I thought the reason no one liked Lady Macbeth because she was cruel and said bad words to her dog (Out, out, damned Spot.)

Carol

I used to think that Horoscopes were actually Horror-scopes, and I never wanted to read mine because I didn't want to know what horrors I would be encountering in the near future.

PS

I used to think that the mangled abridgement HAZCHEM was German for "Danger" as it appeared next to the word on the sign.

joey_gambles

When I was young, before I knew my ABC's, I didn't understand how it was possible to read without speaking the words out loud. I thought my Mom was being silly when she would read to herself because I believed she was just staring at the page and pretending that she was somehow absorting the content.

Anna

when i was about 7 i had misheard the name of the great Shaw play and truly beleived that there was a play called Pigmania. i used to think it would be a really cool show like the muppets.
this came to light to my eternal shame in a game of trivial pursuit - by which time i was 12 and i hav never lived it down. "of course i know its really called Pygmalion, i was just being funny" ... yah right...

chrissydontsurf

I used to believe that the people on magazines and books could see you. (waayy before the Harry Potter moving picture thing) So when in the loo I'd have to turn the faces over or put them in a cupboard so they couldn't see me using the toilet.

28 and still strange

When my sister, aged 10,was reading a book in the 1940's she said 'Dad, whats a brothel?' My father replied 'a sort of soup kitchen'. She believed this until she was married!

Alan

When I was four, I was very puzzled when I read the word "know." I knew the word when it was said aloud, but took a LONG time to figure out that they were the same word. I thought it was pronounced "ku-NOW" and that it had something to do with Chinese food!

Anon

When I was a kid, I used to think that an oxymoron was a stupid ox.

Froogle

I used to think that the reason AMBULANCE was written backwards on the front of an ambulance was so left-handed people could read it!

Laura

When I first started learning to read I was convinced that vowels were called barnacles.

Andy Howell

From the time I first learned to read until perhaps the fourth grade I thought if you parked your car illegally it would be blown up, because that's what the sign said:

Vehicles Exploded

John Thomas

When I was little, me and my mom went to the Library. They have those computers where you look up books right in the middle. We both went to them, because I liked looking up stuff about dogs and whatnot. But, what my mom was looking up looked much more interesting. So, I went over to her computer and started reading aloud what it said. "Pubert..." and that's as far as I got. I was convinced for years that Puberty was the brother of Rupert. (You know, from that cartoon about the bear that went on adventures)

Sarah

I used to believe that if I saw or thought of the words 'to be continued' a man in white overalls and hat would go underneath my bed and paint the words underneath my bed. It scared me to see that saying.

Alisa J

When i was young, maybe 8 or 9, I had seen the movie 'The Bodyguard'. And in that movie, they mentioned that the bad guy had 'masturbated' on the bed of the victim. Well, my dad was driving me to school one morning, and i asked him what maturbate meant. He got really angry and told me it was a dirty word and that i should never say that again or think about that! I eventually looked it up in the dictionary at school, and still didn't understand it...what the heck was 'manually stimulating oneself to achieve orgasm' supposed to mean to an 8 year old?! So i just wrote the meaning down in my diary. My then teenage brother ended up stealing my diary, and when i asked him if he had seen it, he said: "Masturbation?" Talk about embarressing!

Sharky

I used to like reading Marvel comics and such like. Quite often a story ended with a quote from the editor: "Nuff Said". I used to think that 'Nuff' was a person but I could never find any other references in the comics, no matter how hard I tried. I thought that everyone else knew who Nuff was but I didn't and I always felt kind of outside the gang. Gave me a real complex. Took me till adulthood to finally figure that out.

Roy

When was 6-7 i wasn,t very good at reading big words, and every evening i would sit with my Dad and read to him out of the newspaper, and when i came to a word i couldn,t say, he told me to say Wheelbarrow, and one friday in school we always had reading out load, so when i was asked to read , i kept saying wheelbarrow when i came to a word i didn,t know, so after a while the teacher said Janice why do you keep saying wheelbarrow, and i told her my Dad told me i could always say that word if i came across a word i could not read.


Sadly my Dad died when i was 9years old but i shall never forget my time spent with him while he lay in bed.

Janice Owen

There was a Chinese takeaway near us called the Orient Express. I thought it was Onion Press. Yeah.

Spook

As a little kid in pre-war New Guinea, my parents would read out the eagerly awaited letters from family in Australia - "Grandma asks if you are being a good boy, and Sport (her dog) still likes to play", - and so on. So I knew early that those marks on the paper meant real words, but I wanted to talk to Grandma too, and would scribble on bits of paper while carefully shouting out my message (I knew she was a long way away). But I thought it had to be like a conversation, so I would have to invent Grandma's reply and shout and scribble that too. But if I had to know what her answer would be before "writing" it down, what was the point in asking the question? I was a logical if rather confused child. Things haven't changed much.

Swanny

When I first encountered "lb.", I had no concept of abbreviations and would read it aloud, "lib". So Dick and Jane would go to the store to get two libs of butter...

Heather Lodge