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TIFU by thinking the phrase was “Lame Ann’s Terms”

When I was a kid, my sister had a raggedy redhead doll she called “Lame Ann” who had a cane. My sister made her talk in a redneck accent and say really stupid things like “I don’t know nothin’ but my own three feet.”

As I grew older, I started to hear the phrase “layman’s terms” thrown around, and I never had heard of a “layman” so I thought they were saying “Lame Ann.” I never questioned this belief and my developing brain made sense of it by figuring that Lame Anne must have been a nationally recognized folklore character like Paul Bunyan or Mister Bean. I thought she was a handicapped strawman that we all knew to not be able to grasp difficult concepts because she was too stupid.

Well, I’m now a college student who still held that belief until this morning. A month ago I was forced by my own procrastination to write a paper in a single night. The topic was about caricatures that perpetuate harmful beliefs about real people. I took 20mg of adderall and pumped out a paper entitled “Putting Bias in Lame Ann’s Terms: The Dangers Assuming Stupidity in Individuals with Disabilities.” Since I wrote all five pages in an hour, I did not fact check a single thing in the essay, which centered mostly on Lame Ann and the ingrained discrimination she represented. I even opened with the anecdote about her saying “I ain’t know nothin’ but my own three feet.”

We got our grades back today, and to my confusion, I had a gotten an Incomplete. My professor left a single comment on the title of the paper asking me to come to her office hours. I showed a friend and asked them what it could mean. They laughed at me and asked me if I were joking, then told me that the phrase was “layman’s terms.” I did not believe them, so I called my sister and she barely even remembered Lame Ann but confirmed that it was her own original character. Still in shock, I googled it and could find no reference online to Lame Ann as I understood her.

I’m extremely embarrassed and terrified of talking to my professor. I just can’t believe it. I feel like im dreaming.

TL;DR thought it was lame Ann’s terms, wrote a paper about it, now have to talk to the prof

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