language: speaking

My younger sister always had a hard time saying "cucumbers" -- she'd pronounce it cumcubers which, to anyone past puberty, sounds pretty obscene.

My cousins used to say "hamboogers" too which never sounded like something I wanted to eat.

I used to think "This morning" was pronounced "Thissmoring" as one word This and smorning.

My Mom always used the phrase "For all intensive purposes" when I was growing up, and (of course) I picked it up too. When I was around 25 years old or so, I learned the correct phrase is "For all intents and purposes". I thought, wow, Mom's been saying it wrong all these years, but I never said anything to her about it. About 5 years later, she was watching Wheel of Fortune, and the puzzle solution was "For all intents and purposes". She said,"Heh! Well I'll be damned! I've been saying it wrong for all these years! " She was around 60 at the time.

When I was around 5/6, I was told the story about the princess and the pea; only i got it mixed up. As you know; the story goes, "she was such a lady she cuold feel a pea through 7 mattresses. What i thought was, "she was such a lady she could pee through seven mattresses."

When I was a kid, I would hear adults talking about people who talked with their hands...and I thought that, somehow, people could manipulate and maneuver their hands fast enough to make vocal sounds. The idea really intrigued me.

Having been taught phonics in grade school, I believed I could sound out virtually any word. The Plymouth dealership sign across from my uncle's home made me think they must use plywood to make the front end.

When I was little I used to think that the line "rubber baby buggy bumpers" meant that the baby was rubber.

I believed that babies spoke their own language, that only mothers could understand (the product of watching mothers trying to guess at what their children wanted when they cried, I guess). Once, when a family friend was at our house with her baby, who was babbling away, I asked my mom to translate for me. I guess she was too busy to talk with me, so she just kept saying "I don't know what he's saying." It was a while before someone explained to me that babies don't actually talk yet.

I was a very quiet child. That's because I believed I would wear out my vocal cords whenever I talked and I had to save them for when I was older.

My youngest sister was always getting her words mixed up.
She thought 'semolina' meant food poisoning (salmonella), and that the UK celebrity, Cilla Black, was called Silly Plank, and that Mum and Dad banked with the Happy National (Abbey National).

I used to believe that 'hospital' was pronounced hos-pill-til, because that's where you got medicines and pills to make you better!

I also remember seeing the word 'Mom' written in a book, and thinking that it was a mis-spelling (in the UK we say 'Mum'), not realising that Mom is American.

my former colleague, david neilsen, used to belive that there was a nomadic dwelling - perhaps like a yurt - called a "purpose". he inferred this from a figure of speach which he took to mean "what i'm about to say is so obvious it's known by all nomads". the idiom in question was "to all in tents and purposes...."

As a child my mother would warn my sister and me that "If you don't stop that I'll spifflicate you". Whe nI was young, I thought spifflicate meant spank or punish. When I got older (in my teens) I thought it was just a word she made up to frighten us. Recently (in my twenties) I actually looked it up (trying to prove to someone it was ont a word) and found that spifflicate IS in the dictionary and it means to KILL!! Now I'll bear psychological scars the rest of my life because I discovered that my mother had been treatening to kill me when I was naughty. I confronted her with this once and she just laughed at me. She KNEW what the word meant!!!! 

When my younger sister was really small (maybe 5), she got in the habit of calling me a 'stupid fuck'. One time, she said that to me and my mom walked in. My mom wasn't exactly happy hearing my sister say that, and to avoid her own embarrassment, she made me tell my sister what 'fuck' meant. Apparently my sister just thought it was another term for a person, but not a 'bad' word. That was the last time she's ever called me that. 

I used to think "so-and-so" was a bad word. My mom would be talking to a friend and say something like, "That guy's a little so-and-so!" She would whisper it so I though "so-and-so" was a bad word. However, she was saying "so-and-so" instead of the bad word she really wanted to say.

When I was little, I watched "All in the Family". I didn't understand "before" could also mean "in front of", so when Rob Reiner would say "All in the Family was filmed before a live audience", it confused the heck out of me.