Things that perplexed me when I was a kid

[sasha_feather]

--I thought the moon was a planet.

--People seemed to pronounce wind chill as "windsheel", all blended together and soft, so I couldn't parse it and thought they were maybe saying "wind shield," even though that did not make sense.

--I thought that tourist meant someone who led tours (tour guide).

--I couldn't hear the difference between picture and pitcher.

--I didn't understand why "I" in the middle of a sentence should be capitalized.

--I didn't understand the subtle nuances that differentiated dinner and supper (this is still difficult because dinner means different things to different people).

What did you have a hard time understanding as a kid?

Comments

[owlectomy]

I moved to France when I was six and came back when I was seven, and so I had to go through two separate phases of "everything you know is wrong": I started 3rd grade not knowing to capitalize "I" because you don't capitalize "je," I wrote "7" wrong when I got to France, learned how to write French "7," and then when I came back that was wrong. (I also had to learn two kinds of cursive! Which is why I can't do cursive now.)

I'm kind of embarrassed at how old I was when I learned that the ATM isn't an infinite magic money machine (especially considering that I heard "Oh no, we're overdrawn" from my mom a million times).

I didn't understand that I was supposed to be embarrassed (or at least quiet!) about the fact that I was born to unmarried parents.

I didn't understand that I couldn't be Catholic just because all my classmates were. (I also kind of wanted to be a nun, but that was because boys were terrible and I didn't want to marry one.)

I didn't understand why my mom was weird about me reading the Jehovah's Witness magazines at my grandma's house.

[gabbysilang]

I still don't understand the difference between dinner and supper. Is one like...like brunch?

[laceblade]

I was in college before I realized that the mitt of the Milwaukee Brewers logo is actually an m and a b.

[cantarina]

I was sort of a lazy reader as a kid and for years, I pronounced "caretaker" as "crackertacker".

[rhivolution]

I thought 'hallelujah' in church was a kind of peach, for some reason.

I pronounced words the way they were spelled out on the page (there's a Prairie Home Companion piece about Garrison Keillor doing this as a child which always comes to mind), as I often encountered them first on the page. I still get grief from the family about 'man-yer' for manure, 25 years later.

My brain mixed up Carly Simon and my aunt, and they're still irrevocably linked in my head.

In second grade, I told a classmate that he was going to hell because he was Catholic. (Should anyone wonder what conservative Lutheran rhetoric does to the young mind, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence.)