I remember first remembering phone numbers by the way the sounds of the numerals felt together. I'd subvocalize them as iambs to memorize, with exaggerated stress. I think that was part of the fun of numbers with sevens and zeroes.

Telugu number sequences required a completely different prosody that I never devised, sadly, because I never needed to memorize them. (Much much later, hearing someone say their phone number in Italian reminded me of what this internal prosody could have been.)

I remember I had to relearn our car's license plate number shortly after I learned it, when the state prefix changed from CA to KA and all the plate numbers were reassigned. I could read enough by then to know that the state's name started with a K, and it was logical, but the change was still mildly disconcerting. And then a few years later, I'd look back at the CA license plate days as a time from a different era, as so many other things changed at the same time in my life and outside.

(And now I see the switch was in 1990, and so it was.)

[Paul Lakin remembers:]

I remember my first grade teacher saying "actions speak louder than words" to scold us for being too loud, with the idea that if we wanted to speak *really* loudly we'd do something other than yelling. She also said it to scold us for hitting, with, I guess now, the idea that hitting was speaking too loudly.

These two opposite, wrong uses of the proverb were confusing as fuck, and probably would be to any six year old who will from time to time very much want both to hit and to speak loudly. They also delayed several years my understanding what it really does mean.