Things you didn't comprehend as a child because of autism?

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i never bothered to watch sport.
i was not even interested in sports people who were skillful.
no human can run as fast as a mediocre horse, and i was not interested in horses racing either.

the best human fighters (in any style) would be ripped to shreds by a polar bear.

the most powerful weightlifter can not lift a fraction of what an elephant can with it's tusks.

the most agile and quick witted basketballer has not nearly the maneuvering capability of a cheetah chasing a fawn.


i was never impressed by the physical feats of humans, as they are weak and slow compared to most of the animal world.




i was talking about my perception of the saying when i was little. i did not see how hay could be "made", because it is dried lucerne that was "grown". i did not think of the fact by "make", they meant "prepared" hay (ie fashioning it into storable bales). that was told to me at a later age.
however, i still had no idea how the saying applied to anyone but farmers.
how does it relate to life in general? i asked again when i was older what it meant, and they said that it means to "do your work while you can because later it may be too late" and they gave an example of "being lazy while you are young, and then getting sick and old and realizing you never made any money and being stuck with it".
(i remember it because i wrote it down).
i still do not know what "hay" has to do with anything.
i never intended to make money from "hay".
the 2 doctor/teachers i had tried many ways of explaining it that afternoon.
i could never make the connection between hay, and life.
i got tired so i joked "the sun always shines.
the sun will shine for another 5 billion years, so i have plenty of time to make hay"



ok. so that is what it means. but what is the significance of uttering that saying to anyone?

it is as significant as me saying "never screw the lightbulbs in before you build the house", or "never turn the hotplate off before you buy the meat ". it seems so obvious, that i can not imagine why anyone would say it.
it is like saying "do not presume all traffic lights will be green as you read your morning paper on the way to work". doyyyyy!

one possibly useful application of the saying maybe to navigators in car rallies. it makes sense to keep track of how many bridges you have crossed, because if you turn left after the 19th bridge, then it is better not to count bridge 18 as bridge 19. ie: have an accurate map and follow the instructions and be carefully observant.


that makes sense to me. thank you for explaining it.



you can not "make" hay either. you just wait for the "grass" to inevitably dehydrate. even if it is not piled up or stored in bales, it is syill "hay".
even if no work is done at all by a human that just watches idly, it will still become hay. so a person does not "make" hay either. he just waits for it to happen, and then he gathers it up and packages it.

but i agree, you can not "grow" hay as it were.
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another adage i thought i understood until only very recently was "a stitch in time saves nine".
i never really questioned people about things i did not understand, so i retained many fallacial beliefs into adulthood because i never checked them.

i always thought that that adage meant that "an astronomically unlikely event may occur to save a crew of people who seem inevitably doomed". in other words, do not give up hope even in the blackest realization of certain disaster, because a "seam" (stitch) in the fabric of time may just "shunt" you off into a parallel universe for a small time and then deposit you back miraculously just after the danger has passed.
i did not know why the number 9 was used, but the adage seemed rather stupid to me so i gave little thought to fitting the "9" into my idea of it.
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"all good things come to those who wait."
why do bad things never come to those who wait?

wait where? how long do i wait? how can ALL good things come?
that would leave the universe empty of good things because they all came to me.

but if someone else waits as well, then they will get "all good things". how is it possible that 2 people get "all good things" when they can only have really half each? what if everyone waited?

no i do not want to scrutinize that one further

i would become super massive black hole if all good things came to me. then i would attract bad things as well and i would not have to wait.

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simple one: "you sow what you reap"

that is the original saying. i understand"you reap what you sow", but that is another version i did not learn to begin with. in scripture class (i was at a religious school for a few months) they read from the

bible "as you sow, so shall you reap"

that to me meant you sow seeds while simultaneously reaping another crop. like "you reap WHILE you sow".

after i was corrected, i still could not understand, because they said angrily that you "sow what you reap" which meant to me (after their correction attempt) that "you immediately sow what you have reaped back into the ground by plowing it in". so you do not get to eat it.
i was incorrect again. they then said it meant that "what happens to you later in life depends on what you do earlier in life".
doyyyy! again. so if i jumped off a cliff early in life, i would not be a doctor later in life.

