The admonition. “Preserve your body temperature,” just swept by me. Hadn’t a clue what it meant and ignored it.
I thought that when you were someplace that eventually became cool/cold (an outdoor concert, for example) that you would, when it became cool/cold, put on the jacket you brought along. The jacket never warmed my already cold, shivering self.
Seems that the principle to preserve warmness is by being warm before the shivering began. Duh…
I guess it’s been a while since they’ve used the whole jingle. The full jingle/slogan is “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
Makes a little more sense if you know that. They should probably go back to using it all, that way generations of consumers won’t be so baffled. (Though I think it actually says “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee!” on their packaging as well. That really leaves no question.)
When I was 4 or 5, I was outside playing when I looked up into the sky and noticed that the clouds were moving! Holy crap! So I ran to my mother and told her and she didn’t seem to care! Go figure.
But my son has that beat. He began reading around age 3 so pronunciation never works in his favor. I overheard him telling a friend about a Garfield cartoon.
“…And the guy was, like, sooey-ick-a-dal! Know whay sooey-ick-a-dal means? Means you wanna kill yourself! Cool, huh?”
I repeated that one to myself for hours before I figured it out. (suicidal)
I have problems seeing negative writing too. My 6th grade teacher brought us all wooden pens from Mexico. I asked if they had been carved in Aztec or something and got really weird looks. 2 years later, I pick up the pen and can read MEXICO plain as day.
I also have always seen the Man in the Moon as a person, not a face.
I don’t know if mine counts as an epiphany, since it happened over time and it had to be explained to me instead of a sudden realization on my part. Still, it’s pretty stupid:
Most of my knowledge of the space program comes from MTV commercials, the opening credits to “I Dream of Jeannie,” and the occasional shuttle launch. I’ve seen the Apollo launches over and over again, with all the footage of them jettisoning booster after booster until there’s just the lander. They get out, hop around a bit, plant a few flags, then a few days later end up in the Pacific Ocean to much fanfare. What I never understood was: how did they get back? Didn’t they lose all their booster rockets on the trip over?
Eventually someone explained to me that the command module stayed behind and continued to orbit the moon, and they travelled back to earth on its power. I still had questions, but already felt too stupid to push the point any further. Finally, just today in fact, the topic came up again and I had to ask. How did the lander get up to the command module and the command module back to Earth, if they had already jettisoned all their rockets? There was a moment of confusion and a brief “is he really serious” silence, and then: “Well you know, [SolGrundy], the moon has less gravity than the Earth.”
I guess there’s a reason why the JPL has been slow in reviewing my job application… I just hope this doesn’t show up on my application to be legally declared a genius.
Don’t feel too bad about that. John Byrne the main artist on Superman in the mid 80s said as a child he always thought the yellow background of the S was the foreground picturing two fish swimming past each other. He said that’s the way he thought as he drew it as well.
My own D’oh moment occured at age 9-10. Growing up, I went to a Presbyterian church. On the corner in front of the church was a bus stop with a small trash recepticle. A sign on it read “For pedestrian traffic only.” I don’t know why, I guess they didn’t want cars stopping. I always read this as “For Presbyterian traffic only” and even at a young age thought it very unfair to discriminate in this way even if it was right outside our church.
I worked at a gas station that also had a carwash. All of the ads boasted of it being a touchless carwash. I’d only been driving several months by that point and I would just wash the car myself rather than go to a carwash. I honestly just thought it meant you didn’t have to touch anything/do anything to get the car washed. I thought it was an odd way of saying it, but then it wasn’t the part of the business I worked with at all so I didn’t ever bother to ask. Well I glanced over one of the business cards once and saw the “Touchless carwash” feature listed and it suddenly hit me. :red error box/smack: 
Not as bad as a cow-worker at that same place that said “That is under the grandfather clocks.”
Don’t feel bad, Fern – that’s the same epiphany I had when I got my first glasses, only I was 7 and they were real trees. That was also the day I discovered that buildings were indeed made of bricks.
I used to think that there was a small town in northeastern Wisconsin called “Business Dist.” Everytime we drove to visit Grandma or somebody, we went through all these little burgs that had signs pointing to other burgs: Brillion, Shawano, Tigerton – and Business Dist. BUt we never did actually get to Business Dist. I think I was in my late teens when the concept of “Business District” finally dawned on me.
