I’m always very interested in the observations of parents regarding the literal nature of their autistic children’s thinking. I’ve read many tales of children who take idiomatic expressions literally, with some very humorous outcomes.
Consider, for example, the experience of Fiona, who blogs at Wonderfully Wired and writes this post about her children’s literal interpretations. In one scenario, she talks about her daughter Ella:
“I asked her to help me clear the breakfast bowls off the table and because the dishwasher still needed unpacking from the night before, I asked her to just “toss” the dirty bowls in the sink and I would deal with them later.
So she did.
From almost a metre away.
And they ALL broke.
She couldn’t understand what the problem was, I had said to toss them!”
(google image)
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that the whole scene is incredibly cute and completely hilarious. (Of course, I didn’t have to clean up the broken dishes…)
The thing is, though, that I don’t remember ever taking idioms literally as a child. I had other forms of literal thinking. For instance, I tended to take people at their word. When people spoke, I’d see the word pictures in my mind, and the words became living, breathing entities. It took me a while to figure out that I had to wait for follow-through, and that people might not always mean exactly what they say.
I also remember an occasion in which I broke down in tears of disappointment after my father used a word in a different way than he’d ever used it before. My parents always used to refer to cupcakes and other baked goods as “goodies.” Then, one day, when I was about five years old, my father brought a box home and said, “Look at all the goodies I brought for you!”
I had images in my mind of chocolate cupcakes with multicolored sprinkles on top. My mouth was watering.
Imagine my surprise to find toys instead! Now, you’d think I’d have been thrilled, but I’m sorry to say that I broke down and cried inconsolably. My parents, who were not the most sensitive people on the planet, just laughed and told me that I was being ridiculous. They didn’t realize, of course, that they had switched the meaning on me, and that the picture in my mind was so vivid — and so scrumptious! — that I felt as though I’d been had.
But even as a child, I loved metaphor and wordplay. They gave me great delight. And I know other autists who do, too. So I began to wonder whether understanding wordplay stands in opposition to literal thinking.
I’ve discovered that, for me, it doesn’t. In my mind, the literal meaning and the figurative meaning work together. In fact, it’s the combination of the two that makes wordplay so much fun.
Take, for example, the expression, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” When I asked my non-autistic husband what he saw in his mind when he heard this expression, he said, “Nothing. I just experience it as a metaphor for heavy rain.”
In contrast, when I hear the expression “It’s raining cats and dogs,” I literally see the word “cats” and the word “dogs” falling down like rain. I also see the literal rain — in fact, the words are falling with the rain and splashing into puddles — but I don’t see visual images of cats and dogs.
The fact that I think in text may account for why I understand the wordplay. Words are symbols, so I’ve already made a partial translation toward the metaphor before I’ve begun. The words falling like rain are what make the wordplay so enjoyable, because my mind is literally playing with the words. I’ve been seeing words in this way for as long as I can remember.
However, despite my understanding of metaphor, I sometimes find myself becoming impatient when people are speaking and using sarcasm, irony, and any humor that involves a meaning the opposite of what is being said. It’s not that I miss the double meaning. I know it’s there. The problem is that I have to work so hard just to keep up with the literal meanings of the words that I sometimes don’t have the energy to switch cognitive circuits and address the figurative meanings. And because I see word pictures in my mind when people speak, and I have to read them in my mind and then respond, my processing is delayed. I therefore find it difficult to switch circuits into the figurative meaning and keep up with the rest of the conversation, too.
It’s as though I’m always working on two levels. The nature of my auditory processing means that I have to work very hard at simply parsing the literal meaning of speech, and that I’m working overtime just to keep up. And my love of wordplay means that I intuitively understand when the literal meaning is not what is meant.
So, when my husband lovingly teases me at dinner by saying something the opposite of what he really means, it can feel very tiring. I understand that he’s being loving. I really do. It’s just that I have to listen so intently that I’d prefer he just come out and tell me what he means.
But if he writes things with irony, with sarcasm, with teasing, with double meanings?
I love it. I thrive on it. It’s like eating chocolate cupcakes with multicolored sprinkles.
So, I wonder how much of the literal thinking of autistic people comes from difficulties with auditory processing, rather than a failure to understand metaphor. For people who think in visual pictures (seeing actual cats and dogs falling, for example), is the problem that they don’t understand the metaphor? Or is the problem that they have to work so hard to keep up with speech that it’s difficult to switch between the literal words, the pictures they call up, and the intended meaning?
