to believe…

My grandmother was fond of proverbs and would often say "you know what they say..." or "they say that..." When I was little I came to the conclusion that "they" were a group of people in an offfice somewhere, whose job was to sit around all day coming up with sayings and proverbs.

I used to believe…

When I was so young that I was still being read to at bedtime, my parents were working their way through the wonderful book "Robinson Caruso" when I began having some heavy-duty nightmares. When my parents asked me what was wrong, I finally asked, "Robinson Caruso didn't really kill and eat a little kid, did he?" When I found out we were talking about a young goat, the nightmares stopped...

I was 9 years old and in a video store with my grandmother. A box for one of the Child's Play movies said something about Chuckie (the murderous doll) being "one mean S.O.B." I knew what S.O.B. stood for, but I asked my grandmother anyway to try to get her to say the word "bitch." She instead said it meant "son of a bad guy," so as not to use bad language in front of me, but for a while I thought my grandmother was an idiot.

I used to believe…

When I was about five or so I overheard my uncle talking about how something cost him "50 bucks." I asked him what bucks were, and he said "dollars," but I thought he said "dolls." For the longest time I couldn't figure out what my uncle was doing with a bunch of dolls and why anyone wanted to give him stuff for them.

I used to believe…

A friend of mine got into an argument with this metalhead guy. The metalhead guy thought the expression "play it by ear" was actually "play it by air." Personally, I don't know where "ear" comes from, but "air" sounds even more stupid. He was 18 at the time.

I used to believe…

Because my grandfather spoke very quietly and very gravelly, I came to believe that we were born with a limited supply of speech and if we used it all up we'd be mute at the ends of our lives. I began trying to conserve words, as though they were a limited resource.

I used to believe…

Thanks to a vividly pictured counting book, I thought the numbers 0-9 were either male or female and had personalities. I came to dislike some of the numbers they pictured scowling. I'm not sure but I think this contributed to my lifelong hatred of math.

I used to believe…

My Aunt is Greek so when we were little, she and my Greek cousins taught us all sorts of Greek words. For some reason, I got the idea that "penis" was the Greek word for everyones' private parts so I told everyone in my dance class that I had a penis.

I believed "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" meant "Do you speak Dutch?" I also believed that because "Gesundheit!" means "God bless you!" that the German word for God must be "Gesund".

I used to believe that words and phrases could be "good" or "bad". The determining factor was the number of characters comprising the word or words in question. If a word or phrase contained an even number of characters then it was "good", and if it contained an odd number of characters it was "bad." I constantly counted the letters in people's names and the names of stores, cars, and anything else that I saw. Sometimes I would find myself during conversation spelling out some of the words used and counting the letters in my head. Now at 26, I still have an awful habit of counting letters.

I used to believe…

When I was a kid, my parents had their own language. No, that's not my weird belief yet - be patient.

It was just spelling aloud, but using a short word for each consonant. B becomes "Bub", C becomes "Cut", H becomes "Hash", etc. Also, to double a letter, precede it with "Square". Hence the word "butter" would be rendered as "Bub U Square Tut E Rud." With a little practice you can learn to speak and understand it very quickly. My parents used it constantly to talk in front of the kids without us knowing what they were saying.

When I was eight, I broke the code (not transliterating the vowels finally gave me the clue that they were just spelling. After that it was simple.) I was smart enough to solve the code, but too stupid to keep my mouth shut. I promptly told everyone how clever I was. If I'd really been clever I'd have eavesdropped on them for years.

I grew up speaking English but had a lot of Korean-speaking relatives living in our house or in town. I thought there was some weird Korean word, "Bao mo men" that meant "poop". It wasn't until late teens or early college that I realized they were saying "Bowel movement".