…do you know what I think we should do about Euthinasia? I think we should take care of our own kiddies first!!!
(( apologies to Billy T James for using his lame joke-been waiting to use it for years… ))
When I was very young, some older person introduced me to the work of Sylvia Plath, and must have nonchalantly added that she killed herself by sticking her head in the oven.
When I was in high school, I visited a friend’s house overnight and the power went out. “It’s fine,” she said, “We have a gas stove.” It was the first gas stove/oven I had ever encountered.
Overwhelming sense of relief as I finally understood that Ms. Plath had not, in fact, baked herself to death.
It wasn’t until I was shopping around for my first house that I realized that it was not a four stair furnace, but a forced air furnace. I had always imagined a series of stair shaped surfaces where the flame mixed with the passing air…
Try growing up in Jersey, and seeing signs for “Shore Points” on every highway. I mean, I thought I knew all the shore towns, but in all my travels, I never could find that “Shore Points” town. :o
And another.
As a youngster we had (and still have) an amusement park named Lagoon nearby. It was right next to a freeway and the exit signs read:
Next Exit:
Lagoon
Farmington Dr.
I was always in awe of an amusement park fraught with such peril that it warranted a nearby doctor with his own special freeway exit.
:: BB rubs eyes… :: I NEVER SAW THE KIWIS BEFORE…
Like many others posting to this thread, most of my epiphanies have been spelling/pronounciation in nature. My mother taught me to read at a very young age, so I read a lot of words before I ever heard them used in context. Subtle was “sub-tle” for years, and indicted was “in-dick-ted”. For some reason, I thought the words “ep-i-tome” and “a-pit-o-my” were two different words that meant the same thing, instead of it just being epitome being pronounced “a-pit-o-my”, and it was just one word.
My biggest epiphany along those lines was just last year, though. After years of reading newspaper comics, I finally figured something out. Anyone ever read Frank and Earnest? That comic with those two fellas, usually portrayed as hobos, who use puns all the time? Well, it never occured to me that their names, Frank and Earnest, were also puns. It just hit me one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, and I literally rushed to find a friend so I could tell them this stunning revelation. I felt like such a fool!
Are you kidding? I thought I was the only one.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?banal the audio clips give three pronunciations. Way to help out, m-w 
I bought a new(er) car last June, and it’s the first car I’ve owned with a trip-meter. Driving along one day I suddenly realized what definition of “trip” the name refered to: going somewhere. Until that moment I thought trip referred to setting it, as in “tripped a wire.” D’oh!
I was mid-way through high school when it dawned on me thar misled was pronounced “mis-lead” rather than something like missiles; what’s worse, I thought it was a synomym for “mis-lead”!
Even better: I wrote a story last summer and decided a really cutsey name for the place the characters stayed woud be " Winkin, Blinkin and Nodd Inn."
Seemed cutsey enough, but I couldn’t figure out why a couple of my readers thought it was so clever. Until I realized most people, other than me, would read the last two words as “Noddin” not " Nodd-pause-Inn." You’d think knowing what the characters in that poem are would have made me realize this, but no…we won’t talk about how these readers also let me spell a character’s name incorrectly for a year and a half before mention it <grumbles>
One more word epiphany- that I did not figure out on my own. A couple of years ago, I went with my parents to drop of my brother at his new college. While we were driving through Maine, I saw the strangest sign on a small building: Redemption Center. At a total loss as to what the purpose of such a place could be (and not long after learning that The Savation Army is a religion- same trip, I think) I finally decided it must be another church thing and asked my parents if they thought people in Maine were really obsessed with sinners. They laughed, until they realized I was asking a serious question. In my defense, we don’t return cans or bottles for money in NH.
I noticed two great new female rap singers: I kept hearing about “Fiancee” and reading about “Beyounce.” It took me a couple of months to figure out they were the same person.
Both of my parents grew up in Maine. Now, I really haven’t researched this, so I’m uncertain if it’s also true for those who grow up in other New England states, but apparently there is a tendency for people who grow up in Maine while speaking words that have an “l” in the middle to replace it with an “r”.
This has always been especially obvious with my mother. For instance, she prounounces “salve” (as in “Let me put this salve on that burn.”) as “sarv”. I can’t remember when it happened, but when I realized that speaking that word with the “l” is the norm, at least here in California, it was quite a revelation for me!