I had an uncle who told me that "pilchards" was a swearword. I heard a presenter use it on a programme about fishing when I was about 6, and ran to tell my mum.
Sometimes I still catch myself using it..

Anon

When I was four or five I was getting ready to go to outside and I was putting on my mitts. As I was putting on my mitts fuzz kept getting in the way so I finally shouted at my mom "THIS D*MN GREEN FUZZ!" she looked at me and told me to never say that again because it was rude. I looked her straight in the eye and said "fuzz?". So for years I thought that fuzz was a bad word that i should never say.

Jonelly

my moms friends kid thinks shoot is a "bad" word 1 day she saw a bee and said:go make honey you damn bee!

electric killer

when i was in 5 grade my aunt said think of names that rhyme with '-ut' so my sister came up with sl*t and we that it was pretty funny and we didn't know what it was and we went home and said "hey, sl*ts!" when we got in the kitchen we got in trouble and were sent to our rooms we didn't know why i looked it up and told my sister they still wont let us live it down

Jaya

When I was very young, almost six, one of my older cousins left a copy of Huckelberry Finn at my house. I started to read it and was puzzled when Huck told Tom about his life with the Widow Douglas.

To paraphrase, he said that he had to cuss for ten minutes just to get the taste back. My grand mother had always told me that if we kids said bad words or talked back that our tongues would turn black and shrivel up and fall right out of our heads.

Well, I wanted to know what it tasted like to cuss anyhow, so one morning after every one else had gotten up, I went upstairs and said every bad word I could think of. Needless to say, I didn't get any taste from it, just a bad case of the guilt and fear that I would wake up one morning and my tongue would be lying on my pillow beside me.

Marie

When I was a little girl my brother use to call me "naughty name" and I would run and tell my mom. She separated us in a room and could later her my brother whispering across the room to me "naughty name, naughty name".

Bellbean

I used to believe that you couldn't swear until you were like 19 or 20 years old! I actually remember asking my mom: "When can I swear?"

boo

I had a friend growing up, and her parents used to talk about "Sumbees". These, apparently, were very bad people.

I was always puzzled by this, until they told the story that when she was about 18 months old, she was looking through her coloring book, and every time she couldn't get the page to turn smoothly, she'd exclaim, "Sumbee!"

It took them several times of seeing this to figure out she was saying, "Sonofabitch!". (If you're not British, and you've never heard a Texan pronounce this word, it comes out as "Sum-bitch!".

helen

My parents told me the word "butt" was a very bad word and would always scould me for using it. My friends and I would get together and just say that word and laugh hysterically.

Sam

I once read an article in Readers Digest wherein a teenager referred to all Hispanics as "f..... Puerto Ricans". I did not understand that it was an edited swear word; I thought the person had started to say something rude, then changed his mind and simply said "Puerto Ricans". I thought it was very polite of him to stop himself from swearing, and also pretty funny that he didn't know not all Hispanics come from Puerto Rico.

Nicole

i use to mix up shoot and sh*t. when ever i used sh*t my mom would tell me to use shoot and i would yell at her to stop using shoot and say sh*t,we are in public

rob

My brother used to think toilet was a swear.

Oopsh

There aws this swear word and i didnt no what it was my frend sed it was condom and i only found out wen i was older!

Also we had this Russian person at our school, and my frend sed that vodka was a russian swear word and my dad sed something about vodka then he told me it was a drink! lol

KRAZY KYLE

I grew up in a ranching/farm family. One time we were running cattle through a chute to put fly spray on their backs and one kicked me through the fence. I was outraged and yelled "OW! You cock sucker!" To me a cock was a rooster or chicken and a sucker was a foolish person or an idiot. I thought I was saying you idiot chicken. Even after I got into trouble, I still didn't know why what I said was bad until years later.

cowgirl from the sticks

In 2nd grade, I didn't know what jerk off meant. I thought it was a worse term for jerk, but not a curse word, so I could use it. So I would run around the schoolyard calling people jerk offs and having no clue what it really meant...

Emma