Have you ever suddenly realized something that seems to be obvious to everybody else on the planet?
I consider myself to be a fairly worldly fellow. When I was growing up I kept my peepers open. I actually walked among the humans of earth, I saw what they did and heard what they said. I read their books and watched their “television.” I studied my homo sapiens sapiens encyclopedia and then wandered out into the public arena thinking I could pass for one of “them.” But every now and then something happens to me which reminds me of my alien essence. The moment of revelation is usually accompanied by me saying dazedly, “Ohhh… *That’s * what that is for…” or “Ohhh… *That’s * what that does…”
Recently I was watching *The Day the Earth Stood Still * for the third time with my adoptive Earthling family unit. At a climactic point I cried, "Ohhh…That’s why they call it ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ "
They looked at me and laughed as if I had spider webs on my antennae.
Fess up fellow aliens. What did you finally get long after everybody else?
I was thinking of starting one of these threads myself…as for my embarassing realization, it came during a (high school) Spanish class. We were going over pronunciation, and our teacher mentioned that, for example, veinte, is pronounced as it’s spelled, not with the ‘i before e’ rule. All of a sudden, it sunk in that that wasn’t supposed to be a spelling aid…I have no idea where I got that, because it doesn’t even make sense, but I went through 15 years beleiving that’s what it meant.
Hate to hit you with another epiphany, but it is supposed to be a spelling aid. E.g. OWL // Purdue Writing Lab
Apparently there’s also a rule of thumb that says that “ei” is pronounced with a long “e” sound – at least that’s the excuse a lot of people have used for mispronouncing the family name.
Anyway, it is, as far as I know, just a rule for English spelling, so it’s probably utterly useless in Spanish class.
I used to watch a lot of Bugs Bunny as a kid. Every time they did the “doctor” schtick, typically Bugs would get a tap on the knee with a little mallet, and more or less high kick Elmer Fudd into the ceiling–like taking the scoring kick on a soccer penalty shot.
For years that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. Physically extend my leg as far as it would go, really quick.
Later on down the road–well into my late teens-- I had a physical. And it dawned on me to keep my leg still and let it “twitch” on it’s own.
I left a lot of doctors in my wake. Thankfully, not a whole lot of them tried the knee tapping thing.
Tripler
. . . if they were going to make me sing Soprano by grabbing my nuts, then by God, I could have returned the favor.
Apparently there’s also a rule of thumb that says that “ei” is pronounced with a long “e” sound – at least that’s the excuse a lot of people have used for mispronouncing the family name. QUOTE]
I was worried about that being the case. I just can’t win.
In my head, when I read minutia, I would pronounce it “Minnn-you-tay” instead of “Minn=ooo-sha”. The odd part about it was, I knew exactly what the word meant, and how to pronounce it. I just had a disconnect between the written and spoken word.
I’ve been playing the trombone for nine years… and I just realized a few weeks ago that the notes of a scale go in alphabetical order. :o That sure would have been useful knowledge back when I had to memorize scales in high school. Why didn’t I ever notice that?!
I only realize it now because I just started learning how to play the piano, on which it is very easy to see how everything is ordered.
I thought “standing still” was just a reference to the people’s state of shock at being visited by an extraterrestrial. What it literally referred to was the alien stopping all motors and engines in the world for a period of time as a non-violent display of alien powerThe expression may indeed be both figurative and literal but I completely missed the literal aspect.
I hate those. As a young lad I read a ton, and often encountered the written word before the spoken word, or worse, thought they were different.
For years I pronounced “gauge” as “gog” and wrote “gage”, thinking they were two different words. Ugh.
Pronouncing mischievous as mischeevious lasted for years.
The gambler’s fallacy took root in my mind for over a decade, and I was only able to remove it forcibly with a sledgehammer of a post from this very messageboard. No, the $1,000s of losses at the casinos couldn’t do it. (Damn you, casino war!)
i’m still not sure about this one… I’ve always understood from context (but never really thought about) the phrase “for all intensive purposes.” Then the other day i was watching a movie with subtitles, and it said, “For all intents and purposes!”
I just went and asked my roomates to spell out the phrase; one spelled it the right way (intents and) while the other spelled it ‘intensive’, as i would have, pre-epiphany.
I bet a lot of people think the right word is ‘intensive’… it’s an easy mistake to make!
I remember the study hall in 12th grade in which I discovered what the dumflanges on the backs of some sneakers were for. Ya know what I’m tlaking about, those elastic things that are under the pull-tabs on shoes? That was an awe-inspiring moment of deductive reasoning, I tell you!
My ex was the editor of a small-town newspaper in her mid-twenties (and an excellent writer) when she saw me write the expression “beck and call.” She said that she had always believed it was “beckon call.”
Once I dated a man for 2 months, and didn’t actually figure out that we were dating until about 10 years later.
I’m serious. I’m not making this up. I have no explanation, although it does explain why his now-wife kept treating me like an ex-girlfriend every time we met.
I probably should have clued her in so she could relax, but I really had no idea.
One of the reporters at this small newspaper I used to work at once asked me how to spell “prima donna.” Turns out she thought the phrase was “pre-Madonna.”
[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
I hate those. As a young lad I read a ton, and often encountered the written word before the spoken word, or worse, thought they were different.
QUOTE]
I’ve had this problem all my life. I started speaking Hindi first, and while my mother spoke very good English, she spoke it with the Indian version of the British accent and still said things like “torch” instead of flashlight. My father’s English was (is!) atrocious. So I would read constantly, and not know how to pronounce the words properly because my reading level was so far ahead of my class.
But the one I clearly remember was “comfortable”. Not “com-for-table”, with table said like the thing you eat on.
