people: names

On a few occasions I'd perused a newspaper and, in an article about the army, noticed that many people had names such as "Pte Johnson". Not knowing that Pte was an abbreviation for "private", I assumed that they were all named Pete but for one reason or another their parents misspelled it on their birth certificate. It then followed logically that this was why there were so many people with this name in the army -- if they had parents with such basic skills as the ability to correctly spell Pete, they may have been able to get a job doing something else.

When I was little, my dad had a friend named Theresa. He always talked about her and about what a good-hearted person she was. Thing is, she lived in another state so I never met her. I only heard my dad talking about how kind and caring she was. So I concluded that she was in fact Mother Theresa.

When I was little, I thought that babies were born with a metal name tag. I'm not sure when I discovered that was not true. It may have been when my mother showed me her list of baby names, and told me how she picked mine.

I used to believe Monty Hall was a place instead of a man. Let's Make A Deal was before my time and I only knew Monty's name from the Monty Hall problem. I thought "Monty Hall" was the building where the game show took place.

I was reading a letters page from a magazine one day and I noticed a lot of letters from a person called Name Witheld and I commented to my younger brother that this poor lady must have had a very tough life.

I used to think people with old-lady sort of names (Helen, Betty, Betsy, etc) would age twice faster than anybody else. I also felt special because my name was a young-ish sort of name!

I used to believe that there was a girl's name written and pronounced "Feebee" and an entirely different girl's name spelt "Phoebe" and pronounced 'fobe' like 'earlobe'.

When I see the name in print, I stll find it hard to pronounce it 'feebee'.

When I was little, I understood that a woman could choose to change her name when she got married. But, I thought she changed her FIRST name. I proudly announcned that when I got married, I was going to change my name to Monique.

I used to believe that everyone had the same middle name as me... Elizabeth.
(even my uncles)

I have an older sister named Tammy. When I was younger, Tammy had a Tmoble phone. I thought it stood fot Tammys moble

I used to think that Anonymous was a really famous person

When I was about 3, our neighbor had a baby. Her son, who was my age, ran over to us and told us that his mom had a girl. Well, my parents asked him what her name was. He said "Banana Gold". Of course, my parents were completely baffled about why the baby was named Banana Gold. They spent a while figuring out what Kevin really meant. It turned out that the baby's name was Amanda Nicole.

In gradeschool I had a friend named Renee. For about five months I thought her name was Grenade. My mom said, "are you sure it's not Renee?" I told her, "No, it's Grenade." and she looked at my dad with a knowing smile.

Both my parents coincidentally have the same last names, so when I was little, I always thought that you can only marry people with the same last names. i.e. your brothers/sisters...

When I was little I believed that a person had two names, one when they were a "child" and one when they are a "adult"
For example, I asked my mom one day( her name is viki) what her name was when she was a kid and she laughed at me.

I was around 4.

I used to believe that God's name was Howard. It wasn't until I was in Junior High that I realized that the prayer was "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name" and not "Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name"