Up until I was 18--18! I believed that there were two kinds of appetizers one could serve at a party--"orderves" and "horse dovers." I had read about "horse dovers" many times in books and magazines, but at all the parties I'd ever been to, they only served "orderves."

It wasn't until I heard a woman on the radio saying that she could never remember how to spell "hors d'oeuvres" that I figured it out. When I tried to spell this word on my own and nothing looked right, the Frenchiness of it all clicked.

Freezair

My elementary school was very big on teaching us that litter was bad. I misheard the word as "glitter".

When my brother tried to drop a cup outside the window of our car once in a parking lot, I told him grumpily, "No glittering." I imagined that all the litter, if left on the sidewalk for long enough, would turn into glitter. Of course it made sense that glittering wasn't allowed--glitter was a pain to clean up if there was a lot of it spilled!

Gabrielle

i used to swear down that the word huge was spelt and pronounced 'fuge' this resulted in a major fight with my friend at the age of 7, and because he was a boy and i was a girl he won. I believed for ages that if id won the fight then the word would have been 'fuge.'

DietLemonade

As a child, my twin sister and I used to pronounce `Spaghetti' as `Mastaghetti'. Sounds a bit rude, no?

Anon

When I was a child there was a campaign called "keep Britain Tidy" . I was firmly convinced for many years that what I had heard was keep brit and tidy - like spick and span . At about age 11 it finally dawned that there was no such word as brit!

J.B.

when i was younger, i didn't understand that "death" did not also mean "deaf". when i was 5, my doctor asked me during a hearing test "can u hear this?" i replied "of course. do u think i'm death??"

ashley

My mom used to act out the one-person, "You must pay the rent!" scene for my sister and me. It's the one where a comb or similar object is used to signify when the person is playing either the landlord, woman, or hero. Well, it always ends with the landlord saying, "Curses! Foiled again!" For the longest time I believed the phrase was, "Purses, boiled again!!" This would always conjure images in my head of a bunch of purses sitting in a huge pot of boiling water. I wasn't sure why purses being boiled was a bad thing to have happen to you, but I had no reason to question it. Eventually I repeated the phrase in front of my mother one day and she had a pretty good laugh before correcting me.

Nikko

When my parents told me as a young child, that if I didn't slow down the speed of my speech, they would take me to ELOCUTION lessons, I believed that they would be taking me to be ELECTROCUTED stage by stage. I very quickly slowed down my talking.

Louise Kilpatrick

I used to believe that British people were jealous of Americans because only Americans can pronounce the letter "r" correctly.

Ray D. Strawhat

When I was a kid, I was aware that "gender" was the word for if you were a boy or a girl, but that's the only word I knew for that. So in first grade when we took a standardized test for the first time, there was a space that said "sex" and I knew I'd never had sex before so I wrote "no".

Katie

When I was around five years old, my cousin who is one year older than me came to visit. We were putting on our gear so we could go play in the winter snow. He was putting on his hat, it was one of those hats like a cap with a little pom-pom on top. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "putting on my buttocks." For the longest time after that I thought that the type of hat with a pom-pom was called a buttocks, and referred to it that way.

Hannah P.

When I was learning what things are, my dad pointed at his foot in the swimming pool and said "Foot!"

For a year I thought "Water" was called "Foot"

Sean Murricane

I believed that babies spoke their own language, that only mothers could understand (the product of watching mothers trying to guess at what their children wanted when they cried, I guess). Once, when a family friend was at our house with her baby, who was babbling away, I asked my mom to translate for me. I guess she was too busy to talk with me, so she just kept saying "I don't know what he's saying." It was a while before someone explained to me that babies don't actually talk yet.

Char

When I was around 5/6, I was told the story about the princess and the pea; only i got it mixed up. As you know; the story goes, "she was such a lady she cuold feel a pea through 7 mattresses. What i thought was, "she was such a lady she could pee through seven mattresses."

tim

My family is quite religious. Every Sunday my Dad, my sister and I would go to church together (we're Catholics) but my Mum always went to a different church (she's a Protestant). When I was little nobody actually told me what religion my Mum was. Eventually I picked up on what it was and got it loged in my mind that she was a prostitue (see the likeness???).
Come Christmas time my entire family (you know Granny, Grandpa, Uncle X, Auntie Y, Cousin Z) were about to leave for midnight mass. But my mum wasn't coming. So my grandad asked me "Why isn't your Mummy coming to church with us?" and so I replied loudly and proudly "Because she's a PROSTITUTE!".

Vicky

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

When I was about 5 or 6 I was really unaware of what exactly people were saying when they said "suit yourself". I believed that the correct way to say such a thing was "shoot yourself". So whenever my chums didn't want to do what I wanted to it was always "shoot yourself" that came out of my little mouth.

Kristine from Boston

I used to believe when someone said "...as far as the eye can see...", that they were speaking of the Ican Sea. I also believed that the Ican Sea was somewhere in Europe. So, it's pretty far away (at least from where I was).

Robert

When I was quite young I thought that 'this morning' was 'the smorning', and that it was some strange figure of speech, not a time of day.

"The smorning was cold."

Jamie

I read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes as a young child, so one day I found myself wondering, "Why don't speech bubbles come out of our mouths as we talk?" This puzzled me for at least a month afterward.

Cat