speaking

A teacher once sent me to the office to get some supplies. When I brought them back a post-it was also included from the secretary to the teacher:
"here is your 'vanilla' envelope"

Kara Harkins

Up until I was 16 I thoroughly believed that the weed-eater was a "Wee-deeter".

Jen @ 20

When I was young I didn't know (of course) why people die. So I thought that it was limited by the number of words you were allowed to speak in your life. If you pass that number then you die. I never knew how many words that were, but surely I would by now have died already 1000 times.

Dutchy

I used to believe adjacent was pronounced add-juh-sent, the a making the uh sound like in the word uh. Then when I heard adjacent I thought I heard ajason, so I've pronounced adjacent over three different ways before learning the correct pronounciation.

Aerith

In primary school, my best friend's older sister told her that the word 'yellow' could also be correctly pronounced 'lellow'. She went around saying the word 'lellow' so much that it became really annoying. I had a huge row with her about it, so we decided to have a vote amongst our other friends. They all decided that 'lellow' was in fact the correct pronounciation, and we all went around saying 'lellow' instead of 'yellow' for the rest of primary.

overactive imagination

i used to believe that every1 in the world knew every single word and that we just hadnt heard them all yet, but that wen we did we instantly knew wat they meant..... It took a few missused words to discover that this wasnt quite true

overactive imagination

When my youngest sister was a toddler, my grandmother and I were watching her play. My grandmother said, "That Jodi is priceless, isn't she?" I didn't know what priceless meant. I thought my grandmother was saying Jodi wasn't worth anything.

By the way, when I read others people's beliefs, I laugh so hard, I have to be careful not to cry over my keyboard and get it wet!

Vicki J.

I had just moved to Australia from Zimbabwe, and was asked by a girl in my class for a thesaurus..
Since i didn't know what a thesaurus was, i questioned her.. She informed me that a thesaurus was a dinosaur eraser - it was occured to me years later..

Why would anyone want a dinosaur rubber???

Josh

This is just someting funny my grandma did. We had a person almost drown in a pond by our house and my uncle pulled them out and gave artifical respiration. My grandma was so proud she told everyone that her son did 'artifical insemonation'. Only after the rumor had spread did we finally cath what she was telling everyone!

Anon

Not one of my own, but...

Some friends of mine had their 4-year-old son tell them that he thought their cat was "a good looker". They wondered where he had picked up this expression. But it turned out to be something he'd just made up, and all he meant was that the cat was very observant.

Alan

when i was about 8 my sis told me what adore meant. later she also told what horney meant. i was telling my mum how much i adore her, but one day i said "mum i horney you" she just said "oh"

confused words

We were playing table tennis and my friend didn't know what gay (fagget) means...so while we were outdors and there were some bats flying around we told him fagget=bat...well he kind of liked the new word he learned and started telling us how many faggets there are around his house all the time and then he started flapping his hands aroud and screaming that he is fagget too...i needn't say we almost pissed ourselves laughing (no offense to gay community meant)

Strudl

My daughter and I had a long discussion about the plain frock like gown thjat girls and working ladies used to wear. I never got her to accept that it wasn't called a pininform. A few weeks ago she had to admit that I was right. Then she came out with a good one, that "Bonanza" is in fact called Bonzana. mmmmmmm

Adam

when i was 4 i thought id run out of words after id told a joke to all my friends and family. i had nothin else to say... and thats all i have to say about that.

cat

I was maybe, twelve, and was a bit confused at the disticntion between the words "discreet" and "secrete". I made a speech about spies or something like that for a "What You Want to Be When You Grow Up" type project. NOBODY EVER TOLD ME. It took me until I was fifteen to realize that spies do not ooze everywhere.

Xornia

When my big sister was a junior high school cheerleader, I would hear her practice a cheer that said:

Send them to their doom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doom!
Boob-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom!

I was unfamiliar with the word "doom" at the time, so the nearest word I could hear was "dune". I really wondered why the cheer was calling for sending someone to a sand dune.

Kimberley

I used to think that a cadaver was a type of knife. Maybe that was because of its similarity in sound to the last two syllables of "dagger".

Kimberley