speaking

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

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

when i was a little kid, i was playing catch for the first time. when i missed a catch, my mom said, "now, keep your eye on the ball!" i grabbed the ball and stuck it directly on my face, right up against my eye!! (that's a case of taking orders too seriously...)

Cammy

I used to believe that the word 'caterpillar" was the big trucks that were used for road works....not a brand!

J@M & $uG@r

I used to beleive that voting was vomiting and that when mum and dad said they were going to vote I would ask them if they were sick.

Georgia

I used to think that the letter W had a sound that you'd repeat U two times. I was three and would pronounce, for example, watermelon: "U-Umelon". (double u...?)

Katie

I used to say it was "Pit dark" or Pit black instead of pitch when I was explaining how dark it was outside. I always thought it refered to how dark it was at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

Scott McElvany

I used to think that use your head meant you had to head butt

R

When i was in playschool we used to get sweets on a Friday, our teacher would always say "you'll all get sweets tomorrow" on a Thursday. I firmly believed "tomorrow" was another word for "friday".

Amy

I used believe the word "monstrosities" was pronounced "monstro-rites"

Anon

When I was little, I was once told 'Behave!' (as all kids are from time to time) My response was: 'I'm having!' (have-ing)

Tad

I used to get common phrases confused because I would only hear them not see them in written form. Examples: Vericose Veins, I thought they were Verycold Veins. I thought War and Peace was the name of the author (Warren Peace). I thought Off the beaten path was Off the beat and path.

Anon

When I was little I thought that everyone said spaghetti wrong. I said pasghetti instead; my family humored me and said pasghetti as well. This went on until I was about 7 or 8. I was a weird kid...

Sarah

As a child my mother would warn my sister and me that "If you don't stop that I'll spifflicate you". Whe nI was young, I thought spifflicate meant spank or punish. When I got older (in my teens) I thought it was just a word she made up to frighten us. Recently (in my twenties) I actually looked it up (trying to prove to someone it was ont a word) and found that spifflicate IS in the dictionary and it means to KILL!! Now I'll bear psychological scars the rest of my life because I discovered that my mother had been treatening to kill me when I was naughty. I confronted her with this once and she just laughed at me. She KNEW what the word meant!!!! 

proto-sybill 

My husband and I were talking and somehow we used the word "Guaranteed".

My daughter asked
"Whats guaranteed?"

I said it was something you can count on.

"Oh" she said "You mean 1-2-3!"

-Mom

I often did not do reading homework when it was assigned. One day in religion class in high school the topic of discussion was "euthanasia". Since i had not done the reading and had never heard the word before, I thought we were discussing kids in China......

Tracyca

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

Jen @ 20

Until the age of 11 or 12, I thought the term used in boxing for a punch that was delivered to the chin in an upwards motion was an upper-cunt. It was my pastor who corrected me at a Christmas party at the church; and told me what I meant to say was an upper-cut...

Naivety

This happened to my brother. He used to call everyone "maggot" as a rude term to get a rise out of people. It was many years later he found out that when he thought he was calling people a racist term, he was really calling them a form of larvae.

Lee Scott

When my husband was very little and heard the phrase "Throw caution to the wind", he thought the person was saying "Throw cush into the wind". He told me that for years, he didn't know what "cush" was, and was too embarassed to ask anyone!

Kierstin