speaking

Once I had a most embarassing experience as a kid at my big sister's school at a game one time. And it was a booboo that many people wouldn't let me forget for a LONG time. I referred to some cheerleaders "waving their tampons around". That was because I was inclined to confuse the words "tampon" and "pompom". I even still do confuse them occasionally.

Brad

I always thought the saying was 'for crying allowed' instead of 'for crying out loud'.

Anon

I used to believe that a "Rear Admiral" was someone who watched scantily dressed people (like on a beach, for example) and admired their butts.

Kristin Renee

When my best friend's brother was around 7 or 8, he drove their whole family crazy with his endless chitter chater about anything and everything, so they him that he only had a certain amount of words he could use in his lifetime and if he went over that limit he'd never be able to speak again. Just imagine the stillness that ensued after this episode.

Oops!

When I was 10, I visited my aunt and uncle in the city for a week, they lived in a condominium. Back at home My mom and I were walking back home from Church and I told her "When I grow up I want to live in a condom!" My mom explained the correct word 'condo'. But she never did say why she blushed when I pronounced it wrong.

Shalindria

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