I’d love to hear what you think.
© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
I’ve noticed a similar pattern in myself about written vs. spoken sarcasm, and I’ve chalked it up to a different yet related cause.
In written text, sarcasm has to be made apparent purely by the content of the text for it to work. In speech, however, it’s not uncommon for someone to say something that is completely believable, only indicating that it’s sarcastic purely by tone of voice. I don’t know how many times I’ve been bit by that latter case, where I didn’t know that someone was being sarcastic because the actual content of their speech was perfectly reasonable.
Though I’m pretty sure the auditory processing also contributes to it. I have to make more effort to decipher the speech in the first place; I have less memory for the surrounding context, which also often helps to make something obviously sarcastic…et cetera.
Be glad you don’t know my husband. He is king of the deadpan–I usually know when he’s being sarcastic, but that’s because I know him so well that I know he wouldn’t be making that statement seriously. And there’s still times I don’t know what he means. (There’s also the time he ran with a joke so long I started believing him. He still bugs me about that one…).
I do have an issue with spoken speech in that sometimes I can’t tell how a person means a phrase (this isn’t specific to sarcasm, dammit), plus homonyms can cause me issues. In written conversations, I tend to play the pedant a little too much. Partly this is because I have great spelling and grammar sense, so in an otherwise well-written conversation these things stick out like a small thumb, even though I can usually tell what the person means anyways.
That’s really interesting about missing tone of voice — or having the tone of voice be so deadpan that you can’t glean much from it in the first place. Sometimes, I miss my husband’s sarcasm because he speaks in a very gentle voice; my sarcasm is much more obvious, because I tend to change my vocal tone quite a lot.
In general, the way I know that sarcasm/teasing is coming is that my husband pauses and kind of draws himself up, as though he’s trying to come up with just the right rejoinder. The pause allows me to ready myself to catch the meaning. If the pause isn’t there, I’ll sometimes miss the sarcasm.
I understand metaphors, no problem. But at the same time, I also see the literal meaning and tend to be amused by it. My boss said someone “should not overboard” about some project, and I kept imagining them falling out of a life boat into the ocean (with a smile on my face). “Raining cats and dogs”? Of course, I see lots of dogs and cats falling from the sky with alarmed cartoon-like looks on their faces.
At one job years ago, I drew cartoons about the terminology used. The officer who took care of “special categories” of clients (e.g. ex-prisoners or the disabled) was called the “special cats officer”, so I drew a picture of an office-worker with unusual cats crawling over his shoulders. And another expression, when deciding to classify someone as “disabled”, was: “I think I’ll make this person disabled” … so I drew a picture of a staff worker at the counter reaching behind for a big mallet with which to disable the client.
So I process metaphors both ways – figuratively and literally. And I smile in staff meetings when no one else does, because some figurative expression has tickled my sense of humour. (Dx’d with AS last year – in my mid-50s)
“I understand metaphors, no problem. But at the same time, I also see the literal meaning and tend to be amused by it. My boss said someone “should not overboard” about some project, and I kept imagining them falling out of a life boat into the ocean (with a smile on my face). “Raining cats and dogs”? Of course, I see lots of dogs and cats falling from the sky with alarmed cartoon-like looks on their faces.”
Yes! This is me as well… and it can sometimes causes me to laugh a bit more than is necessarily appropriate for the actual context of the situation, but most people I know are aware of my unusual sense of humor, so I can usually get the other people to start laughing too.
Brenda, I can relate to your laughing about the images in your mind in way that seems inappropriate to the context. I can sometimes feel amused by the sounds of words, or by how they look in my head, and if I mention it, I appear to be going on a tangent that no one else seems interested in following — except, of course, other word geeks.
Ian, I love that you can draw cartoons and play with the literal meanings. That’s very cool.
I don’t draw them very often, but I see them in my head. Like you, I love words and I love the absurdity of many metaphorical expressions when taken literally.
Whoops – “should not GO overboard” …
During class a boy asked if I would toss him his backpack, which was at least 10 or 15 pounds, so I tossed it to him. He couldn’t believe that I’d done that because apparently he didn’t actually want his heavy bag tossed at him. I love using idioms and metaphors, but when other people use them I usually don’t understand what they mean. I just can’t see what they’re saying in a way that makes sense.
Now, when someone tells me to toss them something unbreakable, I usually do toss it — although I’m not sure I’d toss something very heavy. It’s probably just my age, and the fact that I’m naturally cautious.
