Misunderstanding of Hat and Cap
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"Is this a cap or a hat?"
In the first grade of junior high school (7th grade) when we started learning English for the first time, we met this sentence. It was to learn "or".
And what we learned then was that a "hat" is with a brim and a "cap" is without a brim. So, if the question was with a picture of a baseball cap, we should answer "it is a cap." If you answered "it is a hat," that was a wrong answer.
But it does not seem to be correct, at least in the U.S.
In a department store, baseball caps are sold as "hats." In a TV show, a kid who was about toleave home went back to his room saying, "I forgot my hat" and came back with his cap.
Actually when I asked my American friends, "Caps are not hats are they?", they looked puzzled.
Caps are a kind of hats.
Who taught me that? I was a pure, innocent and pubescent boy who was scared to meet the first foreign language to learn.
Tim was in Japan teaching English in a junior high school. He said he was asked the same kind of questions about caps and hats so many times that he was embarrassed.
According to him, in the city where he lived 3 years, the English text book used did not have such a question shown in the above.
If you have a Japanese friend, ask him if he believes that caps are not hats. But please don't tease him. He must have been a pure innocent boy, at least then.
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