I used to believe that it didn't matter how many horizontal lines there are in a capital "E", as long as they are evenly spaced. All my "E";s looked like combs.

Kate Joly

When I was in second grade our teacher taught us "I before E except after C". I always imagined a world where I walked in front of E except when C came along, than it had to walk behind E. I imagined them with arms and legs walking on the sidewalk. I had no idea it had to with spelling and always wondered why the teacher repeated it.

Kimberly

When I was little, a boy at my babysitter's house told me that his mamma wanted him to make straight A's. I tried and tried but I couldn't understand that was possible since two of the lines that made up an "A" were slanted.

Brittany

I beleived up until I was about 15 that there were two words for forehead: forehead and forrid. I blame this on living in Essex.

Saggs

For years my friend John and I would hang out in back of the library under a sign "NO LOITERING".
One day, (we were 17) I threw down a candy wrapper. John said "Hey- don't break the rules. There's no loitering here".
I said "What do you think that sign means?"
"No Littering."
"Well, why do you think it is spelled that way?"
"I don't know- I thought it was a fancy way of saying "No Littering".

Tom S.

My sister (when she was in Kindergarten)used to sing the alphabet song with her class, except they'd start "Oh! A,B,C,...)and for the whole year she thought O was the first letter of the alphabet. She even argued with our mom about it!

M.B.N.

When I was five (and just learning to read) I was looking at a roll of TUMS on my mom's nightstand and read the letters backwards.

A few weeks went by and instead of just reading the letters, I could actually put the letters together. Instead of my mom's medicine being called S...M...U...T... I now knew it was called SMUT.

At the grocery store checkout stand a few weeks later, my mom was rubbing her temples while we were waiting to check out. I proudly said - so everyone could hear - "Mom, if you're feeling bad, just buy you some SMUT. It always makes you better."

Her jaw dropped, and I think she forgot about her headache.

Hi Ho

when I was little I got paparazzi and pavarotti confused, I learned the truth when Princess Diana died, because they said they were speeding to get away from the paparazzi, and I couldn't understand why a fat itallian singer would be chasing them and why they'd have to speed away from him.

Moose

When I was about 7 or 8, we had to look up lists of words for homework. One of my words was 'infiltrate' and the definition I found was 'To enter secretly with an unfriendly purpose.' Somehow I misread it as 'To enter secretly with an unfriendly porpoise' and I wondered why somebody had made a word for that, as it couldn't be that common.

unfriendly porpoise

I use to think that the abc's went like this: abcdefghijk im a little p qrst..etc

April