the law

I used to think the sound of a heavy church bell was meant to be the chime of doom, and that God was ringing it himself as a ghost. Grim but still funny.

Judging by the sound of the word, I used to think an asylum was where everyone had to be silent. Well, it is a type of prison!

For some reason, I used to think it was illegal to make up stories in your head, without writing them down on paper!

I used to believe that copying definitions out of a book counted as plagiarism!

I used to believe that police officers were basically the entire criminal justice system. I thought they could arrest anyone at any time and send them to prison for as long as they wanted.
When I was about 5 or 6, a police officer visited my school to give a talk. I asked a question and called him 'Sir' but he told me to call him 'Dave', not 'Sir.
I immediately burst in to tears because I thought I had angered him and he was going to send me to prison for the rest of my life.

When I was a kid, I thought it was illegal to photocopy pages out of books, because of that message that says 'all rights reserved' and tells you not to copy out of the book without permission from the publisher, and thought people had to contact the publishing company just to get permission for that! Like the privacy policy that you get on the internet with so many websites, makes more sense as you get older and learn about new inventions.

My mother has this friend whose last name is Stalker, so when I heard people talking about stalkers, I thought they meant my mom's friend and people related to her.

I used to believe that if you “burnt” a cd on to ITunes on your computer, so you could listen to it on your IPod, you were violating copyright rules.

I used to believe opening a fruitsnack package from the wrong end will send you to jail.

As a kid I didn't realize the severity of getting arrested. I though it was like time-out but for grown-ups; so I figured pretty much everyone went to jail at least once in their lives. I was shocked when I asked my parents if they had ever been to jail and they said no.

I used to believe that there was something called the grammar police and if you say a lot of things wrong(like saying axe instead of ask), the grammar police will come to your house and give you a ticket for bad grammar. I got scared and tried not to make a mistake while speaking!

I used to believe that, if you did ANYTHING which was not allowed (for instance, if you touched something at a shop which had a "do not touch" sign), the police come to get you, and you'd spend a long time in jail just because of that.

I'm from Spain, and here in my country we have a "Civil Guard" (which is a kind of police that takes part in militar-related stuff and mostly helps out people at the countryside), and there was also a Civil War, which took place a bit before WWII. As a kid, I used to mess up both terms (since they sound very similar in Spanish, too), and I used to think that the Civil War was just a time when the Civil Guard was so busy all the time.

when i was little i thought the word "prostitute" meant "prosecutor" and in seventh grade i was on the bus and I yelled really loudly HEY JAKE ISN'T YOUR DAD A PROSTITUTE!

When I was seven, I had the notion that if you cried too much, the social worker would come to your home and take you away from your family. They would put you in military school, I thought that all bad kids were sent there to do militial training.

When my friend was little her mom warned her about not taking food from strangers. One day a neighbor gave her a bag of chips and her mom freaked out, shouting that they "had drugs in them" and now she was a druggie. The next day at school an officer happened to come to their class to talk about not doing drugs and she began to cry and confessed to the whole class she was a druggie. She had to visit the psychologist and principal before they realized what really happened!