language

I used to believe…

When I was little my father wanted to teach me Cantonese, I refused to learn because I thought "Oh no, nobody is going to understand me. How will I communicate?"

I thought that English was the only language that had swear words!

I used to believe…

When I was in Kindergarten I used to believe 100 was the biggest number.

I thought that if intelligent means smart there must also be a word "telligent" which means stupid!

i used to believe "eaves drop" was actually "ears drop"

I thought that people who spoke foreign languages would always learn English, and that dictionaries were only printed translating their language to English, so if someone who spoke French wanted to know the German word for something, they would first use a French-English dictionary, then a German-English dictionary, because French-German dictionaries didn't exist.

I use to believe that a "Prima Donna" was "Pre-Madonna"---someone before Madonna's time.

I remember how my mum would read me stories, and I would always assume they were true. once, though my brother told me a scary story, and I couldn't sleep, so my mum told me that not all stories are true. I called her a liar for telling me made up stories.

I thought that the women who drove the bookmobile actually wrote all of the books on the shelves.

I used to think the phrase "stark raving madness" was "star craving madness". It seemed a peculiar turn of phrase, as I'd never heard of anyone craving stars. On the other hand if anyone did crave stars, it is understandable how that might be associated with madness of some kind.

I thought when people said debit (like a debit card) they were trying to say "debut" and didn't realize the T was silent.

I used to think we spoke german at home because it was our own made-up language. In school we spoke english, the normal language, and other families had different languages that they had invented.

I thought the word debut was actually "day view" since it was the first time the thing saw the light of day. Even when I did read the word for the first time I thought it was pronounced "debbut" till someone corrected me

I used to believe…

When I was younger I used to refer to cars as lawnmowers. Despite my parents constantly saying "c....a....r" I referred to the motor vehicle as the difficult, 3 syllabled word until I started school.

I though that when people said someone was in a coma, they were saying acoma. I didn't know that it was two seperate words. I thought that until I saw the word in a book when I was about 12

I used to believe…

When I was little I used to get terribly frustrated at the open/closed signs at shops and restaurants. It was before I knew about contractions in grammar so I always read "Sorry we're closed" as "Sorry, we re-closed" (implying that they were currently closed and we had just missed them), and I read "Yes we're open" as "Yes, we re-open" (implying that they were closed at the moment, but intended to open again at some point in the future). So I though that shops with these signs were always closed, and I couldn't understand why they needed two different signs to say the same thing. It seemed so terribly inefficient!