language

I knew the "Dr." was an abbreviation for "doctor," but I didn't know it was also an abbreviation for "drive." So whenever I saw a road sign that said "Dr." after a word, I thought it was "doctor."

I used to wear hats a lot when I was little. I thought that I would look foreign.

I don't understand why either.... or why I would want to look foreign anyway.

I used to believe…

My dad would say "Go to buggery" when he was mad (its an aussie expression, means get lost, or screw you). I'd ask him where that is. He said it was far away, but I decided buggery was just down the road where there was a grumpy old lady who would yell at us. Sometimes he told us to go to buggery and I'd run down the street and sit in front of her house.

I used to believe…

When I was young I didn't get the whole concept of numbers or value of money. I thought that when you went to a store, you just gave them some money, and they gave you some back. I was very confused one time when my mother didn't get any change back, and acted like this wasn't a problem at all.

I used to believe…

There was a cartoon sketch on Sesame Street where a comical guy wearing a barrel talked in rhyme about where all his clothes went. "These are the flies that made off with my ties... these are the moths that ate up my cloth... this is the glutton who ate my last button!" That last had a visual of a squirrel-type critter picking up a button and swallowing it. I thought for a while after that that a glutton was some kind of rodent.

I used to believe…

One time in kindergarten, my class had to do this sheet that said, "I have ____ letters in my name." You had to fill in the number of letters in your name. But I didn't know that the space where you fill in missing words is called a "blank," so I misunderstood my teacher when she read the question aloud as "I have blank letters in my name." I thought you had to write the word "blank" in the blank! I also asked how to spell it!

I used to believe…

until I was about 12 or 13 (now 20) I thought "making ends meet" was "making ends meat" and that "ends meat" was a really cheap type of meat, and that when people said that, they meant that they were making just enough to afford that meat.

I used to believe…

When my brother was learning to read he told my mom he wanted to go eat at a resteraunt because they served beaver eggs. When my mom looked at the sign advertising the resteraunt the word he was reading was "beverages"

I didn't know that "people" was plural for "person," and I actually thought it meant grown-ups. (Possibly because we would always be in big groups of people who are mostly adults)

I used to believe…

This is a long, involved case of misunderstanding.
When I was little, I had a lot of science toys. A lot. Little test tubes and experiments. My parents kept them in a big, round tin and put them up so I couldn't play with them without supervision, because there were glass parts. I know now that this was an old Coca Cola tin, but I didn't at the time. It had an old man on it.
I wondered if what was on the tin correlated with what was inside. I guess I assumed the man must have been a scientist. I tried to ask my father, who was in the next room watching hockey on TV.
I asked, "Daddy, who is this man on the tin?"
He didn't hear me, and proceeded to yell "Mother fucker!" at the TV.
The next day, when he picked me up from school, he asked if I wanted to go to the park. I said, "Maybe later. I want to go home and play with mother fucker."

I used to believe…

My dad can be very silly and is always making up words and saying them over and over again. When I was little, he also used to occasionally say random words in French. Since I had never heard anyone but him say them, I assumed he made them up too.

I use to think "Pardon me" was French for please excuse my Eiffel tower. makes no sense it just sounded french and that was all I knew about France the Eiffel tower

I used to think that the Chinese spoke Spanish...I was really confused when I found out the truth.

I used to believe…

My friend believed until his senior year in high school that the word drawer was spelled "joor". We couldn't figure out why he would spell it that way and spent a lot of time sounding out the word drawer to hear the j.

I used to believe…

As a child I learned some Spanish (at school) and Greek (from my Greek family), and once my Dad told me he had tried to learn Chinese but thought it was hard. So whenever I heard a language I didn't recognize, I thought it must be Chinese, and that English, Spanish, Greek, and Chinese were the only languages in the world!

I used to believe…

When I was younger, I thought that some how the Spanish people could speak German, and vice versa, for some weird reason.