We had after-school programs in French and Spanish in my elementary school, starting in the third grade. I’m not sure where my third-grade teacher picked up her pronunciation, but she told us that we should ask our parents for permission to learn ‘farn’ language after school. What I head was ‘farm’ language. I figured my Kansas cousins must already know that language, and I’d be able to speak it with them if I signed up for it.
Had a similar thing with ‘stuck.’ Something was stuck if you couldn’t move it. So one snowy winter day when my mom came in and said the car was stuck at the bottom of the hill, then went back out into the snow, I pulled my boots and coat and mittens on, and went to help her get it unstuck.
By the time I got to where I could see her, she was backing the car up along the road at the bottom of the hill. The car was moving smoothly, clearly ‘unstuck.’ Problem solved, at least in my understanding, so I went back up the hill to the house. She was pissed at me when she got back, because the car was still at the bottom of the hill, and she couldn’t get it up the hill, still ‘stuck’ in the way she of course meant it, and I hadn’t helped her with it.
And I thought people were paid once a year. A job that paid $12,000 a year was one where on the first (last?) day of the year they would give you a pile of cash.
Every day, when my mom walked into my room, she’d say, “Up and at 'em!”
I heard it as, “Up and Adam!” which my me think it had something to do with either Adam and Eve or the company that made my apple juice juice boxes.
Sorry to double post, but I have a longer, stranger story about a misunderstanding. . .
At school, in first or second grade, I was sitting at a table with a group of friends. Outside, apparently someone walking by the window had pressed their middle finger against the glass, so now everyone was whispering about it. I had no idea what putting one middle finger up meant, so I thought that it was impressive because most people weren’t that flexible. So, wanting to impress them with my skills, I stuck the middle finger up with both hands. Of course, everyone freaked out, but then the smallest girl at the table (who was blonde and wore pink puffy clothing everyday) said in this low, serious voice: “The details of this must never leave this table . . .” and we all nodded.
Anyway, back at home I spent a considerable time wondering why they’d all known what flipping the bird meant and I hadn’t. In the end, what I came up with was that they all went to Church, and I didn’t. So, for a few years of my life, my mental image of Church consisted of an old priest standing on a stage, sticking both middle fingers up while explaining what it meant. :smack:
Again, when I was five! I extended my middle finger around dinner time. I I was asking what it. My mother was shocked, and asked me where I’d learned to do that. I told her that the teenaged guy across the street showed me. I didn’t find out what it meant, but I was told it was a gesture I was not to use.
When I was a kid, I thought the phrase was “first one out of the shoe” instead of “chute.” But the precedent was set, and to this day, I say “first one out of the shoe.” Yeah, that doesn’t really make any sense, but such is the life of an idiom.
I’m beginning to think I was weird when I was five. We visited my maternal grandmother for a weekend, and I went into the kitchen and came back with a table knife. Everyone asked what I was doing with it. I said, ‘I thought we were going to spin the knife!’
When I was little, I had a bit of a speech impediment. I thought the toll way was the “toe way”, which sort of made sense because we’d take the toe way to visit grandma, and grandma had frightening toenails.
I also thought a certain fish was a “loud mouth bath” (large mouth bass).
When my son was 3, he pointed to his leg and said, “look, Mama. I have a brew!” I said, “Don’t you mean you have a bruise?” He said, “no, I only have one”.
He’s 20, and we still call a single bruise a brew.
My mom really liked the phrase “worthless as tits on a boar.” Still does, actually. But I always thought she was saying “…on a board” and would imagine a pair of breasts on a seesaw.
I have a 52 year old coworker who came down with pneumonia earlier this winter - when he came back to work he was telling everybody how terrible it was to get ammonia. I tried to correct him but it just went right over his head. So he had, um, ammonia.
In the neighborhood where I lived as a kid we had an empty lot at one corner (for a while). My parents called it, of course, a “vacant lot,” but I didn’t know the word “vacant”; there was a fire there once and I thought it was a “bakent lot,” as in “bake,” because it had burned.
I was completely clueless about the word “blowout.” I thought it meant the wind blowing your hat off.
I did not understand the function of the “defroster” in a car. I mulled that over for a long time, and had a dream in which I was sitting alone in a car and pushed the defroster button. After a short while I opened the glove compartment–and there was an ice-cream sundae!
