speaking

In kindergarden, my teacher would always use the name "Sowenso" as an example for things. I thought that "Sowenso" was an invisible monkey that did the examples that she made him do. I thought Sowenso was in our class until 6th grade when I realized that Sowenso was actaully a phrase "So-and-so".

Staycie

I don't remember how it started, but my sister once told me to "Carpe Denim" believing it was "Carpe Diem". I still tell her to "seize the jeans" and we get a big kick out of it.

Loving Big Sis

I've often heard of "taking something too literally", but do we ever hear of taking anything too figuratively? Well, I have done precisely the latter. Growing up, I repeatedly heard the phrase, "Go wash your mouth out with soap and water!", spoken, for example, when someone had said a "dirty word". I always thought that was clearly a figure of speech, and that surely no one had ever been literally required to do that. It wasn't until my first part-time job during college that I heard a co-worker speak of how her mother used to make her wash her mouth out with soap and water. Something about the context in which she was telling it seemed to indicate that her mother made her LITERALLY do that. So I asked her, and she assurred me that indeed her mother used to make her LITERALLY wash her mouth out with soap and water. I was astonished to learn that that was ever more than an outlandish figure of speech.

Jim

Once in class i listened to a teacher with a wierd accent talking about "Coffee Sent Up". I could'nt make sense of what he was talking through that one hour. Later on i found out he saying "Coefficient of".

Dawood

I used to believe that everyone was given a certain number of words to say in their life and if they used them all up to quickly they wouldn't be able to talk when they were older

Maya

I was learning geometry in school and I always liked to tell my parents all about what I'd learned. They were highly amused the day I came home and told them I'd learned how to find the circumcision of a circle.

Maya

I used to believe that there were two ways to say the word spelt 'misled'. One was pronounced 'my-zuld' and was to be fooled by a miser, and the other one was 'miss-lead' (the real one) which was to be lead astray.

Jade

I remember briefly thinking as a child that "The Laundry" was a branch of the armed forces. It wasn't long thereafter that I got it straightened out what a laundry is. But before that, I guess that I perceived that "The Army, The Navy, and The Laundry" seemed like a group of similar things.

Connie

My husband and I were talking and somehow we used the word "Guaranteed".

My daughter asked
"Whats guaranteed?"

I said it was something you can count on.

"Oh" she said "You mean 1-2-3!"

-Mom

When I was in 3rd grade I heard a girl run up to the teacher and said "Robert has a crush on Alisha!" So, I thought that Robert was literally crushing Alisha by sitting on her or laying on her. I was quite mad to think that he was "crushing" her!

jazzaray

I was introduced to the idea of "soldiers" before "shoulders". The soldiers I knew wore red tunics, bearskins and marched in tight formations. When I found out, via a sweater that my grandmother had knitted for me, that the area between my neck and the top of my arm was in fact a "soldier" I was mystified. For some time I couldn't get the image of a small soldier in bearskin and red tunic sitting on each of my shoulders out of my mind and reasoned that this must've been the origin of the word.

Lee, England

Whenever someone said the word "Grades" it reminded me of grapes and suddenly I would start craving them. I guess they both sound similar.

Also, when I was little about 5 or 6, my dad had chocolate and told me to share it with my sister. Since then, whenever I hear the word share or shares it reminds me of chocolate.

Lime

i used to think gymnastics was a person named Jim Nastics. I couldn't understand how he could be at the local youth club AND on TV in the same day- and i could never figure out who he was when i watched it.

Anon

A few years ago, I was at my aunts house visiting. Well, she was a little annoyed at my cousin (who was about 6 at the time) always saying the word "aint". So me and my sister told her that we had a friend who used that word and she got so sick she had to go to the hospital. I only heard her say the word about once the whole rest of the time ;)

Amanda

When sitting in the car one day, my sister complained about the meanings of so many words changing to mean something bad. When asked what she meant, she thought that 'lesbians' used to be what the little imps in Ireland were called!

Anon

when i young my sisters thought it would be funny to teach me my own language, they suceeded in this and by the time i was old enough to go to school i spoke in gibberish and had 2years of speech therapy, i believed this was normal.........

hannah

I remember my mom saying it must be in their genes. I heard it as jeans and wondered what could possibly be in those jeans.

Kel

A long time ago, my friend had a different meaning for the word "gay".
So, one day, we were driving in the car (his dad was driving and his older brother-who was about 16-was in the passenger seat) and my friend said "hey dad, I'm gay!"
He was about 6 years old at the time and since then everyone still teases him about it.

Anon