Things that perplexed me when I was a kid
Nov. 17th, 2014 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
--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?
--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?
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Date: 2014-11-18 01:19 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2014-11-18 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2014-11-18 02:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2014-11-18 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2014-11-18 10:22 pm (UTC)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.)