language: speaking

I used to think the word "stag" meant naked. I was shocked to hear my Baptist preacher father announce from the pulpit that the men's prayer breakfast would be held in our home, and that the men needed to "come stag".

i used to swear down that the word huge was spelt and pronounced 'fuge' this resulted in a major fight with my friend at the age of 7, and because he was a boy and i was a girl he won. I believed for ages that if id won the fight then the word would have been 'fuge.'

I used to associate words with mental images...I had many, but the only one I can remember to this day was the word "Friday" conjured up an image of the king of spades.

My cousin used to climb under the electric fence without hesitation and she would yell over to me "Come on, what is the matter-- are you a-scared?"
I said "Ascared?" She just shrugged and went about her buisness. I finally figured out that if you were A-Fraid then you must be A-scared in her little 8 year old mind. I still think about it and it cracks me up!

I use to think the Taj Mahal in India was actually the Tajma Hall, a place to have meetings. I though this until I was probably 15.

As a young boy, I became possessed of the belief that every person had a hard limit of 3,000 or so on how many times he could use each word. There was a time when I found my communicative faculties greatly diminished by an unwillingness to waste unnecessary uses of "yes" or "no" on what I considered to be trivial matters.

I don't recall believing anything that I've since outgrown. However, I couldn't believe that pronunciations could differ. It was a great concern of mine when I was nine and we were to move from Tennessee to Illinois. I remember repeating "bean" over and over and never believing that it could be pronounced other than the way I's always heard it. Big surprise!

I always thought a Voo Doo doll was a Doo Doo Doll. Thanks to a very embarrasing moment of voicing this idea, I learned otherwise.

I thought when I was small that a few people sat and decided what things were going to be called, like when u name a baby, and i didn't agree with some of the names! I used to really confuse my parents! I still don't agree with some of them!!

Who had the right to name a table table anyway?!

when i was a child, i told my brother that "algebra" was a bad word so he would go around saying "algebra" all the time and sound like a moron...i was a deranged sister.

i used to think "learning" meant stirring in empty pots and pans with other metallic objects; no idea why. i guess that's what the word "lernen" sounded like to me.

I used to see the signs for Antiques and thought it was pronounced ANTikews.I don't know at what age I finally made the connection between anTEEKes and Antiques. No wonder I went on to major in English in college! :-)

When I was little I used to call blue jeans "boondeenies".

I had never heard the name pronounced, so I always said Zsa Zsa Gabor, "Zeesa-Zeesa Gay-bor."

I used to believe it was "hand cups" and "bolly ball".

I remember the loudest thing ever on TV. It was on Friday night, at probably 9:15 or so, just as the latest episode of Mannix was really getting underway. The camera would cut to a shot of a big, black, heavy telephone (so common then), and it would ring like all the church bells in the world going off at the same time. This happened at least once every episode.

I'd be sound asleep on the floor in my jammies by then, after having gorged myself on popcorn and my own 16-oz. bottle of Coke (in the original curvy glass bottle). I'd practically leap up to the ceiling in fright.

We kids thought Mannix was the last word in extreme TV, because there was something in one of the constant commercials for the show (it was quite the hit back then) about how he "had the guts to get the job done."

The worst phrase any of us had ever used was, "I hate your guts!" and we all knew how much trouble we'd get into for saying it. So it seemed that "guts" was the key word, because you could say, "I hate broccoli!" without the Four Horseman (with my mother at their head) riding down on you. So we were awed that we could hear this awful word spoken, right out in front of everything, and nobody got yelled at.

On another note, my younger brother referred to Clarence on The Mod Squad as the "The Chocolate Man." At age 4 or so, nothing could convince him that poor Clarence wasn't like one of those solid chocolate Easter bunnies.