language: speaking

I went to a day camp for two weeks when I was 7. It was run by school teachers and were called counselors, a word I didn't know. After several days of our classes being swapped around or not having certain ones, I was convinced the adults were "cancelers" because they were canceling the classes.

My dad told me at a very young age that I should read the book "To Kill a Mockingbird". However, I heard him wrong and until I hit the seventh grade I called it "Tequila Mockingbird"

I used to think that getting "knocked up" meant getting hurt. One day when I was about 5 years old I scraped my knee then told my mom i got "knocked up". You should have seen the look on her face.

I have a friend who, up until about 6 months ago, thought the color turquoise was actually "turk boys". He is 23 years old, by the way.

My mother's godson was unable to say pacifier when he was little. Instead, he would just scream, "Fire" when the pacifier fell out of the crib.

I read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes as a young child, so one day I found myself wondering, "Why don't speech bubbles come out of our mouths as we talk?" This puzzled me for at least a month afterward.

When I was young, my mother would always say things were "as slow as a wet week". I realise now that this is a figure of speech referring to the way that things can seem really slow or boring during rainy weather.

I used to believe that there were these soggy, spongy creatures called "wet weaks", and I figured they must slop around everywhere incredibly slowly.

I thought eavesdropping was actually "easedropping" because it was so easy!

When I whas 7, I learned my first "bad" word, my mother told me that only criminals use that word.
so i was always thinking that if i say any bad word, the police would come and put me in jail.

When I was little my grandfather told me that my cousin was in a private school. I was so confused. If it was private, how did he know?

Yes, I was the kid that took everything literally

I used to think that if something was out of the question, then you were banned from asking for it.

I thought "bless you" always came after "excuse me" after burping, farting, etc. It was pretty funny when I would say "bless you" after someone passed gas.

i used to think that the word 'clothes' was the plural for 'clo.' so i'd call a sock or a shirt a clo.

I though that there were a certain amount of words, say a million, that I had available to use before I died. I was a quiet kid

When I was a child there was a campaign called "keep Britain Tidy" . I was firmly convinced for many years that what I had heard was keep brit and tidy - like spick and span . At about age 11 it finally dawned that there was no such word as brit!

Having to emigrate to an English-speaking country at the tender age of 12 with English that I learnt by rote in school, I spoke an alien kind of English, with text-book big words wrapped in an unfortunate grammar and an even more unfortunate accent.

Needless to say I was much parodied in school. But one thing I don't quite get was why my classmates insisted I say 'orgasm' when I said 'organism' in science class. I insisted that they are missing a syllable, while the nastier ones insisted that that was the way it's spoken. Fortunately I have never wavered in my belief - being the bookworm that I am, I found out what's what from a dictionary. I always played dumb though to wind them up!