This is interesting Rachel – when i was a kid, if anyone said ‘raining cats and dogs’, in my mind’s eye, i would literally see cats and dogs falling out of the sky! When someone said it, i would look outside, and not seeing any cats or dogs, i worked out what they meant thru logic. So i certainly understood the metaphor, at a fairly young age.
In fact with just about all these sorts of sayings, i would see them literally, as a picture in my mind first, before working out the metaphor. Eg if i heard someone was ‘shown the door’ as a euphemism for being tossed out or fired, i would literally see them taken to a door, shown it, and told to put themselves on the other side of it. This is the way i understood things. (I would also think of people being ‘fired’ as being shot out of a cannon, like in the circus!) This meant a lot of often very funny images in my literal little brain, and in fact even as an adult i can still be amused to the point of laughter by these sayings. (My family look at me, and ask “what’s with you?” “What’s so funny?” And even when i explain, they roll their eyes and go “whatever…”)
I wasn’t often distressed by these sayings, as i got so much amusement out of them, but then language has always been a deep and abiding ‘special interest’ of mine (i dislike the word ‘obsession’), so perhaps any confusion (and there was some) was outweighed by my fascination.
I too have difficulties with auditory processing, and combined with my visual thinking, it can mean i’m slow to answer, to some people’s frustration and annoyance. Either that, or they think i’m a bit dim, which is annoying!! I also do still have to ‘translate’ my visual images into words, even at this ‘advanced’ age!
I just love the path you took to understanding metaphor. That’s really amazing.
I’m a 22 year old high-functioning autistic boy. I’d have to say I’m similar to Kiwipen. Whenever someone tells me it’s raining cats and dogs I literally see cats and dogs falling out of the sky. Then a mere second later imagine the total mass of all the cats and dogs be converted into water and I see that it must be raining pretty heavily! Another interesting thing is that when I was very young and just heard the expression, I thought it meant it was raining on cats and dogs who were outside before realising the actual relations between the words.
I think I would have to agree with you, Rachel. With reading phrases you can take as much time as you need to get both understandings of it. However, I don’t have a problem with communicating double-meaning phrases if I know that it will have a double-meaning ahead of time. For example, if I’m sharing jokes with someone, I expect more than a few phrases with double-meanings, which makes it easier for me.
I agree, JC: Context goes a long way. If I’m joking around with people, my brain gets into gear, and I love it. It doesn’t tire me at all to be working on literal and figurative tracks. It’s the switching back and forth in the course of an otherwise straightforward conversation that gets me tired.
We have a common reaction to spoken sarcasm.
Again, it’s not that I don’t get the double meaning, or maybe that there is a double meaning there, somewhere, it can occasionally feel like the speaker is throwing obstacles in my way, when really, he or she wants to be clever (a motivation you would THINK I’d be more understanding of…)
A bit of this might relate to not wanting to feel stupid, and I often feel that way when trying to parse what somebody is trying to tell me. Cue my impatience.
Yes, I think the feeling of being a bit slow on the processing end is part of what bothers me. It takes a while to really get that it’s just a processing issue and not an intelligence issue. My mind is actually working very quickly and very intently, on two different levels (literal and figurative), and that’s why it takes more time to process things.
I have a similar reaction as other people have described to the “raining cats and dogs” phrase. I literally see cats and dogs (the animals) falling from the sky along with raindrops. I still ultimately understand that it means very heavy rain, even though that’s not exactly what I see in my mind’s eye.
However, when I was a child, perhaps the first time I head the phrase, I felt very sorry for the poor cats and dogs. I mean, it would hurt to fall from the sky like rain and hit the ground! I would hear the cats and dogs mewling or barking in distress, inside my head. Until someone actually explained what they meant by the phrase, I found it very upsetting because I thought animals were getting hurt. (I’ve heard other people have similar reactions to the phrase “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”)
I don’t especialy feel like I have trouble picking up on spoken or written sarcasm (or irony, or other such things), but I do sometimes find them bothersome. It often troubles me that people can’t just say what they mean in a straightforward way. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a philosophical objection, or whether it’s merely an expression of my subconscious mind’s having to work overtime to understand.
Wow, you didn’t just see the cats and dogs, but you could actually hear them!
And I hate the expression “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” For some reason, I get a fairly intense visual on that one, even though I’m aware of what it actually means. I also dislike, “Killing two birds with one stone.” That’s a bad visual for me, too.
