I’ve been using various Windows operating systems since version 3.0. But I’ve been using Macs even longer, so to this day, in my interior monologue, I still call the little “windows” shortcut key on the keyboard, the “apple” key, as in “apple-e,”“apple-w,” etc.
I’ve had one pet or another or another continuously for the last 12 years, but I’ve only had kids for 20 months now, so the word “pediatrician” is not in my vocabulary, but the word “vet” is well-established. As a result, I still talk about taking my kids to the vet.
Would anyone else like to share?
For the last 15 years or so, all my cats and dogs have been neutered males. Then, in June, we adopted a spayed female Lhasa Apso dog. Since then, I have had trouble getting the pronoun genders correct for the female dog and the male cat.
When I speak of pears, chances are good that I’ll say “peaches.” I don’t know why.
A good part of my early computer education took place on the Apple II series. Back then, there was an open apple and a closed apple. I drifted away from Apples at the beginning of the Mac era. The labs at my university had mostly Windows machines, and I did most of my real work on Solaris, etc.
With the advent of Unix-based OSX, I Switched Back, if you care to call it that. I discovered that the closed-apple key had been changed into another open-apple key, but they weren’t open-apples, anymore, they were just apples. I still invariably refer to the apple key as the open-apple key in my head, and sometimes do it out loud, which once prompted a friend of mine to point and laugh at me. Literally.
I said, “Hit open-apple-4.”
He paused, and said, “What did you say?”
So I repeated, “I said, hit open-apple-4 . . .” and he pointed at me and laughed.
“Open apple? OPEN apple? Haaaa! What is this, a IIe? Do you know how to use a mouse? Do you have a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, or only a 5 1/4? Open apple?”