I had a different interpretation considering that ‘fell’ is a geographic term for a type of field
“John Doe sued!”
To my mind, that means, John Doe, went to court, lost, and now has to pay a bunch of money.
For a long time I thought that “fish taco” was a euphemism.
Me too. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would be tasty.
Uh…
Neither meaning sounds tasty, I should clarify.
When I was little, I thought that “paying taxes” meant paying taxes on your entire net worth, every year. I.e., even if you have zero income for a year, but a savings account with $100,000, the government will raid your savings account.
Moreover, I misunderstood percentages. So I thought that if you were taxed 25% of your personal wealth, that within four years, the government would raid you of everything and leave you destitute, penniless, even if you technically *earned *nothing during those four years. I thought life was a frantic race to earn more wealth than Uncle Sam could plunder you of it.
It is and was done somewhat like that for a time, in other nations especially.
My misinterpretation- I thought “coffee cake” was made with coffee and since I hated coffee during my early years I wouldn’t touch it. In my defense, there* were *some coffee cakes made during that time that did have coffee in them, perhaps i ate some when I was young and so…
Same here.
Here’s another doubly relevant example.
My sister made coffee cake that called for a cup of coffee;
…so she opened the coffee can up, scooped out a cup and added it to her cake. :eek:
Perfectly reasonable conclusion.
Nobody has yet mentioned “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”?
When I was little I thought people lived in televisions and radios and that sex was illegal, so I’m actually kind of impressed by the maturity of your childhood delusions.
We had a similar one in the neighborhood where I grew up: “Slow Deaf Child”. Aww, poor kid.
One of my favorites!
This is similar to Patx2’s misinterpretation.
I heard on the radio that a “man was shot outside of a church”.
I interpreted this as if someone was inside a cannon (like the Zacchini Brothers) and was literally shot outside of a church.
I could not imagine why:
- they put the cannon inside the church
- the guy didn’t break the stained glass windows when he was “shot outside”.
I had a temp job once that involved entering the information from handwritten forms into a database. When I got to a form where the bank’s name was written out as “ASS BANK” I assumed this was an unfortunate acronym but since I had no idea what it stood for I entered it as written. After entering more forms and seeing more bank names, I realized this must have been someone’s abbreviation of *Associated *Bank. Which just goes to show that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and…a Midwestern banking company.
Too late to edit, but I wanted to add that there’s a This American Life episode (293: A Little Bit of Knowledge) with a segment on children’s misunderstandings. It’s Act One of the linked episode, titled “Small Thoughts In Big Brains”.
When I see a sign on a door that says “This door is alarmed” I sometimes think that someone should tell it to calm down.
When a recorded voice in your car says “Your door is ajar” is it saying that your car door is a broad-mouthed cylindrical container made of glass?
When I see a sign that says “For Sale By Owner”, who else could sell it?
When I was in jr high, my sister was in actual high scool, which let out earlier than the jr high. So she was always home when I got home.
ANYway, one day I got home and barely got the door opened and she rushed towards me from the living room (where she was watching mtv) and asked me excitedly “DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘LEGO MY EGGO’ MEANS!?!??!”
After a few moments of thinking I was falling for some horrible joke or prank, I slowly replied “Let go of my Eggo?”
“OHMIGOD YEEEESSSS!!! I just finally got that! I always thought it was just some funny rhyming slogan all this time!!!”