language

I used to believe…

i used to believe that my parents can speak all the world languages... that�s because when i was a little boy (and i couldn�t tell one form another) so whenever i asked them which language the actors in movies are speaking the always gave me answer... so i thought they can simply speak all that languages

I used to believe…

When I was learning how to spell my name, I had trouble finding the letters for it in the alphabet because I thought that elimenopee was one letter. My initials were LPM

I used to believe…

When I was small, my friend Melissa wrote her name in all capital letters, letting the center line of the A extend past the sides, making it look somewhat like a star missing the bottom two lines. She told me that only certain people could write their names like this, as it affected pronunciation, and I was devastated. For months I came home crying from daycare because I couldn't cross my A's like she had, and afterward, insisted being called 'Diamond' so that I could write my name with the amazing A's.

I used to believe…

When I was very small, I couldn't deal with the fact that there were "number words" that weren't definite. I mean words like "a couple", "a few" and "several". I pestered my mother about this until she told me that "a couple" was 2. Eventually I made up a whole system where "a few" was 3, and "several" was 7. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that people were sometimes just talking about an unspecified number!

I can't believe how many people associated numbers with gender! Although I know that there's no real connection, I still can't help feeling that even numbers and 0 are feminine, and odd numbers are masculine. Some, like 10 and 30, are a bit ambiguous.

I used to believe…

When I was little and used to try to explain things I was thinking to my dad, he used to tell me to "be more specific". I thought he was saying "be more Pacific" so I thought that people who lived over the ocean must be really good at explaining stuff.

I used to believe…

When I was between 3 and 4 and learing to write the letters of the alphabet and my name, I thought the letter E could be drawn with an infinite amount of horizontal lines.

I used to believe…

In a history class, actually we were fairly old, a girl in the back perks up in the middle of a discussion about one of the worl wars, and contribute to the conversation with this "Oh, do they speak english in Great Britain?"

I used to believe…

My mom said that everytime that I said a bad word,
my mouth will dirty up and onions will grow in it, and the only way to stop it was to wash my mouth out with soap. I believed that for 3 months.

I used to believe "foyer" meant fireplace because is german feuer [pronounced like foyer] means fire.
I never heard anyone say foyer before, until i was at my grandmas house once. She told me to go wait in the ''foyer'', and i had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she wanted me to wait in the fireplace!!

I used to believe…

when I was little, I asked my mom what the f-word was. After pushing her for a while, she told me but I though she said "folk". Having read a lot of Amelia Bedelia books... I said... so if you say folk with the s it's not a bad word but without one it was.

I used to believe…

When I was little I thought that "involved" was a dirty word, and would get really embarassed when I heard my parents say it. Since it was my mom I usually heard it from, I thought it was a female private part. I think this is weird, because I was only about 3 or 4 at the time, but now realize that "involved" sounds a lot like "vulva." Coincidence?

I used to believe…

In the 1930s and 1940s, Virginia Lee Burton wrote and illustrated children's books about anthropomorphic vehicles. There was a steam shovel named Mary Anne, a snow plow named Katy, a cable car named Maybelle, and others.

Several of these stories were collected in a book called something like "Tales of Modern Machinery". (The copy I read to pieces when I was little was probably an original printing that one of my parents had owned since childhood.) I'd never heard the word "modern", before, but I deduced from this book that it meant "old fashioned". Those vehicles looked like the ones in the old photo albums from when my grandparents were newlyweds...

I used to believe that the phrase "Lord, have mercy" was "Lord, how mercy". At the time, I was familiar with the word "mercy" but had no idea what it meant. From the context of what I thought was "Lord, how mercy", I assumed that "mercy" must be an adjective, indicating the presence of lots of "merce" or "merces", whatever merse or merces were. I So I grew to think that "merce" or "merces" denoted a condition of difficult or dreaded circumstances. After all that was the kind of conditions generally being experienced or anticipated by anyone who said (so I thought) "Lord, how mercy!".

I used to belive that the English language was made up by two men at the start of the world.Their was one tall and one short and that was why we had the same sounding word meaning different things (e.g. right and write) because they each wanted to call a different thing the same word so the tall one made the short one change the spelling!

I remember when I was very young, there was a television show on a saturday night. It was sort of a variety thing, and one segment of the show was called "gotcha!" it played pranks on celebrities like a candid-camera thing.

There was one celebrity who cursed alot and because this was prime time television they would put a "bleep" over the top of the word. I noticed that this was a regular thing and wondered what the "bleeps" where for.

I also noticed that when the crew would jump out near the end of the prank the amound of "bleeps" would rise. It suddenly dawned on me! The bleeps sounded exactly the same as a hospital heart monitors.

And thats why the amount of bleeps when up when the crew jumped out becuase they made him jump and his heart rate rised! stupid...