Take for example the Beach Boys song "Cocomo," which I don't really know how to spell or if it's even the name of the song. But I'm sure you know it, y'know, "Aruba, Jamaica, ooo I wanna take ya . . ." etc, etc, so on and so forth. Well, in the folly of my youth, (namely dance class when I was four or five), I realized that these Beach Boys fellows were brothers, and I thought the line "come on pretty mamma" meant that they were asking their mom to take them to these nice vacation spots. I never really thought about a lady friend. I mean, I was the girl who was so ignorant that she wanted to marry her best (female) friend because then I could live with her. (On a side note, I never could figure out why no one would give me a direct answer of whether I could do that or not.) But yeah, the song takes on a very different tone when you think it's about a bunch of ten-year-olds begging their parents not to take them to the Grand Canyon for yet another family vacation.
Another misinterpretation that always confused was the warning written on side-view mirrors of cars. "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." This one frustrated me for years. Because there was no punctuation, it was in all caps, and there was that big break in the middle of the sentence, I read it as "Objects in mirror are closer. Then they appear" where "closer" meant "the thing that closes" and the word "than" was supposed to be "then." I always hated it when things were misspelled. So it meant that everything you saw in the mirror was actually just this "closer" gadget, but what it closed I couldn't tell you. I don't think it was until I saw Jurassic Park that I caught on to what it really meant.
Wow, I feel like I'm bearing all out here. Most of my memories from youth are things like my sister asking me where oatmeal comes from and all the wise-ass answers I gave her:
Sister (I can't even remember which one): Where does oatmeal come from?
Me: The store.
Sister: But how did it get there?
Me: In a truck.
Sister: But where did the truck get it from?
Me: The factory.
Sister: But what was it before it got to the factory?
Me: Just oats.
I remember this sister getting particularly frustrated with me. Not that I blame her. I think I'd rather have no one to look up to than a wise-ass older sister. But that's just me.
But anyway, back to the matter at hand. Sometimes I still pretend to misinterpret things for fun. For example I'll look at a news headline and try to twist it in my head to mean something else. Like "Kitchen fire leaves Nashua families homeless." This is a pretty weak example, but I could make myself believe that it means "there was a kitchen fire of leaves started by homeless Nashua families." Which is ridiculous I know but sometimes when you're bored you have to do things like this to entertain yourself.