I guess some things I do see in pictures. Perhaps it’s the violent imagery in the idiom that awakens the images in my head.
When I was younger, idioms and metaphors needed to be explained to me the first time I heard them, but I don’t know if that’s unique to being autistic. (Does any child instinctively understand what “raining cats and dogs” means?) I also found many of them unnecessary – why even mention cats and dogs when you could just say it’s raining really hard?
As I got older, it became easier to decipher the meaning of idioms and metaphors. I could start to extract meaning from the surrounding context and consciously attach it to a new phrase. Like Kiwipen wrote, there was logic involved. But again I have to wonder if the way I did it is so different than how a non-autistic person adds idioms and metaphors to their knowledge base. Nobody is born with the knowledge, so we all have to figure out the meaning somehow.
However, I can also relate to Kiwipen’s explanation of seeing the literal interpretation of a part of speech in one’s mind, and it does often put a smile on my face.
Jokes and sarcasm do need to be pretty explicit for me to “get” them, and by jokes I don’t mean someone “telling a joke,” but someone saying something that is not true just to be funny. For example, someone I knew once called another person “Stacks.” I asked why he called him that and he said “because he likes pancakes.” That was a perfectly acceptable answer to me, and I only found out about a year later that he had only been joking. I repeated the pancake explanation to someone else and the person who originally told me started laughing. I’m still not sure why he called the other guy Stacks, but I have since heard a song where it seemed like “stacks” meant money, so perhaps the other guy had a lot of money? Or perhaps I’ll never know
I wonder about how non-autistic people learn the meanings of idioms as well. When my daughter was young, learning idioms was actually part of a curriculum I came across for homeschooling, and we bought a couple of kids’ books containing common ones. I think she already understood most of them, though, which leads me to wonder whether those books are meant to introduce idioms to kids who might not hear them a lot but need to become familiar with them.
Calling the guy “Stacks” was an example of a particular kind of joke in which the speaker attempts to sum up a person’s entire existence into a single-word nickname. Usually these nicknames are more and more absurd the less the joke teller knows the individual they are nicknaming. In this case, even non-literal thinkers may have been confused by the name “Stacks” because people normally don’t choose such arbitrary characteristics to sum a person up by.
It would have been more on par with that type of humor if “Stacks” had eaten nothing but stacks of pancakes for the past week, or had just won a pancake eating contest. But simply “liking pancakes” seems like a bit of a stretch for that type of humor. I would not have seen the humor in that.
This type of humor is generally avoided, though, because it is dangerously close to becoming offensive.
Another example of this type of humor might be to call a very tall person “Legs” (because they physically have more length of leg than the average person).
It’s much like how a caricature artist sums up their client’s most pronounced features into a funny drawing.
I told my son to “shake a leg” when we were running late and in my angst I couldn’t figure out why he was taking even longer. Turns out, he stopped getting ready and was shaking his leg. He told me later he was confused as he didn’t know which leg to shake. He understood things after I explained it to him but didn’t quite understand why I didn’t just ask him to hurry up in the first place.
We also had a time when I said to “stop pushing my buttons” and he looked at me and said, “but Mom you aren’t wearing any buttons and I’m not pushing them.” I had to explain that one too.
LOL!
I seem to remember being really confused by “shake a leg” the first time my father said it to me. It made no sense as an idiom whatsoever. I mean, wouldn’t it just slow you down to shake a leg?
I’ll have to look that one up to see where it comes from. Then I might feel more accepting of it.
Strangely, I don’t get tripped up by metaphors or by trite phrases like “raining cats and dogs” (if I’ve heard them before and had them explained).
I’m scientific and rational. I know that there’s little chance of a downpour containing any form of small mammals (though fish and birds are possible). Since it doesn’t make sense, my mind rejects it and retains only the sensible part of the sentence. (ie: “it’s raining ….”).
Of course, when things actually are possible, that’s when I get confused.
So, that means that “in a pickle” wouldn’t have confused you, but “break a leg” might have?
I always had a hard time with “break a leg.” I knew it meant to wish someone luck, but every time I used it, I felt as though I were wishing the person harm. I decided not to use it much.
[...] On Literal Thinking appears here by permission. [...]
You mean people don’t really want it tossed when they ask me to “toss” something?
I’m always very literal, but I do understand idioms. I usually see them visually in my mind (e.g. animals literally falling from the sky), and I do find them funny (I lol’ed reading the examples in the other comments).