if i plant sunflower seeds i get sunflowers. i expect sunflowers unless i misread the packet. the adage has no real meaning to me except that it is an obvious statement that needs not be said.
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other than adage confusion, i had (and have still) an incapacity to see normal sentence staging.
i have a great likelyhood of totally misperceiving the meaning of normal sentences because of it.

recently i was slapped hard on the face by a co-worker because she said her boyfriend was very depressed and suicidal because his father died before he was born.
i laughed because i found the thought funny and she hit me.
that is how fast it all happened. i thought she was making a joke because i could not see how her boyfriend's father could die before he was even born, because he could not have grown up and married fathered her boyfriend if he died pre-term.
but i misinterpreted what she was saying because i have limited theory of mind.

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anyway i will end here because it takes about 9 mouse wheel rolls to scroll past my post. when i read posts that are long and i am not interested, i mousewheel down and after the 11th mousewheel roll i get annoyed.
so this is just under 10 mousewheel rolls of garbage.

Also true. And yet we always put ourselves at the pinnacle of evolution!

I used to hear song lyrics wrong and think it was normal for people to sing gibberish.I thought throwing your voice was a trick people could do that made their voice appear to be coming from some where else like they had thrown their voice to a point in space.
The beano showed a cartoon of someone throwing there voice behind someone so that they thought the person was behind them when they where somewhere else.I always wondered if i could learn the trick.
Also i tryed moving things with my mind thinking if they can do it i should be able to as well and i gave myself a hard time for not being able to do it .

I thought everyone had seen Home Alone.

Do you remember in the second movie Kevin telling Cigret not to flash his underwear because there could be girls on the floor. He meant there could be girls staying on the same floor as him, he didn't mean they could be lying on the floor.
About "Good night Kevin," When Kate told her son to say that, she meant "Say 'goodnight' Kevin." She wanted him to say goodnight to everyone. I just heard it wrong and I didn't figure it out till my teens so it made sense now why she was telling him that.

About the cotton candy story, I told about it in this thread earlier. You must not have read all the posts in here.

The only weird thing I thought was that a drum machine was a little drum playing robot (I was 4) then I googled it and saw it was a little box with lights and buttons)

I didn't learn how to tell time until I was around 12 years old. Still seems a strange convention even now but I got used to it.

According to my husband, at least this one is actually a true unit of measure? I use it interchangeably with 'a few' because I had not understood it to be a firm number but apperently that is wrong and it does specifically mean 2.

lol gary, I am still not very good at it. I can do it well enough to get by now, though.
I also am horrific at telling left from right.

I had many problems understanding jokes. I always took sarcasm/playground jokes seriously and often made myself look stupid when everyone else was laughing and I was upset.

Yeah, I now remember mom being annoyed at me for some reason. She said 'a couple' and I took it to mean three. Over what? That I dont remember. She made a big deal of it though.

I only realized recently that when most people say "a couple", they mean "two". I usually take it to mean "three or four".

Difficulties accepting that pain EXSIST'S in this world and men are concidered 'domanete' over Woman. Still kinda feel this way today (though not soo much about the men/woman thing anymore. and no i'm NOT a feminest. plus, feminests tend to HATE cute things, anyways...well not all but i'm still not one).

I also never understood how people would call others 'guys', even when there are girls in there. Or (worse) when it's ONLY girls their saying it to! -_-;; It really upsets me, even today.





...And I never really understood 'cuteness' as a kid, either (though i supposly was found of cute things, from what my mom say's she remember's about my childhood anyways).

There was A LOT of things I didn't really comprehend as a kid....
~cmastler

I didn't know that until I was 15 when my mother told me but I also have learned since then, people can mean more than two when they say it.

I have to say that I am guilty of the "guys" thing. I would LOVE to say gals, but am uncomfortable, as it might sound demeaning or like I am trying to pick them up. If I were female, I would definitely have said gals just yesterday when I addressed two women. You can never tell how women would react. Blacks(colloquial american term used today), for example, ARE negros(accepted name for race classification). Just like Whites are caucasion. But you probably want to stay away from calling blacks negro. Then again, I am not crazy about the term caucasion either.

