A common Catholic Prayer is “Hail Mary”. As kids, we weren’t taught to understand it. We were just taught to recite it by rote memorization. Likely because we were too young to read during these early lessons. It took me quite a few years of saying it wrong before I realized that my young mind had mis-under-heard it
What they said:
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
What I heard:
Hell, Mary full of Grapes. The Lord is wifty.
Blessed are the monkey women and blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, play with our scissors, now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
I jacked this prayer up that bad several times a week for about 4 years! Grapes made some sort of sense to me because they also made us sing The Battle Hymn of The Republic where God himself is trampling on the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. To this day, I have no real idea what that means, but as a kid I thought he was stomping grapes like Lucille Ball did in that one episode (why God needed to make his own wine made no sense to me because he had a kid who could magically turn water into wine).
And “Wifty”. My favorite damned part of this is “Wifty”. Why? Because I thought “Wifty” meant you were hanging around heaven floating on a damned cloud. Like you could be standing on a cloud like a surfboard. Folks would say stuff like, “Dude the way you wifty that cloud is gnarly in a tubular sort of way”. Or, you could be laying on a cloud like wiftily laying in a hammock.
I figured the Monkey women were in there as a tribute to Professor Zira. She was that scientist chick/ape played by Kim Hunter in the original Planet of the Apes. I figured God dug that movie as much as I did.
Why Jesus was a wound, I had no damn clue.
And the Scissors thing. We were consistently warned not to run with scissors. So, I thought Mary could run safely with scissors as much as she wanted to. Kinda like it was her super power.