When I was a kid, and my parents asked me to do something like taking out the trash etc. using the polite Norwegian sentence “Kan du ta ut søpla” (lit. “Can you take out the trash”), I often just responded yes (as in “Yes I’m capable to do that”) and do nothing.
I’m a programmer, and I guess literal thinking is a very good thing when programming (the computer doesn’t “assume” anything, you have to be explicit) and when I’m programming I’m even more literal than usual. Once my colleague shouted from across the room to me “Are you using the test server for anything?”; I paused for several seconds, mentally making a list of everything it was used for (webserver, git repository, etc….) and before I could respond he said “That was a little too unspecific, was it?”. If I weren’t “in the zone”, I would of course understood that he meand “use it for anything *right now*” because he was going to reboot it.
BTW: I’m diagnosed with ADD (ADHD without the “H”), but I’m pretty sure I’m also an Aspie.
You mean people don’t really want it tossed when they ask me to “toss” something?
Or so I’ve heard. Who knew?
Once my colleague shouted from across the room to me “Are you using the test server for anything?”; I paused for several seconds, mentally making a list of everything it was used for (webserver, git repository, etc….) and before I could respond he said “That was a little too unspecific, was it?”
LOL!
It’s great that you have coworkers who understand. When I hear a question like that, my mind goes toward the literal, mainly because I’m always concerned with answering accurately (which made me a very good tech writer, but can be annoying when people just want a yes or no answer). I generally skip over the literal part fairly quickly, though, because I realize that most people use language as a shorthand.
Rachel, that’s an interesting point about ‘break a leg’. I feel the same way about the slang “sick” or “dope” to indicate something positive, because I simply can’t separate myself from the negative emotional feeling I have related to those words, even if it’s not necessarily a specific picture in my mind.
And also the term “groovy”. It’s not a bad term, even though I really don’t like the way it sounds either out loud or in my head, but I also have such a strong emotional sense of it associated with the worst stereotypes of drugged-out hippies of the 60’s, that I cringe inside whenever someone uses it (and I am exceedingly grateful that I don’t hear people use it much anymore at all!).
So word usage, and how I respond to it, is kind of a combination of the imagery it provokes, and also the emotional feelings I have inherently associated with certain words or phrases, even if I absolutely know the actual meaning is not the way I’m feeling it. So if someone says something is ‘sick’ and I make a face, they’ll sometimes mistake my wrinkled nose for not understanding. Then I have to say, that no, I understand perfectly well what they meant, but that I just don’t believe that word means what they think it means. I tend to have a lot of these word-associated idiosyncrasies, and I guess I could see how that could make someone think I don’t understand, instead of just not liking it, especially when I don’t explain my reaction.
I do, however, love the word ‘cool’ as slang for anything even remotely positive, because ‘cool’ is a wonderful word!
Brenda, I am the same way about certain words. I physically recoil because of the associations I have with them. However, I have only good associations with the word “groovy” because I grew up in the 60s and very much identified with hippies — not around the drugs, which didn’t interest me, but around the peace, love, and anti-Vietnam-war activism.
However, the word “groovy” is now so outdated that when people use it, it always feels to me as though I’m listening to a foreigner incorrectly using a word in my native language.
Yes, definitely. Unfortunately I was born a little too late to have been able to experience much of the positive aspects, but early enough to see a lot of the negative at a young, impressionable age. Words are funny though, they all seem to have a flavor all their own depending on your perspective.
[...] Literal Thinking through this other post: “On Literal thinking“ [...]
Asking someone to “toss” something to them must be a Northern thing. They never say that down South where I live. Someone might ask to give them a “hand”, though.
I used to have the same problem with taking people at their word. Interestingly, I found that the people who were least likely to stick to their word were the ones you’d expect to find keeping their word most important…like church pastors and my parents.
Interesting… I always thought that asking someone to “toss” something was a universal English idiom. So interesting to find it isn’t!
And when people would say “Would you give me a hand?” I always thought of “Thing,” the disembodied hand on the old Addams Family show.
It’s really tough as a parent teaching a child with pre-verbal skills and ASD language. I have to be really careful. For example when Cade learned the meaning of go, he learned it as an action word. One bedtime he was overly tired, grumpy and restless, after a long while of getting him settled, finally he lay quietly in my arms. I stroked his hair, and soothingly said, “there you go.” He took it as a command to move, and ran screaming from the bedroom.