BTW when I say demeaning, I mean that some women feel that men have NO respect for women. I once met a woman that RAILED against men for such things. Heck, she spoke of how males will insult other males by saying things like "you throw like a girl". Don't females do the same sort of thing? Males LIKE breasts, ON FEMALES! But they don't want to have them, or be accused of having them. So it isn't an insult to females, etc... It is simply that males should want to be like males, just like females should want to be like females.

As for the idea of pain, I WISH there was a good way to encourage people to do things. Our current system STINKS! AND, because the idea of barter can get complicated, most people work for, and accept, currency that creates even MORE problems! Taxes, credit cons/needs, theft, conjobs, etc.... ALL are greatly facilitated by currency. Frankly, a TRUE communist system, with ALL working for the COMMON good, would be best, but it has never succeeded. And does anyone even know if it has ever been attempted? Russia, China, and Cuba are dictatorships and oligarchies, and not really communist.

As for men being dominant over women, any DECENT man would just want to be in his rightful place, and no better or worse. The Bible(old and new testament) often implies that and sometimes states it. Feminists HATE the idea that men should be the protectors and work while the women should be more the caregivers, etc.... Men DO tend to be bigger and stronger.(So better able to protect and do manual labor) Is that to say that either is better overall? NOPE! Society couldn't exist without either sex. Just look at china that is now trying to find OTHER women because they have killed so many female babies. And when women went out to work while the men did, the need for various things went up, and prices went up, so the idea of a nice family with the mother being able to care for the kids is FAR more unlikely. And that means they must hire others to help more often which also reduces the ability to have/find decent people to do so. SURE, single women fared better. MAYBE married women felt more assured, and needed. In the long run though, it was like the average family was making LESS! Do you remember that au pair(Louise Woodward) that actually SHOOK the baby to death!?!?!? MAYBE if SHE was in a better family, she would have been more reasonable. Maybe if Deborah Eappen hadn't considered a job SO important, she would have had less need for an au pair. Maybe if fewer married women worked, there would be better au pairs willing to work for less.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9710/30/au.pair.v ... index.html

Just think! If the married women generally worked for the family, and the men worked for society and protected the family, things would run smooth, and everyone could be happy! You wouldn't need loans, credit, jail, money, etc.... The kids could be cared for and wouldn't have to study propaganda, etc... The only problem is that people would have to be honest and altruistic, and those people are RARE! Some say NON EXISTANT. I USED to be like that though.

BTW I SHOULD say that there was almost always a need for SOME women in the work force. When operators were first used, it was found that men were RUDE, CRUDE, etc.... They switched to women that handled it well. THAT is why it is so popular. Women DO tend to do better with little kids, so a lot of teachers were women. In times of extreme war, like WWII, women filled in the gap that was created by all the men that had to go to war. Male nurses were all but unheard of when I was a kid. Of course, women are generally more comfortable with female doctors. And females would make better au pairs also, and I'm sure most au pairs are.

And if you think I am railing against women too much here, please realize that I am REALLY railing against the degradation of society and the family.

In SOME languages, supposedly the word that seems like pair actually means few. but...

couple=2
few=generally 3, but at LEAST 3
some=more than 1 and probably more than 3
several=more than 2 and probably more than 3

I HATE it when people don't understand couple or few, as they really ARE pretty precise terms.

As for the word soon, it has pretty much lost ALL meaning. so many LIE!

I didn't understand until I was about 5 what "yet" meant. I could se no difference between "It hasn't happened" and "It hasn't happened yet". Actually, I still don't. Either it hasn't happened, or it didn't happen. What purpose does "yet" serve to clarify things?

"Has he done it?"
"Not yet."

Never made much sense. It apparently implies that he will do it, but up until now, hasn't. I think I can use the term correctly now, although it still confounds me.

With plural forms, I as well until I was around 12 thought that "a couple" meant more than one, but not too many - not specifically two. Since "several" sounds so much like "seven", I thought that it meant "approximately seven", and that therefore, "a few" was somewhere between "more than one, but not too many", and "approximately seven". Quite confusing. We have numbers for a reason!

I couldn't make out "some", either. I could understand "eat some cake", but not "get some forks", or the difference between "some cake" and "some cakes". These days, I just use a specific number, and add "approximately", "about", or "ish" to the sentence. It's much easier than the ambiguity introduced by the many plural pronouns and adjectives in the English language, especially when sometimes, "a couple" means more than two. When did that happen?