speaking

when people said it was "raining cats and dogs" i'd always go out to check but always came back disappointed because it was only water.

sunshine

for the longest time i thouht that when people said "throw caution to the wind" they were saying "throw caush into the wind." i understood the meaning, but i could not figure out for the life of me, who or what caush was.

emma

I used to get confused as to the difference between bearing a child and baring a child. Whenever I heard of a mother bearing children, I thought this meant she took off their clothes before bathtime or whatever. Darn those words that sound the same!

Evilrabbit

I used to think that there was such a thing as baa lambs,I only found out they were sheep when I was publicly humiliated by the teacher aged 8.My second astonishingly wrong belief was that we had neck curtains at our windows, not net curtains. This belief was only corrected when I was about 12. That there was such a thing as Ringing Carnation, I later discovered the word was actually Reincarnation! Parent's who'd have them?

Phyllippa

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

I used to believe that all languages were written exactly the same (ie: in English) it was just that different nationalities said the words differently.

Joanna

I grew up on a small island in the South Pacific. I (we) mistakenly believed that the childhood game called Red Rover, was called Run Over. After all, you RAN over, right? Unfortunately, it wasn't until reminiscing with my adult friends in the U.S. that I discovered that something had gotten lost in the translation. It now makes sense to me why I received strange looks when trying to explain this great game we used to play as kids called Run Over. I was shocked that no one in the U.S. ever played it before.

FOB@pago

for the longest time i didn't know the difference between the word hangover and hangnail. man is that embarassing

confused

I used to think people on the West Coast of the US were the only people in the world without accents. If you went a little bit further east, everybody had Texas accents, and if you went to the East Coast, everybody had New York accents. I thought Midwestern people and East Coast people must be real jealous of the West Coast people, because we were the only normal ones. I sure was enlightened back then, huh?

anonymous

I used to think that when people said 'God Bless You' after someone sneezed, that they were really saying "Gosh! Bleshoe!" thinking that Bleshoe was the word for a sneeze and that people were pointing out the painfully obvious.

Anon

I used to believe that the phrase "outer space" was really "out of space"... as in a spaceship from "out of space". My reasoning was that space is the boundary of the place we know, and weird things come from beyond it. I still catch myself saying it to this day, and I'm in my forties.

Rokas

While playing the game Clue with my family when I was about 10 I discovered that the Lead pipe, rhymes with RED and not READ. When I announced that my guess was that Miss Peacock did it in the conservatory with the LEAD (rhymes with read) pipe my whole family burst into laughter...I however burst into tears from the embarrasment!!

Red faced with embarrasment

When i was in kindergarten, i used to think that i invented the words million and billion

Comonsnadama

i used to think that being boring and being bored is the same thing so me and my friends used to go around the whole classroom and we'd be like 'im boring. *sigh*' or 'we're boring'. we sort of cracked up the teacher until she nearly spat her coffee on us

~boring

this is true... my friend maria thought that she was caucasian because she is a cocky asian. i told her what it really meant and she was sad.

cockyasian

I used to believe the word "isolated" meant "maybe". This was due to the weather reports on the news saying isolated showers, and my parents saying that meant maybe it would rain and maybe it wouldn't.

Dan

I use to think people who were "chinese" were "chinnys"
So during kindergarden with the 3 little pigs, "Not by the hair of my chinny,chin,chin" I asked the teacher if the pigs were chinese."

aliena

I used to believe that the expression "old-timey" was actually "old Tommy." My great uncle's name was Tommy and with my mother's thick southern drawl, "Tommy" and "timey" sounded very similar.

I thought this until I was at least 12 or so.

J. Bred.

One year, my Dad and I went Christmas shopping and he spent two hours talking a price down on a gift for my mother.When we returned home mom exclaimed "What took you so long?" I replied "Dad spent forever masturbating with the guy at the counter." As soon as I said it my mom cracked up and Dad turned red. I tried to play it off like I knew what I was talking about until I told my friend the story.She explained to me I mixed the word "masturbate" up with the word "haggle."

thegirlwhotoldondad

When I was little, I pronounced "variety" veye-ar-it-ee, and kept trying to correct my Dad for pronouncing it wrong.

Anon