speaking

When MSN and AIM first got really popular, everyone said LOL when they laughed. I thought LOL meant hello, so I went around saying LOL whenever I see someone. That continued for half a year until my friend told me I was weird.

LOL

I really used to believe that languages had barriers,physical barriers and you were prevented from crossing from one language to the other unless you had some kind of a permit or visa

epimeno01

I used to believe the word original meant basically the opposite of what it really means i.e something old and familiar. I think I thought this because I knew the original version of something meant the first so I thought if something was original it was similar to the first version

Mintaka

When they had us sing "America the Beautiful" in school, I thought the words were,
"In the Donzer Lee-light."
Instead of "In the dawns early light"

I discovered that I was wrong when I read one of the Ramona books by Beverley Cleary, in which Ramona makes the same mistake.
Hehe

Anon

My brother thought that if men were perverts, women must be pervettes. My sister and I were accused of this often.

Sara

When I was 7 years old, I was POSITIVE that the word "determine" was correctly pronounced DEETER-mine, and that everyone else just had it wrong!

Anon.

When I was little we used to take trips to Cape Cod. I was just learning how to read at the time, and I would see the word and not realize that the "e" was silent, so to me, it was "Cape-a Cod." The worst part was that it took my parents about 2 years to notice that I wasn't saying the name right. When they corrected me, I was in shock! It altered my sense of reality.

brookie

When I asked my father the meaning of the word "peon," he said it was something that you would "pee on." Like an idiot, I not only believed this well into my teens, but was only corrected after I announced it to my whole physics class.

Anon

when i young my sisters thought it would be funny to teach me my own language, they suceeded in this and by the time i was old enough to go to school i spoke in gibberish and had 2years of speech therapy, i believed this was normal.........

hannah

When I was young, my mother would say "May I speak to..." when she made a phone call. I thought she was saying "Mass peak to..." So, when I got old enough to call my friends, I would say,"Mass peak to Jill?" or whoever it was that I called.

Lauren P

When I asked for something or acted like i was the best when I was younger my dad would say "who do you think you are. the queen of sheeba?!?!" for some reason,no idea how, i always thought the queen of sheeba was a small white poodle that sat on a velvet cushion, and that she had servants. I thought this for a very long time,oh dear.

Anon

I attended a Catholic school as a young kid, where we were made to attend weekly mass each Tuesday. The priest was a nice Vietnamese man, but whenever he would say "Jesus Christ", I always thought he was saying "Cheetah Cry". Mentioning this years later to an old school buddy, he admitted that he had thought the same thing!

Kev

These still trip me up sometimes:

Pizza Hot = Pizza Hut

Holland Oats = Hal and Oats

Entire State Building= Empire State Building

Crackle Barrel = Cracker Barrel

tonybaloney

I used to think that when someone(usually my dad), was saying "Pardon me", they were saying "Part me" because they said it fast and I didn't find out until I was 12.

Anon

"I rode a whore through the countryside" EXCUSE ME???
Not a native english speaker, my boyfriend thought that the word "horse" was plural for "hor".

anne-claire

I used to think the phrase "throwing caution to the wind" was "throwing cosh into the wind." Whatever cosh was. I think i thought it was some kind of grain.. a type of couscous maybe.

Cooter

I was working on a science book report in third grade and decided that liquid and liquor must mean the same thing since they looked similar so I used them interchangeably much to the pleasure of my teacher.

Shaman Rikki

when Dad was watching TV, I used to block his view to try and get his attention. He would always say, "Get out of my way!" One day I asked, "Dad, where is your way? I can't see it!" I still get teased to this day...

Cris

I thought "spam" and "sperm" were the same thing. What confused me most was that it was sold in tins at the grocery store and that you could recieve it over the internet.

Marshmello Da Strawberry Cow

I used to think the word "sane" was slang for "insane" so if one of my friends was bouncing off the walls, I'd tell them, "You're going 'sane!"

Anon to the nymous