26 December 2020

What Word Or Phrase Did You Misunderstand As A Child

Rendezvous.

I knew the word, and what it meant.

What I didn't know for many years was how it was pronounced.

I was reading about the Gemini program and the rendezvous in space.

Being unfamiliar with the word, I looked it up in the dictionary and got the definition.

I was too young to have learned the pronunciation symbols, and asked my mom, "What's this word?"

Being busy with kitchen stuff, she uttered her standard reply of, "sound it out," because I was constantly hitting her with words WAY outside her vocabulary.

So I did.

Renn Dez Voyz is how I said it for a really long time.

It wasn't until I was watching a documentary about the Ronn Day Voo in space...  CLICK.

It's not the first time this happened.

4 comments:

  1. This is apparently a very common thing with children that read way above their "grade level".



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  2. That song that goes... "Wake up and do the Watusi." Seriously, wasn't until, um, I was 35 or so that I found out it was "Wake up, Little Suzie..."

    I have always had problems understanding sung music. It all sounds like foreign music to me... Sigh...

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  3. When I was a kid I was a Cub Scout and I got Boy's Life Magazine. There was a joke and riddle page and one of the riddles was "when is a door not a door? Answer, when it's a jar." I puzzled over that one until I was an adult and encountered the word ajar. It made me wonder what else I might be totally confused about that had a simple explanation if I just had the good sense to ask someone about.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Awry. Knew what it meant from context, but never heard it used outload until my late teens.

    ReplyDelete

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