speaking

When I was a little kid we traveled long distances by car--this was in the '40s--and my parents spoke of "living out of our suitcases." I thought they were saying we were living out of our soup cases and I used to look for the cans of soup in our suitcases to no avail.

Ted

When I was a kid, the first time I heard my parents use the word "babysit" I thought they were actually going to find a baby to sit on. When they said it was me they were talking about me, I thought they were going to turn me back into a baby and I wanted to know why I needed to be sit upon.

Linda from Los Angeles

Since the words of the English language obviously needed to have been created at some point in time, I believed that the responsibility of coming up with all of the words rested upon the shoulders of one man. He thought up all of the words after sundown, with a group of his friends helping him along. They sat in his backyard while he played the banjo, and pointed at objects and then decided what to name them.

Amy

In my native language, the word for "scar" is pronounced the same way as the letter "R" (the word for the letter, not the sound). Therefore, I thought for a really long time that if you hurt yourself bad enough you got a big red "R", possibly on your forehead (I don't know where that came from. I suppose I had heard of (obviously not met!) a person who had got a scar on their forehead).

J.

For forty years my family has reminded me about Christmas when I was five years old. A relative who traveled extensively brought blue jeans from Paris as a gift for me. I tried them on, and the family quickly made a big deal of my 'spiffy European pants'. I soon announced to the family that I was wearing my "new spiffy I'm-a-peeing pants".

Phil P.

When I first heard the phrase "survival of the fittest," (probably around age 7 or 8) I had no idea what the word "fittest" meant and believed that people really meant "fattest"! ^_^

Vivienne

I used to see that commercial advertising for the grocery store "Fiesta" when I was little...This lady would always be on the commercials and at the end she would say "FIESTA". I used to think that the lady was pronouncing it wrong and that it was really Fiester. I thought she was just putting some accent flair on the end of the word...I used to correct her out loud. I would say, "No, it's Fiester!!"

Angela

I used to believe that a "punch line" meant a line of people waiting to dip punch from a punch bowl.

Sheila

I used to be confused on how I was to respond when I asked someone, "do you mind if I blah blah blah?" Some people would be like, "no go right ahead!" While others would say, "yes do what you like!" So I would stand there and be like, "ummm, so can I?"

Keisha

Somewhere down the line of growing up, I lost the 'L' in flashlight. Even now as an adult I still tend to say "fashlight" instead and have to actually think about the word before saying it.

Silverchild

I used to believe that "God bless you" was "gableshu," so everytime someone sneezed, I would say "gableshu."

JS

My brother thought that truce was truths.

"Let's make a truths"

Usagi Ohkami

I used to believe "foyer" meant fireplace because is german feuer [pronounced like foyer] means fire.
I never heard anyone say foyer before, until i was at my grandmas house once. She told me to go wait in the ''foyer'', and i had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she wanted me to wait in the fireplace!!

Kupfer Staub und Feuer

When I was little I thought that "involved" was a dirty word, and would get really embarassed when I heard my parents say it. Since it was my mom I usually heard it from, I thought it was a female private part. I think this is weird, because I was only about 3 or 4 at the time, but now realize that "involved" sounds a lot like "vulva." Coincidence?

Steph

I used to believe that the phrase "Lord, have mercy" was "Lord, how mercy". At the time, I was familiar with the word "mercy" but had no idea what it meant. From the context of what I thought was "Lord, how mercy", I assumed that "mercy" must be an adjective, indicating the presence of lots of "merce" or "merces", whatever merse or merces were. I So I grew to think that "merce" or "merces" denoted a condition of difficult or dreaded circumstances. After all that was the kind of conditions generally being experienced or anticipated by anyone who said (so I thought) "Lord, how mercy!".

Jessica

I used to belive that the English language was made up by two men at the start of the world.Their was one tall and one short and that was why we had the same sounding word meaning different things (e.g. right and write) because they each wanted to call a different thing the same word so the tall one made the short one change the spelling!

Beth

I used to think the 'okay sign' -- when you put your thumb and middle finger together and stick the rest of your fingers up -- was actually a 'monocle sign' and meant that you lost your monocle or something like that. I only wish I could tell you what made me believe this.

Majusca