reading

When I was about 9 or 10 I was very into reading the dictionary - my brother (5 years older) must have thought this was kind of geeky and asked me, very seriously, if I knew that the word 'gullible' wasn't in the dictionary - you can see what's coming next can't you?

t

I used to think that "etc." at the end of a list of items meant electric. I was a very young reader, and since most everything adults did seemed strange, it didn't really occur to me to question such constructions as "dogs, cats, horses, cows, electric"

k

i thought grown ups read in a different language!

Anon

i used to be a bit of a pretensious kid when i was younger, and thought one day that i'd give reading 'don quixote' a go. unsurprisingly i gave up shortly after, but it wasn't until years later that i found out the book wasn't about a bloke called 'don' whose second name was pronounced 'quick-sote'. genius.

anon

I used to believe if you read a book in the dark, you would go blind.

Ellen

When I was about 8 or 9 I loved to read (I still do). My mom said that reading made you smarter so I always had this vision that after each book you read that your brain literally had these little tick marks showing how many books you've read. The more tick marks you have the smarter you are.

Bobbi Jo

i learned to read at a pretty young age, but wasn't great at speed reading when i was little. when we drove past the signs that say "adopt a highway litter control," i always read "adopt a highway little girl," and spent hours wondering where these girls came from and why there were no boys.

it made me happy to see a sponsor on there :)

Anon

I used to believe the letters L, M, N, O were the word elemeno, which was an adjective that described some attribute of the letter P. I always wondered what it meant to be elemeno, and why none of the other letters in the alphabet were elemeno.

Robert

So you know those signs in Steak n Shake that say Takhomasak (it's take home a sack)? My mother told me it was an Native American chief... and I believed her.

Delaney

I used to think (for an embarrassingly long time!)that FAQ meant For Any Questions, because that was what people said they would leave time for at the end of a presentation.

For Any Questions

Before i read the Harry Potter books, i think someone told me Griffindor was a place! I imagened a city, at night.

Also in 1st grade we named our "groups" (groups of desks) once, a group called themselves (Dumbledors" i thiught "why wuld anyone want to be called "double doors"?"

When i read it i found out the truth.

I was silly..

I once was at a friend's house and we were going to go to the grocery store. So we were perusing the ads and reading the big deals on food for the day. It was that day when I first realized that meat was not sold in units known as "libs", as my friend's father calmly explained to me. In fact, "lbs." was short for pounds (and I still don't understand why).

Ann Y.

My mother has told me about a time when I was just starting to figure out that letters made words. She said that one time she saw me pointing to the word on the back of the toliet and I said, "E-L-G-E-R. Potty!" I thought Elger (the name of the toliet manufacturer, spelled potty.

Kristie

When I was little, I really wanted something from a mail-order thing, so I took the form and filled it out... but there was something I didn't know about. On the form, it said "please print".

Now, at the time, I didn't know what cursive handwriting was, so I thought that it meant you had to put your fingerprint there to show that you really REALLY wanted what you were ordering! It was like saying "please mommy, can I have this?" Hence, a 'Please Print'.

Bunny

When I was little, I had a foreign nanny that would always tell me something that sounded like "com kweet". I never learned what it meant, but I somehow came up with the idea that you had to say it after every sentence when you read aloud.

So, when I'd read a book for my mom and grandma, it sounded something like this: "The dog climbed up the hill, com kweet. It made him very tired, com kweet..."

AUDREY

I must have been about 8-9 and I read a book called 'The boy who climbed into the moon'. I remember sitting in the bath and looking out of the window. I saw the moon in the sky and I utterly thought that I would be able to get a ladder and climb to the moon. It would be hard but possible. Great book

Matt

I used to believe that photos of people in magazines or books, if they were looking straight at you from the photo; then they could REALLY see you and everything you were doing. It still creeps me out to this day, a little.

Maggie, NJ

i used to believe that 'island' was pronounced 'is-land' instead. I know im not alone on that one! :)

Da KornMeal

I used to believe that "G" was a vowel. As far as i was concerned, vowels were letters that could make two noises. At that time, i thought they were just called the two-soundy-letters. I first found this out at the age of 6 and believed it until first grade. I was sad when i found out it wasnt.

G aint a vowel!!!

I used to believe that if you folded a letter with the recipient receiving the blank side upon opening, then he or she would think there was nothing on either side of the paper.

SPC