language: speaking

I used to believe…

When I was young I had mixed up many words e.g. cinnamon and cyanide and when in the kindergarten I get some dish with cinnamon I thought it's poisonous. I told to everyone who sat around me, they can't eat this, otherwise they'll die. Nobody wanted to eat, we were sitting so frightened.

I used to believe…

When I was young, my mother would say "May I speak to..." when she made a phone call. I thought she was saying "Mass peak to..." So, when I got old enough to call my friends, I would say,"Mass peak to Jill?" or whoever it was that I called.

I used to believe…

In Kindergarten, I asked my friend what she was dressing up as for Halloween. She said Tina Turner, but that meant nothing to me, for years I thought she had gone as a teeter-totter(Playground Equipment).

I used to believe…

My dad told me at a very young age that I should read the book "To Kill a Mockingbird". However, I heard him wrong and until I hit the seventh grade I called it "Tequila Mockingbird"

I used to believe…

My mom was hosting a fundraiser one year, but I thought she was saying "fun razor". I wanted one (a fun razor)so badly because my dad would never let me play with his razors.

I used to believe…

When I was little there was this asian teacher at school. She had an asian accent so i was havin trouble understaandin her. I figured that if another asian woman could understand her but i couldn't, it must be because asian people have different shaped ears to white people(me). To solve this problem I tried to twist my ears into different shapes so that i could hear her too.
BOOYAH! It didn't work. I learned nothin.

I used to believe…

My sister used to pronounce demolish as de LOM ish.

I used to believe…

When I was young maybe 5 yrs. old whenever my mom would talk on the phone I always thought she was saying to the person she was talking to "potatos again". So I thought eveyone she spoke to ate only potatos. It was 4yrs. before I realized she was saying "Say this again". And I don't have a hearing problem.

I used to believe…

When I was 4 I was very angry at my older brother and told my mom that i was "Happy as a Clown" until he hit me, she laughed and said it was "Happy as a Clam" i got angry and asked "Why would a Clam be happy?"

I used to believe…

In my grade 1 class there was a girl who needed speech lessons because of a lisp. One day I heard the term "voice box" and put together the idea that the doctor was shoving a shoe box down her throat, and it scared me. I asked her if she wanted one of my shoe boxes because my feet were small.

I used to believe…

When I was very tiny, I used to think that a portrait was just a rubbish picture of someone. Clearly I had deciphered the meaning correctly from the context, but added a bit of my own. I was outraged at the shoddyness that the people talking would accept when they said that they would like a "poor-trait", so I insisted that I would only accept a "bettertrait", oh yes indeed.

I used to believe…

When my brother was little, my dad took him to a sauna, the kind with the benches, and he was fascinated. Later that evening, while company was over, he told my dad, "Tell mom about the hot bitches we saw today!" Her face was priceless.

I used to believe…

The first time I ever heard of doing somersaults, I guess it was summer, and I thought somersaults were so called because someone was doing them in the summer. I supposed that if someone did the same thing in the winter, it would be a wintersault. As time went on and I never heard of wintersaults (or springsaults or autumnsaults either, for that matter), I assumed that there was some reason why somersaults were most likely to be done in the summer, hence the name. It seemed to make sense to the extent that summer is associated with outdoor activities, and I'd seen somersaults done primarily outdoors, probably because few people I knew would have had ample room to do them inside their houses.

I once thought that I invented the word "buoy". At the time I hadn't learned to spell very much, so I would have been more likely to spell it "booey" or something like that. On my family's first trip to the beach since I came along, as we were nearing the shore, something possessed me to say, "We'll see booeys at the beach!" Maybe I had heard of buoys but forgotten, but something subconsciously prompted me to say that. But I thought at the time I was purely making it up. Once at the beach, I'd point to all sorts of unfamiliar objects, and ask, "Is that a booey?" At first my father would say "Yes" to my question for whatever I pointed to. For a while I supposed he was just going along with my game of making up the word. The first time I remember him saying "No," we were on a ferry ride, and I'd asked the question within the hearing of the ferry operator. In retrospect, I guess my father didn't want the ferry operator to hear him telling me something was a buoy that wasn't. Before the ferry ride was over I was having actual buoys pointed out to me. Gradually I learned to use the word only for real buoys. But for a long time I thought that perhaps they were never called "buoys" until I "invented" the word.

I used to think that "Rape" and "Cape" were somehow one and the same.

I used to believe the word "movie" was pronounced"wee-oovie"