speaking

When my brother was very young, he would pronounce "hamburger" as "hangerber". This became a standard alternate pronunciation in our family. At about 8 years old, while having dinner at a friend's house, I called them "hangerbers" and everyone laughed. I was surprised at their ignorance, and spent a good long time convincing them that "you can say it either way".

duh...

One time I was driving in the car with my mom. I wanted her to eject a cd from the cd player in the car. Earlier on in the day I had heard the word ejaculation. I thought the word eject was an abbreviation for the word ejaculate. So in an attempt to show off my big vocabulary to my mom, I said, "Mom can you ejaculate the cd."

Courtney

Until about my freshman year in high school, I always heard about mostly celeberties being "incognito" but i always thought they were in Cognito like as a place. I thought Cognito was some tropical island somewhere.

Anon

Until a few years ago, I believed this was a "doggy dog" world, rather than a "dog-eat-dog" world.

jemima

I used to think volleyball was actually called "ball-y ball"

Anon

I used to believe that whenever people said "So-and-so" that they were talking about an actual person named Soandso.

I always heard "Soandso" did this and "Soandso" did that.

I wondered, who IS this person and how did everyone know him?

V.I.

When a "mean girl" in early grade school asked me if I was a virgin I answered "no I am catholic."

Hilary

When I was a kid, my parents had their own language. No, that's not my weird belief yet - be patient.

It was just spelling aloud, but using a short word for each consonant. B becomes "Bub", C becomes "Cut", H becomes "Hash", etc. Also, to double a letter, precede it with "Square". Hence the word "butter" would be rendered as "Bub U Square Tut E Rud." With a little practice you can learn to speak and understand it very quickly. My parents used it constantly to talk in front of the kids without us knowing what they were saying.

When I was eight, I broke the code (not transliterating the vowels finally gave me the clue that they were just spelling. After that it was simple.) I was smart enough to solve the code, but too stupid to keep my mouth shut. I promptly told everyone how clever I was. If I'd really been clever I'd have eavesdropped on them for years.

Ian, Los Angeles

When I was really young, I thought saying 'good riddance' to people was a posh, grown-up way of saying goodbye. I never quite understood why everyone would tell me off for being rude when I said it.

Not Important

I believed "lesbians" and "Presbyterians" were the same thing; I still don't know why. I can't imagine the conversations I had mixing those two up.

Andraea

I thought that exorcise and exercise both meant the same thing

Dobby Bob

I used to be very talkative when I was young. I remember that I was going on and on about something and my sister was getting really annoyed. So she told me that you were born with a set amount of words you're allowed to say in your life and then you go deaf. She said that's why there are deaf people; they didn't have any word management skills. She also told me that she'd been counting and I was dangerously close to running out of words.

That shut me up.

John T

I used to think the heimlich manoeuvre was called the heimlich remover. I did not know until about a year ago (when i was 25!) that it was the manoeuvre, my boyfriend still makes fun of me for it.

Anon

I don't know where it came from, but I do distinctly remember when I was about 7 or so that we must have a limited number of words to say in our life. That one day, I would run out of words. I kept quiet sometimes, so that I would not use my allocation of words too soon. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut more, and not got into so much trouble!!

Mick Hughes

I used to believe - until maybe the age of 12 - that the Pullitzer Prize was in fact the "Pullet Surprise," as in, "Surprise! You won!"

joshi

When I was four, by best friend from preschool called me selfish. I was convinced that I was some weird species of fish.

Kate

behind the times ment behind the newspaper!!!!!!!

Neon Anon

My sister believed for the longest time that the word "Grandma" was actually GRAHAM ma. She even used to call our grandma "Graham cracker." :D

Anon

I used to think that ancient languages, like Latin or Sanskrit, were spoken by dinosaurs and cave people, as a reference to being extinct or non existent.

Anon

Back in the day, we used to refer to losing a game as getting "creamed." Unfortunately, I got it in my head that losing really badly was to get "cremated." So I would run around yelling "OOOH, you guys just got cremated."

Trina