What's the last thing you took literally?

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i do not usually commit to memory the things i take the wrong way.
i usually have no default way of perceiving ambiguous statements, and so i see a number of alternative ways of understanding things i hear that seem ambiguous to me.
after a short time thinking about all the ways it could be perceived, i usually settle on the right way.

some misconceptions i have had that i remember are ones that have caused a stir when i spoke too soon.

like:

a police commander was killed in the line of duty, and i was was with tammy's parents when the story came on the TV. the reporter said " he was an eminent officer admired by both his colleagues and the people he had helped in his years of service"
i remarked that if he had only 2 colleagues, then he must not have been that important. i was reprimanded as incorrect in my comprehension.

another news item (sport related) came on another day when i was waiting for tammy to get dressed and i was sitting with her parents. the reporter said " collingwood is training hard for it's first match against st kilda in 30 years".
i said "if their first match is going to be in 30 years, why are they training now? surely they will be too old to play the game in 30 years". i was angrily corrected.

once,an old person who was a bit drunk was talking to me at the tavern where i was waiting for dinner.
he said his son was killed in the war in iraq. he showed me a picture of his son who was a fighter pilot sitting in his plane. he was sitting in a plane with the windshield open, and the plane was on the ground near a hangar, and he was wearing sunglasses and giving a gesture of "thumbs up".

the old person said to me "he was killed right after this shot was taken". i said "well it is sad that he never even got to take off, and it was a waste of a plane because he should not be ignoring the danger around him by relaxing and posing for cameras and showing off". as it turned out, he meant that his son was killed a few hours after the photo shoot whilst in battle in the air.

yesterday, i saw an ad that was trying to sell some sort of exercise equipment. the ad said "if you are not completely satisfied, you will get a money back guarantee".

even though i am not remotely interested in exercise equipment, i interpreted the ad to mean that all you would get back is a guarantee that you would get your money back and nothing else.

that was also wrong i was told.

every day i hear things that seem ambiguous, and i usually do not bother to analyze what they mean because i do not care. i do not commit all the things that i think to memory, so i do not have a bounty of examples to report.

maybe i will write down all my misconceptions in shorthand for a few days and post then after a week or so.

Ah! I get it now - I think! You mean you could have as many cups of coffee as you wanted? The first image in my mind was coffee all over the place and wondering why anyone would want a cup with no bottom in it. My next thought was that this must be some kinky restaurant thing and the waitress went bottomless as opposed to topless.

If that was the exact wording of the ad then that is what it means.

A bunch of my friends were talking about how they have conversations by moving their eyebrows (eye-versations which is an NT thing because I was sitting there like "What?!??" And one of them said, "How can you have eye-versations without using [moving] your eyebrows?" and I did an impression of someone shaving their eyebrows off. Luckily everyone laughed, but I only realized he meant 'without MOVING your eyebrows' after the fact...

...probably monique's birthday thread.

lol

Yes I too had those similar images (except the waitress bit ) and that's why I could only laugh in response...imagine that! Indeed it appears that a bottomless coffee means you can refill your cup as many times as you wish.

i think there was also a mention of 100% as in "if you are not completely satisfied, you will get a 100% money back guarantee".
that was the wording. i was told that it means you will get 100% of your money back.
the ad was worded wrong therefore. i was told that most people would see it as they will get 100% of their money back if they are not satisfied.

it is like infomercials on the tv (that i can not be bothered to change the channel from while i am programming) that say "remember... if you call within the next 30 minutes you will receive a 30% discount".
then, 25 minutes later in the same infomercial, they say "remember..... if you call within the next 30 minutes you will receive a 30% discount". well they should have said at the beginning that you had 55 minutes rather than 30 minutes. the recorded message is the same all throughout the infomercial, and so is not correct.

when an ad says "save 20% "off" all our stock", it is the opposite of saying "save 20% "on" all our stock"
so it means that if i do not buy their stock, i will save 20% "on" whoever else is selling the same stock?.

"off" means away from, and "on" means with.

i just heard on the TV news right now as i am writing this, a person saying "nothing can surpass the bravery of those boys" (about soldiers).
well if "nothing" can surpass it, than their bravery is less than nothing.
what an insult. i know what it means a few seconds after i heard it, but for 1 second i wondered whether he was a protester until i saw his medals, and then i immediately realized the context. nevertheless, i have to defer to "artistic license" in order to ignore the literal meaning of what the words portray.

Today I read someone's post on their cat which likes beer but isn't given it too often because "cat's liver is much more delicate than a human's one" which made me wonder what it had to do with the issue of giving beer to a cat or not because my very first association was about the culinary art - I thought it's like that a cat's liver tastes better than the one of a human.

There was a recent topic someone made about having a "green" ride. They meant it was environmentally friendly, but I interpreted it to mean it was literally colored green.

Yesterday my dad asked me to pick up some poop bags (which is what my family calls the bags they use to pick up my dog's poop) from our beach house, and I asked him why there were bags filled with poop in our house.

And then there was the time when my dentist was accidentally spraying me with water from the slurpy thing they use in your mouth, and he asked me if it was raining. Even though we were right in front of a window with clear blue skies, I thought he was seriously asking me if it was raining outside so I said no. Turns out he was just making a joke about spraying my face with water. Heh...

My roommate asked if I attended tap classes. I thought he meant tap dancing classes. But then I remembered that TAP was short for Transition Assistance Program. (It's a military thing. He's active duty & I'm a veteran).