language: speaking

i used to believe that the word chimney was made up and it was actually chimley. i believed it until i was about 11 and even thought someone had made a joke dictionary to trick me. i believed it up until i heard that song that goes chim chimney chim chimney chim chim charoo. lmfao.

I began reading very early, and so I knew a lot of words at a young age. However, I had only seen them written; I had never heard them spoken. So from age four to about age 10, I belived that the word "procedure" was pronounced "pro-DUCK-shure". When I heard the word "procedure' spoken by a teacher or something, I thought it was a completely different word! My dad finally enlightened me in fifth grade.

I used to think up until now that when a piece of jewelery was paste(fake) that it was litterarally made of glue! Though I always wondered how they managed to make the jewels out of glue...

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".

when i was about 4 i used to believe that 'on purpose' meant accidentally. whenever i spilled drinks i would shriek, "I did it on purpose, i did it on purpose!!!!"

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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!

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.

I couldn't understand why no-one had invented a word for something that isn't big but at the same time isn't small so I used to express the concept with the word "little-big" or "big-little". It was a revelation to me when my mother asked me go to the shops for a medium sliced loaf (of bread) and I discovered that someone somewhere had actually solved the problem that was perplexing me at the time.

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.

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.