speaking

i used to believe that when you accidentally/ unconsciously say something bad, then knock on wood three times.... it wouldn't come true. :D

elmo

I used to pronounce and spell the word 'both' B-O-L-T-H until I was a senior in high school. One of my friends paused my sentence and asked why I was talking so weird. I came home that night and listened to my dad speak and realized I had been imitating the way he said it.

Liz

I used to believe people could use up all their words and my dead great-grandmother who wasn't speaking used up her words.

These are my last wo-

I used to believe that "according" meant playing the accordion, since it sounded like accordion.

According

I used to think that fetish meant phobia. I was afraid of bare feet and when i told people i had a feet fetish, they would take their shoes off and stick their feet in my face which freaked me out. I just thought that they did that to scare me, because i didn't know what a fetish was. That was in 3rd grade, when i didn't know that much about fetishes

Andy

I used to pronounce the word "Computer" as "Crocuta"

Anon

I used to think that teenagers had really interesting conversations.

Nathan

I lived in California and believed that every U.S. state had its own language. I was confused when I met some people from Colorado and could comprehend their speech.

John

When I was a kid, I just couldn't understand why we were human beans. We weren't long and green and stringy and we didn't look terribly edible...it was an enormous mystery to me...

Anon

a rather talkative 4 year old, my sister told me that after so many words i would run out of speech. i thought that one day i would just open my mouth and no sound would come out. my parents found it very odd that for about a week, i didn't have much to say (in an effort to conserve my words) and finally got to the root of the problem.

evie

As a kid, I always read a lot, and read a lot of my parents' books. So there were a lot of words that I'd read (and understood) but didn't know how to pronounce.

In high school, I was preparing a Shakespearean monologue for speech class that included the word "whore". Luckily, I practiced at home first, where my mom told me that "war" was not the right way to say it. :)

Anon

When people used to say 'Search Me' when they didn't know the answer, I got terribly confused because surely that meant they did have the answer somewhere about their person?

One day I asked my dad if you searched a person who said 'Search Me' you'd find a small piece of paper with the answer written on it. I still have visions of this whenever people say 'Search Me'. I am 30.

Anon

I used to believe that American people were the only people in the world who didn't have accents. I always conplained that I was born in the one place where people didn't have accents. I got over it, though, when my brother informed me that I have an American accent.

Nicole

I used to believe that our "voiceboxes" came with a finite number of words twe could speak in our lifetime, so I believed it wase wise to conserve words lest one become mute after middle age.

Peter

i used to think stigmata meant the really clear, white sunbeams that you could see reaching down to the earth.

lora

When I was young I didn't know (of course) why people die. So I thought that it was limited by the number of words you were allowed to speak in your life. If you pass that number then you die. I never knew how many words that were, but surely I would by now have died already 1000 times.

Dutchy

When I was young I assumed that 'yes' is always the positive response and 'no' always meant a negative response. So when someone would ask me "Do you mind if....blah blah?" I would get confused and instead of saying 'no' as in "no, i dont mind" I would say 'yes' as in what I thought to be "yes, i dont mind". I took me a while to pick up on why whoever was asking the question always looked at me as if I was a rude little brat.

Brendan

For years I was under the impression that the sailing boat that started with a 'y' was pronounced "yatchet".
No-one told me :-(

yacht boy

I used to think that cattle was a kind of kettle, because it was a similar sounding word. I had a recurring dream about my parents filling the kettle and saying it was the cattle, and it made a funny noise, something like "Voontoom, voontoom, voontoom". The Christmas carol "Away in a manger" has a verse which says "The cattle are lowing and the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes". I thought that meant the kettles are whistling.

Alan

When I was a kid and said "no" to something simple my Dad asked me to do, he would say "What did your last servant die of, a humphy back?" or the short version "What did you last servant die of?" Of course being a kid and not knowing what a servant was, all I heard was a bunch of syllables going whatdidyourlastservantdieof. I thought it just meant "Do it yourself". Then one day in school the teacher wanted me to write on the blackboard and I asked her "What did your last servant die of." That was not fun.

Robert