It's all relative.

How do we learn the meaning of words? Sure there was all those years in school, but I suspect a lot of words we learn from conversations. How simple it is to misunderstand the meaning of a word that we hear.

I recently received a message on a social networking site asking me if I believed in incest. The sender hoped I wouldn't think him weird. He was in his twenties. My assumption is, somewhere along the line he has heard the word incest, the story must have involved a significant age difference. That is what he has now defined in his brain as incest. He must have missed the entire concept of the familial relationship between the two people.

It now makes me wonder how many words I have wrong in my head. It's not like I've looked up every word I've ever heard.