speaking

I used to see that commercial advertising for the grocery store "Fiesta" when I was little...This lady would always be on the commercials and at the end she would say "FIESTA". I used to think that the lady was pronouncing it wrong and that it was really Fiester. I thought she was just putting some accent flair on the end of the word...I used to correct her out loud. I would say, "No, it's Fiester!!"

Angela

I used to believe that a "punch line" meant a line of people waiting to dip punch from a punch bowl.

Sheila

I used to be confused on how I was to respond when I asked someone, "do you mind if I blah blah blah?" Some people would be like, "no go right ahead!" While others would say, "yes do what you like!" So I would stand there and be like, "ummm, so can I?"

Keisha

Somewhere down the line of growing up, I lost the 'L' in flashlight. Even now as an adult I still tend to say "fashlight" instead and have to actually think about the word before saying it.

Silverchild

I used to believe that "God bless you" was "gableshu," so everytime someone sneezed, I would say "gableshu."

JS

My brother thought that truce was truths.

"Let's make a truths"

Usagi Ohkami

I used to believe "foyer" meant fireplace because is german feuer [pronounced like foyer] means fire.
I never heard anyone say foyer before, until i was at my grandmas house once. She told me to go wait in the ''foyer'', and i had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she wanted me to wait in the fireplace!!

Kupfer Staub und Feuer

When I was little I thought that "involved" was a dirty word, and would get really embarassed when I heard my parents say it. Since it was my mom I usually heard it from, I thought it was a female private part. I think this is weird, because I was only about 3 or 4 at the time, but now realize that "involved" sounds a lot like "vulva." Coincidence?

Steph

I used to believe that the phrase "Lord, have mercy" was "Lord, how mercy". At the time, I was familiar with the word "mercy" but had no idea what it meant. From the context of what I thought was "Lord, how mercy", I assumed that "mercy" must be an adjective, indicating the presence of lots of "merce" or "merces", whatever merse or merces were. I So I grew to think that "merce" or "merces" denoted a condition of difficult or dreaded circumstances. After all that was the kind of conditions generally being experienced or anticipated by anyone who said (so I thought) "Lord, how mercy!".

Jessica

I used to belive that the English language was made up by two men at the start of the world.Their was one tall and one short and that was why we had the same sounding word meaning different things (e.g. right and write) because they each wanted to call a different thing the same word so the tall one made the short one change the spelling!

Beth

I used to think the 'okay sign' -- when you put your thumb and middle finger together and stick the rest of your fingers up -- was actually a 'monocle sign' and meant that you lost your monocle or something like that. I only wish I could tell you what made me believe this.

Majusca

I used to believe the word "privacy" was considered rude, because my parents explained to me when I was little the reason they shut the bathroom door was for privacy. I thought it pertained to something involving nudity, and even after I learned different, still felt odd saying the word in public for a long time afterwards.

Kathryn

One particular babysitter of mine was comforting me after I became hysterical and was crying over something or other. She started cooing "Calm down, it's okay." Having never heard anyone use the phrase "calm down", I thought she was saying "come down" (as in "come down out of the tree", or off of something high off). I looked up at her and said "Come down from where? I'm not on anything, i'm right here."

Amy

Not my belief, but my brother's. When he was around 12 and I 14, the subject of foreign accents came up in a discussion. At one point, I mentioned American accents. (We're American.) He looked confused, and said... "What? Americans don't HAVE an accent."

He had been assuming that people from England, Australia, etc. had to go out of their way to talk like that, and that the American accent was just the normal default way of talking.

Anon

When I first heard the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from Alice in Wonderland on tv, I thought the walrus said it was time to talk about "shoes and ships and CEILING wax." I had no idea why anyone would want to wax their ceiling, but I figured it had to be either more Lewis Carroll nonsense or else some kind of obscure ceiling maintenance technique that grownups used.

Amanda M.