spelling

I used to beleive the alphebet went .....xyNz. and i replace the "and" for the letter"n", i argued with my mom for a long time

Anon

I thought if a person writes WAY too much then he will never write ever again. I always save my handwriting power until needed. I even refused to write notes during classes then my teacher made me to write sentences on the board 100 times and I was SO worried that I will never write again from it!

Anon

When I was little, my mom had this typewriter and I believed that I could just press random buttons and it would form a story. I would type a bunch of jibberish and then go to my mom and ask her what it meant she said nothing, I did it again and asked her what it meant: nothing, I figured out by about the fifteenth time that you had to try to write a story

lauren

You could spell all letters.

B = bee
C = sea
J = Jay

So how do you spell A, D, E... ? For some reason, they just didn't teach you how to spell all of the letters in school.

Jessica S.

I thought my dad invented the "radio alphabet" and it was something only he knew about because I'd only ever heard him use it

Nate

I used to believe that I had created the word "lesbian" when I was in the 4th grade. I had never heard the word before and used it in naming a landform (i.e. Lesbian Lake) for a social studies assignment involving naming your own country and creating mountain ranges, bodies of water, and cities within the country. I had thought of the word "Lebanese" and turned the letters around because "lesbian" sounded like something important and creative...only my teacher did not see it that way, and made a big deal out of it (since she was not a nice teacher anyway). In front of the entire class, she made me look up the word, and (no kidding) in my dictionary, it said "homo". I was laughed at for days. Gotta love paranoid people in the 1980's.

Victoria

I was confused by words with similar pronunciation or spelling.

- cavalry vs. Calvary (Did they take Jesus to a horse? And what did Jesus have to do with war and the armed forces? I was baffled.)
- prostate vs. prostrate (When I read sentences about men lying prostrate on the floor, I thought that one of their organs had been dismembered and tossed to the floor. Horrifying!)
- Andes vs. Alps vs. Appalachians vs. Adirondacks (Were these different names for the same mountain range? Then I thought maybe all mountain ranges started with the letter 'A'.)
- Mozart vs. Michelangelo (With so many similarities, I didn't realize they were different people. Both were men, and long dead, and European, and artistic.)
- Einstein vs. Edison (Hmmm. Both scientists of a sort...but it didn't help that one made discoveries about the speed of _light_ and the other invented _light_ bulbs.)

Kevin Wiatrowski from Colorado, USA

when my sister was around 7 she thought doing word search meant circling the letter of each word in the search, ending up with a whole bunch of circles in the word search

sunshine

When I was three or four I believed that letters and numbers were either boys or girls. The letters A, B, H, K, M, N, P, Q, R, U, V, W, and Y are girl letters whereas C, D, E, F, G, I, J, L, O, S, T, and Z were boy letters. X always kind of tricked me (ironic considering our chromosomes). 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 are boys and 4, 6, 8, and 9 are girls. I can remember to this day (20 years later!) exactly what letters and numbers are the girls and which ones are the boys!

Lindsay

I though that when people said someone was in a coma, they were saying acoma. I didn't know that it was two seperate words. I thought that until I saw the word in a book when I was about 12

Anon

My friend believed until his senior year in high school that the word drawer was spelled "joor". We couldn't figure out why he would spell it that way and spent a lot of time sounding out the word drawer to hear the j.

Anon

I used to believe the word shoes was spelled shouse. It looked right to me...

Shouse

I used to believe that the word "strawberry" was actually spelt "BBBB". Why? Because my sister used to pronounce it "Forby".

Pete

My cousin walks up to my grandmother and myself and said "I can spell trashcan, B.F.I." We both bust in to laughter and then try to explain to her that B.F.I. is a company, not the way you spell trashcan.
That same cousin also thought sec. (as in second)and sex were the same word.

Anon

When I was little, when I saw something with the word "original" written on it, I thought it was pronounced "origontal," even though I knew what "original" meant. Then one day I was having my dad write on the back of a blank video tape case, and I had him write the word "original." I then noticed it wasn't actually "origontal", once I saw it in print.

Shontom

I used to believe that organism and orgasm were variations of the same word. Then while reading aloud one day in Grade 7 science class, I replaced the word organism with the word orgasm. Most of the class, including the teacher began laughing. I was dumbfounded until about 1 year later.

Bianca

My cousin, who's my age always thought there were two n's in the alphabet. 'l-m-N-o-p' and 'w-x-y-N-z'

Ashley

When my parents would give our last name to someone over the phone, they would say, "B, as in boy" continue to spell, and end with "M, as in Mary." They both did this the same way, and I heard them doing it all the time.

For years I didn't even realize that they were spelling our name; I assumed it was some sort of code.

S, as in Silly

When i was first learning to write and put words together, i wondered what the purpose of vowels was... it made perfect since to me that "ct" meant cat, and "trck" meant truck, etc. "LL" (that means LOL)

i'd like to buy a vowel, please... ""

When I was a little kid, for some unknown reason I thought the word rinse was spelled "wrince." I even argued with my dad when he corrected me.

Anon