language

I used to believe…

My name startes with an "E" and when I was learning to write my name, I thought that after you 'made' the vertical line, and the line on top of it and the line on the bottom, instead of just putting in one more line across the middle of my capital "E'"s I thought you were supposed to squeeze as many lines in between the top and bottom as possible...I eventually went into kindergarten and one of the first things my teacher asked me was "Erica, why does your "E" look like a comb?!"
...I was so embarrassed that I had been doing it wrong for so long...(and here I thought all along that I could do it better than anyone else...after all, they could only fit ONE line between the tops and bottoms of thier "E'"s!!)

I used to think that an explanation mark only had a dot at the bottem because they were normally at the end of a sentence and it was the full stop. If there was an explanation mark in the middle of a sentence, it would just be the stick.

I used to believe…

Up until about the age of 8 I was convinced that the f-word actually was the word Faroono ... yes I now know that, that isn't the word nor is a word at all. But for some unexplained reason I thought this when I was younger ... and of course I never thought to clarify it with my parents because I didn't want to get in trouble for saying the f-word to them...

I used to believe…

When my daugher was young (before she knew profanity), she was really angry at me because it was bed time, and she just didn't want to go to sleep. She balled her fists up next to her face, started shaking, and yelled "You are FOOD"!
In baby language, I believe I got cussed out!

I used to believe…

As a kid, I believed that Little Red Riding Hood was "Little Red Writing Hood". I found considerable cause for puzzlement in wondering what her hood had to do with writing.

I used to believe…

We were once Burgled and so have a couple of my friends and our parents used to always refer to it as "The house is Upside down, its so messy" I was always puzzled upon returning back from school to see it back in its place again, the right way up!

I used to believe…

when i was about 7 i had misheard the name of the great Shaw play and truly beleived that there was a play called Pigmania. i used to think it would be a really cool show like the muppets.
this came to light to my eternal shame in a game of trivial pursuit - by which time i was 12 and i hav never lived it down. "of course i know its really called Pygmalion, i was just being funny" ... yah right...

i had heard the word naive before and knew what it meant, but whenever i saw it written i thought it was a completley different word, pronounced like 'nave'. i beleived this for a very long time, until finally i was reading or something and suddenly it clicked that it was the same word! sadly that was only about a month ago

I used to think that the word "wanker" wasn't swearing, and once I went to watch the football (soccer), and when the referee made the wrong decision, me and the rest of the fans got up on the chair and shouted "The Referee's a wanker!" My grandma looked shocked because she thought I was a polite little lad.

I used to think grown-ups had this rule that when someone didn't hear what you said, you had to say it in another way. I remember this happening when I was watching tv with my mom.
The woman on tv said: "I think we should break up" the man would say: "What?!"
and the woman would reply: "It's just not working out".
I found it strange that the woman just didn't repeat what she said since the man didn't hear her. Instead she said something else and I never understood why....

I did French Immersion (half day English, half day French) all through elementary school, and remember thinking that French was pretty much like English except with a different pronunciation. So art was art, science was science, musique was music, hygiene was health (it was just a more flowery term.) It took me awhile to accept that I was just learning plain old spelling and not the ancient and revered discipline of orthography.

I remember hearing the words 'the numbers are in numerical order' on the lottery. At the time I thought the announcer had said 'the numbers are inAmerican order'.

I used to believe…

When I was a kid I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to say the words "A Adult" without it sounding strange, (At the time I wasn't aware of the word 'an') and often ended up saying "A grown-up".

i used to believe that when on the news the presenter said bulletin i thought they meant they had put a bullet in some one!

i thought i could speak my own language because when i spoke in this language to my friend he wud talk bak the same i thought id invented a language until i tried speaking to my dad like that and he didnt replay.

i used to believe that you could learn foreign languages by subsituting foreign letters with english letters. For example bonjour = good day, so ... b=g, o=o, j=d ...