When we were living in Argentina our daughter saw the no parking signs and couldn’t figure out what they meant. In Spanish the phrase is ‘No Estacionarse.’ The no parking sign looks just like ours in English except it has a big E on it instead of a P. She finally determined on her own (and who were we to correct her) that the E with a slash through it meant ‘No Elephants.’ I have no idea how she came up with that, but it did make sense: I never saw an elephant walking around the streets of La Plata. The signs must have been working.
Yesterday we drove through a town with several no parking signs along the side of the street. She read the signs and then she asked me what the word for ‘parking’ was in Spanish. I told her it was ‘estacionarse.’ Then I heard her say to herself, “So the E doesn’t mean ‘No Elephants,’ it means ‘No Parking’ in Spanish.”
I think it was cuter when she thought that all those signs meant ‘No Elephants.’