speaking

I often heard people being called dirt bags and wondered what that ment, until one time I was visiting an aunt that had an apple tree in her garden. She was having a problem with moose eating the tree so she tied white bags with dirt in them too a rope fence around the base of the tree. It scared the moose away. I naturally assumed these were dirt bags but never could figure out why you would consider a person to be one.

missa

When I was rather young, my friend and I thought we could speak with British accents as if it was a whole different language, and we wrote it differently. All as were to be substituted for os, so bath became both (pronounce bawth). The opposite was also true; all os became as. So "Let's go" would become "Let's ga (gay)."

We used to speak in this manner around our parents, thinking they couldn't understand a word that we said. And of course, we had cracked a code; everyone wrote their words with these alternate spellings in England.

Nat sa British Noncy

I used to think "understood" meant you didn't understand, because "under" means down. My mom would scold me and say, "Am I understood?" and I'd sheepishly reply "no", which got me 5 minutes in the corner every time for being a "smartmouth". One day, I heard someone use "understand" and "understood" in the same sentence, and it clicked.

Jamie

When I was about 8, my dad and I watched an old movie he'd seen as a kid. He mentioned having a crush on the young actress in the movie when he was younger, and said he would have "given his right arm" to go on a date with her. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why she'd want his right arm anyway.

Jamie

When I was younger I heard the word manure used (my mother and most nearby relatives had gardens), but had never seen it written. When I finally saw it I failed to connect the spoken word with what I was reading, so I gave it my own pronunciation: man'yer. It took a while to dicsover the mistake.

Charles

when people would say "no offence" i thought it meant don t build a fence between us if you don t like what i m about to say.

Anon

my sisters friend is form finland and having only heard the word infantry thought it was an infant tree, liek a tree full of infants.

numa numa

when i was little I didn't know about prefixes on words being able to be attached to other words and got double barrelled words mixed up. I always wondering why multi-storey car parks weren't multi-coloured.

Heather

I used to think that an episode was an episoda, and that it was a kind of soda that made you sick when you drank it (epi meaning EPIdemic). I got upset when somebody was talking about that funny episode of Spongebob, thinking that they were jerks to think that Spongebob with a disease was funny.

Anon

I could not figure out how one could feel sorry for *themselves* (it just seems so circular) until one day it hit me that that's what I was doing. I think of that often now, whenever I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Sarah

whenever adults used to say "the king was overthrown" i would picture in my head that they actually picked him by his clothes and threw him out of the window of the castle. and i would take other words literally too but thats just the first one i remember

christina

I used to believe that the word 'caterpillar" was the big trucks that were used for road works....not a brand!

J@M & $uG@r

When I was younger I thought the the letters L, M, N, O, P were all one letter!!

Brittany

I used to think people on the West Coast of the US were the only people in the world without accents. If you went a little bit further east, everybody had Texas accents, and if you went to the East Coast, everybody had New York accents. I thought Midwestern people and East Coast people must be real jealous of the West Coast people, because we were the only normal ones. I sure was enlightened back then, huh?

anonymous

My father used to use "oblivious" when he meant "obvious" because he thought it was funny, so i went through grade school thinking they meant the same thing

jeremy

I used to think that "lagoon" and "legume" were the same word. I thought a lagoon was so called because it is roughly shaped like a pea pod.

Valerie

I used to think that "infared" could be pronounsed either "infa-red" or "inffrared" (pronounced in-frared(like in-prayer-ed with an f insted of a p )

Now i know there is no such word as "infrared"
I still think infared looks like infrared though.

KrazyK

For the longest time I could never keep the paparazzi and Pavarotti straight...
By longest time, I mean my friends were making fun of me in Jr. High.
So I finally got it right, and declaired that the paparazzi was the bastard child of Pavarotti and Liberace.

Commissar Em-cha