speaking

When I was 4 I was very angry at my older brother and told my mom that i was "Happy as a Clown" until he hit me, she laughed and said it was "Happy as a Clam" i got angry and asked "Why would a Clam be happy?"

Kelli

In my grade 1 class there was a girl who needed speech lessons because of a lisp. One day I heard the term "voice box" and put together the idea that the doctor was shoving a shoe box down her throat, and it scared me. I asked her if she wanted one of my shoe boxes because my feet were small.

Mangopeel

When I was very tiny, I used to think that a portrait was just a rubbish picture of someone. Clearly I had deciphered the meaning correctly from the context, but added a bit of my own. I was outraged at the shoddyness that the people talking would accept when they said that they would like a "poor-trait", so I insisted that I would only accept a "bettertrait", oh yes indeed.

Lawrence G

When my brother was little, my dad took him to a sauna, the kind with the benches, and he was fascinated. Later that evening, while company was over, he told my dad, "Tell mom about the hot bitches we saw today!" Her face was priceless.

Pip

I once thought that I invented the word "buoy". At the time I hadn't learned to spell very much, so I would have been more likely to spell it "booey" or something like that. On my family's first trip to the beach since I came along, as we were nearing the shore, something possessed me to say, "We'll see booeys at the beach!" Maybe I had heard of buoys but forgotten, but something subconsciously prompted me to say that. But I thought at the time I was purely making it up. Once at the beach, I'd point to all sorts of unfamiliar objects, and ask, "Is that a booey?" At first my father would say "Yes" to my question for whatever I pointed to. For a while I supposed he was just going along with my game of making up the word. The first time I remember him saying "No," we were on a ferry ride, and I'd asked the question within the hearing of the ferry operator. In retrospect, I guess my father didn't want the ferry operator to hear him telling me something was a buoy that wasn't. Before the ferry ride was over I was having actual buoys pointed out to me. Gradually I learned to use the word only for real buoys. But for a long time I thought that perhaps they were never called "buoys" until I "invented" the word.

Greg

I used to think that "Rape" and "Cape" were somehow one and the same.

J

I used to believe the word "movie" was pronounced"wee-oovie"

M

I used to believe that "prosecuted" and "executed" were the same word, and that shoplifting laws ("shoplifters will be prosecuted!") were rather draconian.

Susan Davis

i used to believe that the word chimney was made up and it was actually chimley. i believed it until i was about 11 and even thought someone had made a joke dictionary to trick me. i believed it up until i heard that song that goes chim chimney chim chimney chim chim charoo. lmfao.

maria

I began reading very early, and so I knew a lot of words at a young age. However, I had only seen them written; I had never heard them spoken. So from age four to about age 10, I belived that the word "procedure" was pronounced "pro-DUCK-shure". When I heard the word "procedure' spoken by a teacher or something, I thought it was a completely different word! My dad finally enlightened me in fifth grade.

KLB

I used to think up until now that when a piece of jewelery was paste(fake) that it was litterarally made of glue! Though I always wondered how they managed to make the jewels out of glue...

Glowworm

I used to believe that the phrase "next door" was pronounced "next store". I still say "store", even though I'm 15.

DarkDan

When my best friend told me that she had got dumped... I thought it meant that someone would dump fish on their head.. Boy.. was I smart!

ShortGirl

In kindergarden, my teacher would always use the name "Sowenso" as an example for things. I thought that "Sowenso" was an invisible monkey that did the examples that she made him do. I thought Sowenso was in our class until 6th grade when I realized that Sowenso was actaully a phrase "So-and-so".

Staycie

I don't remember how it started, but my sister once told me to "Carpe Denim" believing it was "Carpe Diem". I still tell her to "seize the jeans" and we get a big kick out of it.

Loving Big Sis

I've often heard of "taking something too literally", but do we ever hear of taking anything too figuratively? Well, I have done precisely the latter. Growing up, I repeatedly heard the phrase, "Go wash your mouth out with soap and water!", spoken, for example, when someone had said a "dirty word". I always thought that was clearly a figure of speech, and that surely no one had ever been literally required to do that. It wasn't until my first part-time job during college that I heard a co-worker speak of how her mother used to make her wash her mouth out with soap and water. Something about the context in which she was telling it seemed to indicate that her mother made her LITERALLY do that. So I asked her, and she assurred me that indeed her mother used to make her LITERALLY wash her mouth out with soap and water. I was astonished to learn that that was ever more than an outlandish figure of speech.

Jim

Once in class i listened to a teacher with a wierd accent talking about "Coffee Sent Up". I could'nt make sense of what he was talking through that one hour. Later on i found out he saying "Coefficient of".

Dawood

I used to believe that everyone was given a certain number of words to say in their life and if they used them all up to quickly they wouldn't be able to talk when they were older

Maya