i used to believe…

So I was thinking earlier today, as I watched a huge old Buick Le Sabre drive by on the street, about how when you’re a little kid there are things that you just assume are true because you simply don’t know otherwise. In fact, there is a great website out there devoted to peoples’ memories of what they used to believe when they were kids.

OK, about the Buick. To this day, in my mind I pronounce it “Lee Sabree.” My dad’s parents used to have one when I was a very little kid, and when riding in their car I would trace with my finger the Le Sabre logo that was on the dashboard, and I thought that it was the weirdest name. I had no idea that it was French (or faux-French, I don’t know for sure). I just figured that it was words that I didn’t yet know how to pronounce or what they meant. And “Lee Sabree” was how I decided I should pronounce it.

Which reminds me, and I haven’t thought of this in years, I had a mystery book when I was a kid called “Abby Is Missing,” about a girl whose boyfriend kidnaps her and ties her up in a cave while they and some other friends are camping in a cabin, and nobody knows that Michael Waverly did it until one girl figures out that her missing hair curlers are a clue that he was the culprit (hair curlers = “wave” = Waverly). Anyway, the description on the back of this book included the word “whodunit” — which, as we all know, is common shorthand for “who done it?” — referring to the search for the perpetrator of the mystery crime in question. Well, I’d never heard that phrase or seen that word before, and I thought that it was probably pronounced as two words “whod unit” — but what the heck a whod was and why a book would be described as a whod unit, I had no idea.

Got anything interesting that you used to believe? E-mail me and I’ll post it!