For reference, the following is the context that I would like to share to excuse myself lol (also to make the whole story less ridiculous).
English is my third language. Also, I didn’t get to touch upon academic English until 3 years ago, and I eventually got to immerse myself into a completely English-speaking environment last year after dealing with visas and other fastidious (tedious as well) tasks. As a result, I still struggle with slangs, idioms and sayings.
I would say I’m somewhat competent at language learning, and I wanted to challenge myself. So I took AP Lang this year. But in the exam, I made a funny and silly mistake:
In my rhetorical analysis essay, I incorporated the term “mermaid’s purse” into my analysis of the author’s view on having reference books which sharpens one’s writing skills. However, the unfortunate thing was that I thought the “mermaid’s purse ” was an actual purse of a mermaid like Ariel from the Little Mermaid movie, so the first thing that came to my mind was Ariel perching on a rock holding a cute little purse while staring at the sunset vanishing into the sea horizon… :(
So I wrote a full paragraph about the literal meaning of this phrase which I’m too sleepy to to recall cuz it’s 3 in the morning rn gotta go to sleep.
The moment I stepped out of the classroom after finishing my exam, I asked chat about it, and that honestly just ruined my day. May 13th was the day on which a naive AP student was given a biology lecture by the artificial intelligence: a mermaid’s purse is an egg of a shark… I’ve never heard of this term before even though it’s just a common name for the shark’s egg.
When it rains it pours. I also got a stomachache that day cuz I drank a huge glass of lemonade before lunch.
Hope this story makes someone laugh cuz I personally find it funny… (my native speaker friends also made fun of me for a few days because of this lol)