As a child my mother would warn my sister and me that "If you don't stop that I'll spifflicate you". Whe nI was young, I thought spifflicate meant spank or punish. When I got older (in my teens) I thought it was just a word she made up to frighten us. Recently (in my twenties) I actually looked it up (trying to prove to someone it was ont a word) and found that spifflicate IS in the dictionary and it means to KILL!! Now I'll bear psychological scars the rest of my life because I discovered that my mother had been treatening to kill me when I was naughty. I confronted her with this once and she just laughed at me. She KNEW what the word meant!!!!
A childhood belief about speaking
others believed things like this
- I used to believe that "nuptial" was a naughty word. I thought it meant nipple. XD— Sara Hagen
- my husband believed, until recently, that the word "several" meant seven of something. — sheryl
- For years I heard the word "pedophile" and thought it meant a pedicurist's tool.— Lauren
- In first grade, I thought that if I've never heard of a word before, then it wasn't a word.— Destiny
- up until recently I thought intern was just another word for a secretary (I'm 27 btw)— Axecutioner
- i used to think the word "friendship" meant a special kind of rocketship that you went on with your friends.— chips ahoy!