Now that we are teaching some manners, tough with any kid, he is confused by thank you. My fault in hindsight, I had always used “No, thank you” as a way to stop unwanted behavior, now he needs to say thank you when he gets something he wants! It’s rough, especially as he has auditory issues like you.
It really is a challenge to talk with a person who takes things so literally. My father (an undiagnosed Aspie) was much the same way. He was forever mistaking my meaning. Because of that, I learned to be very, very careful with language, and to speak as accurately and as clearly as possible.
It’s had a profound impact on my writing. I’m forever thinking about all the implications of my words.
When I was a child, I went hysterical when I overheard that a friend of my mother’s got fired. I thought she was literally set on fire. As I got older, I took the stock social question: “How are you?” literally and would chew strangers’ ears off (metaphorically, of course) telling them in detail how I really felt at the time. Life experience and studying literature has made me better at not taking things literally.
John, I know what you mean. I used to take the “How are you?” and “What’s going on?” questions very literally. It took me awhile to realize that they’re code for “I recognize your existence and come in peace.”
This reminded me so much of the xkcd comic: Small Talk!
http://xkcd.com/222/
I normally have fun with this type of expression because I see both ways, literal and figurative.
I use a lot of sarcasm, as humour and defense, but if someone does not have the expected intonation when using sarcasm I am lost, some sarcastic jokes and other types insult me because I think it’s the truth when the person is joking.
This post helped me because normally it’s said autistic are all about literal meaning, when I am more like you described.
Sorry for the late reply, but I just had to share this.
I was having the discussion with my father recently about my own autism (Asperger’s, mainly) and the indications of his own. I used being extremely literal-minded as one of the numerous pieces of evidence, the following story illustrating:
I think I was about three or four years old, it was the late ’70s. My father was in the Navy and home for a few weeks before months back at sea. We were all, of course, delighted that he was there, and I got a little amped up. I was dancing around the living room, my parents periodically fussed at me to stop (though they did nothing to enforce this since they were deeply engrossed in conversation with their friends), and during one of my many pirouettes near the back of a side table, my foot caught on the cord of the lamp which fell to the floor and broke.
I was a little stunned by the lamp breaking, but I was really shocked by a hand smacking the back of my leg (the main means of “getting my attention”) and my father yelling at me for breaking the lamp.
“But I didn’t break the lamp!” I replied, now very upset and angry at being accused of such a thing.
“Of course you did! Look right there!” he said, pointing to the broken lamp on the ground.
“But I didn’t break it!”
“YES! YOU DID!”
I was more and more upset, my father was more and more furious, and my mother was utterly confused because she had just been saying how honest and truthful I was, even when I did something wrong. She couldn’t figure out how I would lie about something like this, especially knowing that everyone saw it.
My father went to spank me again, and she stopped him and pulled him off to the side to have words. Then she came back and said, “Dawn, the lamp is broken, we were all watching you. What do you think happened?”
Through tears and much indignation, I informed her that I hadn’t broken the lamp (something which in my mind implied a very specific action of touching the lamp and maliciously throwing it to the ground) but I had been a “little naughty” when I didn’t stop dancing and I tripped on the cord (which wasn’t a “sin”).
There was only a purely physical cause-effect connection in my head between “tripping on the cord” and “breaking the lamp”, but to be accused of a malicious action for the latter when I obviously only committed the former was very wrong to me.
I also got very upset when I overheard from my father that “the car had died on him”, and I had an image of my head of a car splayed out belly-down on the street with my dad caught underneath. I burst into tears and ran up to him and hugged him and told him I was glad he was okay, but how did he get out from under an entire car?
I confused “dawdle” and “waddle”, so when I was accused of “dawdling” on my way to bus stop, I was very clear that I had *not* been dawdling (in my mind, waddling like a duck) but just walking very slow because I was sleepy and didn’t feel good.
After a few hours of such examples, my dad relented and accepted that “maybe there was something to this”.
Just as a weeny amusing aside, we Kiwis have a lot of expressions that confuse newcomers and visitors to our country. I remember reading years ago, for instance, about an American woman who, shortly after moving here, was invited to a social gathering and asked to ‘bring a plate’. Confused (were they short of plates, she wondered?), she brought along an empty plate. Only then was she told that ‘bring a plate’ meant ‘bring some food’ to the gathering! So it’s not just aspies who can be confused by idioms they don’t know, and take them literally!
LOL! I love that.