speaking

I wrote in my first degree essay that a bilingual friend spoke Polish because she had grown up in Walsall. The lecturer wrote (quite harshly I feel!) "I wasn't aware there was a large Polish community in Birmingham". I'm just glad papers were marked anonymously!

Deb

I used to believe that when you had a "crush" on someone, they had to lie down on the ground in front of you, and you would step on their arm.

JifJif

These still trip me up sometimes:

Pizza Hot = Pizza Hut

Holland Oats = Hal and Oats

Entire State Building= Empire State Building

Crackle Barrel = Cracker Barrel

tonybaloney

I used to believe that the expression "old-timey" was actually "old Tommy." My great uncle's name was Tommy and with my mother's thick southern drawl, "Tommy" and "timey" sounded very similar.

I thought this until I was at least 12 or so.

J. Bred.

In Holland we have a sentence when you are scared by a sudden noise or something. I was sitting at the backseat of my mothers bike when someone drove by so fast my mother shouted out 'I scared me a hat!' I remember looking at the sky seeking this hat. I thought it should float somewhere.

hannah

I always used to believe the word was "acoma". People always talked about someone being in acoma, and if they could come out of acoma, and what would they remember. Not until one time I was talking and said "the acoma" did I really learn the truth. :(

Anon

When I was a kid, I somehow got it into my head that a “scone” was a type of a fish, a shellfish . . . some type of fish. How I got this into my head? . . . I don’t know. Maybe I got scone crossed up with schooner and transposed fishing or the sea with it. It could have been from me looking in my mother’s cookbook while she baked and seeing it grouped amongst other topics - Scallop, Scampi, Scones, Seafood - in their order. I don’t know!

Anyway, I believed it as FACT. And it never got challenged - for whatever reason, it just never came up in conversation. If I had heard it said in a sentence spoken during the course of time, fish may have worked in place of scone in my head, so it never got challenged that way, either. It wasn’t till an episode of ‘Friends’ was on TV, one night some years ago, they were talking about scones and I said something about a scone being a fish and my wife looked at me and said, “WHAT?”. I argued with her that a scone wasn’t some sort of pastry bread, roll thing - IT’S A FISH!

Obviously, I was wrong - but I wouldn’t give in until we got out the dictionary and I saw the proof opposing my error. My face was RED! But you know, I still tried to justify why I thought a scone was a fish - much like I did here! And I’ll go one step further and admit that there’s some weird part of me that still wants to believe a scone is a fish!

Wind Farm Horse

As a small child I believed that the word was "nakeup", finally I found out that it was actually "makeup".

Hannnah P.

I use to think people who were "chinese" were "chinnys"
So during kindergarden with the 3 little pigs, "Not by the hair of my chinny,chin,chin" I asked the teacher if the pigs were chinese."

aliena

Before I had started kindergarden, when it was saturday my parents were happy because it was "the weekend, baby" it was also what a dj would say on the radio, so i thought that the weekend was called "the weekend, baby"
Well, when i started school, we were learning the days of the week and when my teacher asked what the days saturday and sunday were called i answered with a smile and said expressively, like a song "Its the weekend BABY" i wondered why everyone laughed, and for the longest time "the weekend" seemed to plain of a word :P

Ayesha B.

I used to think loot bags were called loop bags.

Anon

I thought for years that women carried "pock-a-books"... oops :-)

Joanna