I thought when people said debit (like a debit card) they were trying to say "debut" and didn't realize the T was silent.

God Parkland

I thought the saying "run amok" was actually "run a muck" and figured a "muck" must be some weird measurement of distance I had never heard of!

Alberto Richardson

when i was little i used to think that an appetizer was called lingerie, and that lingerie was an appetizer, so once i saw my mom maken like shrimps, and dips and such and i was like: "mom nice lingerie!"

Christina L.

My mom was hosting a fundraiser one year, but I thought she was saying "fun razor". I wanted one (a fun razor)so badly because my dad would never let me play with his razors.

papa2be

When I was younger I loved potpouri. But I always confused potpouri with diarhea, so I would go around stores chanting, "Diarhea! Diarhea!" because I always got excited when I saw a bag of potpouri. (I think I thought this because I pronounced potpouri as poperia, so it sounded like diarhea to me! And to this day I still pronounce it as poperia.)

Azalee

My fianace grew up around his father and cars and always talking about them, looking at them, etc. One night I noticed that he was using the word "deluxe" in the wrong context, and asked him what he thought it meant. When he responded that it mean "bad" or "worse then the rest" i was baffled that he had the exact opposite meaning of what it really meant. I asked him why he thought that. He said that because in cars the "deluxe" version is always the worse of the models. You have stuff like "supreme" and all the super decked out models. Than the base model they still call something nice like "deluxe" even though it's the bottom model. So he thought it meant crappy version.

Anon

This isn't mine, but my sister's. My sister is 5 and she recently saw the commercial for genital herpes. Well, I guess she figured "genital" was "genetic," because when my grandparents were over she proudly whispered to them: "I have genital dyslexia."

NO THANKS

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

One day when I was walking outside with my mom, we saw some dragonflies or something flying around and I asked her what they were. She said "Oh, just some type of fly." Later on when we saw them again I said "Look, Mama, it's a typafly!!" I thought that was the name of them- 'typa-fly'

Anon

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.

Remember the show "Wide World of Sports" that was hosted by Jim McKay? The show opened with McKay saying "Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC's Wide World of Sports! For the longest time, even into my adulthood, I thought "agony of defeat" was "agony of the feet."

Connie

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 used to think that babies could communicate with eachother, just as adults communicate with eachother. I just assumed there was "baby's English" and then "adult English". I also theorized that if you were at JUST the right age, (for example: 3 year, 7 months and two days old) you would be able to speak both languages.

At the time, I had a cousin who was 3 years old and her brother was just a baby. Me and my cousins all believed in my theory. We sought to exploit my 3-year old cousin and create a "baby translation company". :)

Moose

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 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

As a child my father used to fix his car with a tool called a ratchet, I always thought he was saying "pass the rat sh*t" I always gave a confused look and meandered off incase I got wrong for knowing what a sh*t was. or even worse, had to actually pick it up!

becca

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

Ray D. Strawhat

I used to watch the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians constantly. At the part where Nanny calls Roger a "blooming hero", I couldn't understand her acccent and thought she called him a "bloomineero"--whatever that is.

Jo

One day when I was about 7 or 8 my guy friend from across the street came over. He was always bragging about anything he could think of, so one day I told him I could speak Cherokee, he asked me to prove it and I just blurted out some random made up words. My dad had been BBQing just a few feet away and when I stopped "talking" he said "Pretty good Cherokee sweetie."
After that I had completely convinced my friend that I could speak Cherokee, and my dad had convinced me that I could too.

I was about 11 when I finally figured out that he was kidding.

Little Lies Alot