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A few things I firmly believed.
Apr. 27th, 2006 07:25 amAs a child one has all sorts of misconceptions about life. Talking about things that my niece is currently saying, and being baffled by infallible 3 1/2 year old logic, made me think about the seemingly-silly things that I believed as a child.
1. The "soul" was an actual, viable internal organ, and it was roughly liver-like (shaped and textured). Don't ask me how I knew what a liver looked like at 4, but somehow I did. I got the metaphorical connotation of the soul, but there was no reason that it couldn't also be an internal organ. After all, the heart is both a physical and metaphorical organ. I understood that you loved someone with all your heart, but you didn't actually deal with the physical heart when you loved someone.
2. When people said they were "a quarter Irish" I envisioned a person drawn up like a pie chart, with nationalities dispersed in portions throughout the body. That could mean that, like my mom, someone could be half Swedish (and it would show up in their top half of the body).
3. Who is 'they'? I distinctly remember showing my Grandma R. my room one day and I rattled off some cliche that I had heard my parents say at one time, "Well, you know what they say. . . " My Grandma, trying to improve my speech, asked me, "So who is 'they'?" In the confidence of a 4 year old, I replied (apparently with a VERY matter-o-fact look on my face), "The president and his wife." 'They' were the president and his wife. Hmmm...
Anybody have any other little misconceptions that stick out in their mind?
1. The "soul" was an actual, viable internal organ, and it was roughly liver-like (shaped and textured). Don't ask me how I knew what a liver looked like at 4, but somehow I did. I got the metaphorical connotation of the soul, but there was no reason that it couldn't also be an internal organ. After all, the heart is both a physical and metaphorical organ. I understood that you loved someone with all your heart, but you didn't actually deal with the physical heart when you loved someone.
2. When people said they were "a quarter Irish" I envisioned a person drawn up like a pie chart, with nationalities dispersed in portions throughout the body. That could mean that, like my mom, someone could be half Swedish (and it would show up in their top half of the body).
3. Who is 'they'? I distinctly remember showing my Grandma R. my room one day and I rattled off some cliche that I had heard my parents say at one time, "Well, you know what they say. . . " My Grandma, trying to improve my speech, asked me, "So who is 'they'?" In the confidence of a 4 year old, I replied (apparently with a VERY matter-o-fact look on my face), "The president and his wife." 'They' were the president and his wife. Hmmm...
Anybody have any other little misconceptions that stick out in their mind?
