speaking

My mother is from London and she always used to say 'maswell,' as in 'yeah, we maswell do that.' I never really thought about it until it came to my GCSE English Lit exam and I could not figure out how to spell it. She said it again a few days later and I questioned her over it. Turns out 'maswell' is actually her version of may as well. I have no idea why I didn't work it out earlier.

Lynda UK

When I was a kid my father had a file holder on his desk that was like a hybrid between a letter rack and a lazy susan. His secretaries would put things in there he needed to deal with immediately.

The first time I ever heard someone say "I'll put that in my circular file" I formed an immediate association with the filing tool on my father's desk and the phrase. Obviously very important things went in the circular file!

Well into my adult life I'd use that phrase in conversation, not realizing I was implying that I would immediately throw the item I had just been given into the trash.

Boss: Ok, this project is critically important.
Me: I'll put it in my circular file right away!
Boss: .... Uhh ....

Anon

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