swearing

I thought that "cocky" was a bad word since it has "cock" in it

Shimmer

I thought that "caucus" was a bad word (not sure where I heard that word as a kid, but whatever) it took ages for me to get up the courage to ask my mom if it really was, as I was afraid I'd get in a lot of trouble if it turned out to be something really offensive

Darth Carrietta

I used to believe that rats and mice were the same species, rats being males and mice females, and that similar to the b-word meaning a female dog, the word "rat" was a swear word. Euphemistically, I referred to rats as big mice.

Such a rat

I Used To Believe Profanity Was A Language And The Words Were Okay To Say/Speak In That Way Until I Learned That Is Not True And I Could Get In Very Huge/Big Amounts Of Trouble For Swearing At The Wrong Person Or Calling Them Slurs!

KellGirl

I thought "sake" was a curse word

shh

I was about eleven and knew that the f-word was bad, so i asked my mom and dad if I could say "f*cky" since it wasn't exactly the same thing. When they said no, I was shocked. So I couldn't say forms of swear words.

Molly

I thought that "shit" was just a rude way of saying "stuff", rather than specifically meaning fecal matter, due to how people say things like "I don't have time for this shit."

Geirskogul

When I was thirteen, I thought that FTW stood for Fuck The World.

Anon

When I was eleven or twelve, I saw the live-action Smurfs movie and there's a scene where a human says, "Stop saying, 'smurf' for everything! I mean, what does it even mean?! Smurf! Smurfitty smurf smurf smurf!" and a Smurf replies, "There's no call for that kind of language!", so I thought that "Smurfitty" was a swear word.

Anon

Once, I was playing a video game and at the end, one of the other characters said "That was pathetic!," referring to my lack of effort.
i never heard the word before, so I thought "pathetic" meant "wicked good."

Anon

As a kid, I learned from a song that the French word "connard" meant "a**hole."
One time, when I was in school, I called someone a "connard" and the teacher heard.
The teacher sent me to detention, which led me to believe that all French words were swears.
And the ironic part was, it was my SPANISH teacher who heard and sent me to detention.

I'll stick with English, thank you very much

I believed the word “faggot” was a swear word until I was almost 18. Also, when I was 7, several people told me that “boring” was a swear word. I totally fell for it. The phase didn’t last too long. Maybe a couple of months.

Anon

My father convinced me that grawlixes (those "@#$%&*" symbols that sometimes appear in comics to represent swears) were pronounced "errr-rrr-rr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rr." Even though I'm an adult, I still can't stop pronouncing grawlixes like that.

@#$%&*!!!

I thought the C-word was crap.

Anon

I thought Gaston from Beauty and the Beast was a bad guy because his name had "gas" in it and that was a 'bad word.'

Belle

For some reason, I thought "relax" was a swear word.

Anon

I used to think if you said a bad word you would get arested

Anon

When I was little my mom really cracked down on swearing. She was very religious and said that when you swear, you're saying a mean thing to god and it hurts his feelings. So if I slipped up and said a bad word because I was really upset, I'd go and apologize to God. I also thought that if I didn't, I'd have really bad luck afterwards and in general didn't understand how that whole relationship with God works. When bad things happened, I though God was upset with me personally!

Raised Christain