I have a friend who, up until about 6 months ago, thought the color turquoise was actually "turk boys". He is 23 years old, by the way.

Kath

I used to believe that the word 'circumstances' was pronounced 'circus dancers'.

Mel

When I was little I would always get confused with the words homo and hobo. One day, while in NYC, I saw a man sleeping on a bench. To my mother's horror I exclaimed, "Look! A homo!" and recieved many puzzled stares. I haven't mixed them up since.

Anon

For 3 years (5-8) I spoke like I was in a book. like '"I'm going upstairs mom" she said quietly, walking down the hall." My mom has tapes of me doing it and it's soooooo funny. I just made my life into a book on tape.

Lexi

I used to believe that people who spoke different languages just had different ears than us. If someone was speaking spanish, i thought they heard english.

Rachel

I though that there were a certain amount of words, say a million, that I had available to use before I died. I was a quiet kid

Jude

My Mom always used the phrase "For all intensive purposes" when I was growing up, and (of course) I picked it up too. When I was around 25 years old or so, I learned the correct phrase is "For all intents and purposes". I thought, wow, Mom's been saying it wrong all these years, but I never said anything to her about it. About 5 years later, she was watching Wheel of Fortune, and the puzzle solution was "For all intents and purposes". She said,"Heh! Well I'll be damned! I've been saying it wrong for all these years! " She was around 60 at the time.

Joe

I was introduced to the idea of "soldiers" before "shoulders". The soldiers I knew wore red tunics, bearskins and marched in tight formations. When I found out, via a sweater that my grandmother had knitted for me, that the area between my neck and the top of my arm was in fact a "soldier" I was mystified. For some time I couldn't get the image of a small soldier in bearskin and red tunic sitting on each of my shoulders out of my mind and reasoned that this must've been the origin of the word.

Lee, England

For the longest time, I thought "granite" was the same word as "granted", so I thought that when somebody was "taking you for granted" it meant that you were going with them to collect rocks in the forest or something.

kitten

My mother's godson was unable to say pacifier when he was little. Instead, he would just scream, "Fire" when the pacifier fell out of the crib.

mistaken1

When I was young, I went to go see the movie 'Titanic' with my mother. Good idea for a family movie, right? I specifically remember the scene when Jack is showing Rose his sketch book, and the drawings of the one-legged prostitute. I thought 'prostitute' was a fancy word for politician. I thought that she probably wasn’t a very good one if she kept on being naked all the time. The sad thing is, I kept on thinking prostitute=politician until I was a teenager. Of course, now that I'm older I know it’s the other way around.

Anon

I used to think that "lagoon" and "legume" were the same word. I thought a lagoon was so called because it is roughly shaped like a pea pod.

Valerie

When I was young I always used to get the words "prodigy" and "prostitute" mixed up. And my older brother, after a piano lesson wanted to show off too me and out parents. When he was done, we all clapped and I blurted out " Well arent you just a child prostitute!"

Anon

When I went to Disney World when I was four ,I really thought Epcot was pronounced Cobweb, and I'll never forget how embarassed I was after jumping on the bed telling my parents how excited I was to go to Cobweb today.

Julianne

When I was about 9, I had a 2 year old baby sister and a few months old baby brother. Sometimes, I would play with them and then they gurgle and mumble stuff and look at each other. I used to think they were communicating in some secret baby organization language, and it made the most sense to me. I asked myself: "How come I don't remember those times when I was a baby?".
Then I came to the conclusion that they had a secret Baby organization in some base and that they were members of it. I thought that when members got too old, they erase any memory of the organization.
From then on, I started interrogating my baby sister and brother whenever my parents would leave them alone with me.

Alley

When I was a very young girl I talked a lot and people would make me feel bad by saying how much I talked and that I should talk less. My grandmother heard this and told me this... "Don't worry people who talk a lot never have bad breath because the germs can't live in a mouth that is always moving." I believed this and I always thought that the priest at my church had very bad breath so he must not talk alot. I then proceeded to tell him that he should talk more so his breath wouldn't stink so much. :( Needless to say I got in trouble.

Noel

I used to think that booby traps had something to do with actual boobs or bras or something. I think the idea was a combination of it being referred as a "booby" trap and the fact that the first time I heard it was in a movie where these boys were trying to sneak around and they got stuck in a line of bras that were tied together. One of them said, "Oh no! It's a booby trap!" Needless to say, I felt really stupid when I found out it just meant someone had set up a trick or trap for someone else.

Yasmine

After being corrected for saying "doin'" instead of "doing", my friend's daughter decided it was bad grammar to pronounce ANY word with an "-n" sound at the end. For years she added a g to the ends of words- "button"became "butting", "kitten" was "kitting". She even called a classmate "Kristing".

Anon

My Dad would always say 'well cut my sock'if I or any other family members told him anything interesting or remarkable. I was 25 when I realised his favourite expression was actually a spoonerism for 'suck my cock'. Oh the long lost innocence of youth.

Geoff

Having to emigrate to an English-speaking country at the tender age of 12 with English that I learnt by rote in school, I spoke an alien kind of English, with text-book big words wrapped in an unfortunate grammar and an even more unfortunate accent.

Needless to say I was much parodied in school. But one thing I don't quite get was why my classmates insisted I say 'orgasm' when I said 'organism' in science class. I insisted that they are missing a syllable, while the nastier ones insisted that that was the way it's spoken. Fortunately I have never wavered in my belief - being the bookworm that I am, I found out what's what from a dictionary. I always played dumb though to wind them up!

holding my own