I used to think Yiddish was pronounced to rhyme with Swedish.
language
3,499 beliefs in this area
pick of the bunch
I believed that the word optimistic was something to do with opticians and being happy with your eyesight.
I thought that Roman Numerals were pronounced like the letters making up the numeral rather than like the number. For one birthday (I think I was about 8 or 9) I got the game Mega Man IV and would keep referring to it as "Mega Man I.V" (pronounced just like the abbreviation for "intravenous") even though my parents corrected me. I'm not sure how long it took for me to say it right.
pick of the bunch
When I started reading comics, I used to think people were yelling "APPLES" when they were happy to see a performance. Later on I learned the word "applause".
This is a rather stupid one lol, but I used to think that foreign schoolkids, like ones from Kosovo or somewhere like that, would have to have 'special lessons' with speaking English. You get the idea.
When I was eleven or twelve, I saw the live-action Smurfs movie and there's a scene where a human says, "Stop saying, 'smurf' for everything! I mean, what does it even mean?! Smurf! Smurfitty smurf smurf smurf!" and a Smurf replies, "There's no call for that kind of language!", so I thought that "Smurfitty" was a swear word.
When I was learning to read, I pronounced "fire" as "fury" and "crocodile" as "croco-DEE-lay".
This one is actually my uncle. He lived with Granny and Granddad and my mother and aunt in a house next to a butcher's shop or something that had "hydra" written on the sign.
My uncle couldn't read back then and thought that the sign had his name on them.
Once, I was playing a video game and at the end, one of the other characters said "That was pathetic!," referring to my lack of effort.
i never heard the word before, so I thought "pathetic" meant "wicked good."
As a kid, I learned from a song that the French word "connard" meant "a**hole."
One time, when I was in school, I called someone a "connard" and the teacher heard.
The teacher sent me to detention, which led me to believe that all French words were swears.
And the ironic part was, it was my SPANISH teacher who heard and sent me to detention.
I believed the word “faggot” was a swear word until I was almost 18. Also, when I was 7, several people told me that “boring” was a swear word. I totally fell for it. The phase didn’t last too long. Maybe a couple of months.
My father convinced me that grawlixes (those "@#$%&*" symbols that sometimes appear in comics to represent swears) were pronounced "errr-rrr-rr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rr." Even though I'm an adult, I still can't stop pronouncing grawlixes like that.
When I was little in the early 60's we lived in an area that was nearly all white.Back then the Politically Correct thing to call black people was "Negros".The first time I heard that term I got a weird image of a person who had knees growing all over them ( as in "knee grows").I thought it was a weird disability of some sort.
pick of the bunch
I thought the word "divvy" was slang for "divide." So, I would say "8 divvy 2" instead of "8 divided by 2." I'm sure my parents and teachers were confused!
I thought the C-word was crap.
I used to believe that "foofa" was the F-word in Spanish.
pick of the bunch
Not me but my classmate. He thought that stereotyping was listening to the stereo.
When people used the word "stationary" to mean staying still, I thought they were talking about the stuff you write with.
i used to think the New York accent was the accent all old people had because as a child all the old people I knew (grandparents, great grandma, great aunts, uncles, etc) had thick NY accents. Also that when you become old you automatically develop a New York accent as like a rite of passage ...I was a strange child
I thought "incessantly" meant "often and annoyingly".