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

[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.)