speaking

Not my belief, but my brother's. When he was around 12 and I 14, the subject of foreign accents came up in a discussion. At one point, I mentioned American accents. (We're American.) He looked confused, and said... "What? Americans don't HAVE an accent."

He had been assuming that people from England, Australia, etc. had to go out of their way to talk like that, and that the American accent was just the normal default way of talking.

Anon

When I first heard the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from Alice in Wonderland on tv, I thought the walrus said it was time to talk about "shoes and ships and CEILING wax." I had no idea why anyone would want to wax their ceiling, but I figured it had to be either more Lewis Carroll nonsense or else some kind of obscure ceiling maintenance technique that grownups used.

Amanda M.

"an" is short for "and"

Anon

You know the movie 5th Element with Bruce Willis and Chris Rock? Theres a character thats all blue with tentacles and sings like its at an opera. When I first saw the movie, during the solo, I yelled out really loud, "Eew look at those testicles!!"

I still get teased for it.

JecNucz

When i was a little kid i used to believe that the word yellow was said as yeller and brat was a cuss word cause my parents told me it was! i am still also afraid of CLOWNS!

Rebecca Ckarj

When I was about ten or eleven, I somehow mixed up the words "lesbian" and "leprosy." I used to be afraid of catching "lesbian" after that. One day I overheard my mom on the phone; she was talking about some woman she knew who was a lesbian, and I freaked out and started screaming at her to get away from me because I thought she'd picked up "lesbian" and I didn't want to catch the disease too!

Needless to say, I felt very silly when my mom explained my mistake.

Manda

when i was little, my mom, my little sister (6 yrs) and me were watching, "fiddler on the roof" in the part where it shows the army on horses, my little sister said, " mommy, are those the gay people?" i started laughing so hard, but my mom LIGHTLY slapped my leg, trying to hide her laughter. obviously, she didn't want to explain being gay to a 6 yr old, so she just said, " no" and went back to watching the moviee. :)

Anon

I thought that people who couldn't hear were called "death" people and that was not a very nice name for them. They couldn't hear, but they certainly weren't dead!

Anon

I used to be afraid that when I have a kid I won't be able to teach it how to speak English and it would just grow up never knowing how to speak.

Danielle

When I was about 10 I first came across this work "fuck" and had no idea what it meant, just that it had something to do with love. So, when we were doing a story in class in which a boy and girl meet, I told my friends afterwards, "I bet they'll fuck."...meaning, "I bet they'll fall in love and marry."

Bill The Butcher

When listening to CasyKasem on America's Top 40 while growing up, I thought he always talked about such-and-such band's 'day view' album. It wasn't until my 9th grade English class that I learned d-e-b-u-t was not pronounce dee-BUTT, but in fact day-BEW, and that it wasn't a 'day view album' but a 'debut album.'

Ugh.

Thanks, Mrs. Hermann

I used to pronounce choir as chore. It was until my 5th grade teacher corrected me when the whole class was reading the passage together. And the worst thing was, I was sitting right in front of my teacher the whole time. Imagine how embarrassing it was when she had to peer out from under her book and correct me in front of everyone.

JG

I used to think that the jokes ... to screw in a light bult ment that that the people actually had to SCREW inside the lightbulb. I've thought this for many many years.

haha

I used to think genre was pronounced "jen - er". Sometimes I still pronounce it that way by accident.

Jener

For the longes time, I said ,"Human Bean."

Amber