I never took advanced sciences in school — no physics or chemistry for people who just wanted to be teachers, advised the mis-advised advisers of Larkin High circa 1973.

Therefore I don’t know the name of the principle that makes sound leaving the source change into something it wasn’t meant to be as it reaches its destination.

For instance: I say to my daughter: “Did you sign up for [insert activity here]?”

What reaches her ears, however is something more along the lines of: “Why don’t you ever follow through with anything?”

Or I ask her a few questions about the colleges she’s applying to while I help stick stamps on the application envelopes and she hears criticism.

I know this must be a true law of nature — akin to gravity and that one about objects in motion going through the windshield if you step on the break really really fast — because it was around when I was a teenager. My mom would say, after I lost my retainer for the fourth time, “Did you look everywhere for it?”

I would hear something completely different, like “Why can’t you be like your brother who doesn’t lose anything and is cute besides?”

If anyone has an idea of what this law of phyics physics [gah! typos] is, please let me know, otherwise I’m going to think it’s psychological. Or that my brother was actually cuter than me.