speaking

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

When I was a kid, the first time I heard my parents use the word "babysit" I thought they were actually going to find a baby to sit on. When they said it was me they were talking about me, I thought they were going to turn me back into a baby and I wanted to know why I needed to be sit upon.

Linda from Los Angeles

My father used to use "oblivious" when he meant "obvious" because he thought it was funny, so i went through grade school thinking they meant the same thing

jeremy

when i was little I didn't know about prefixes on words being able to be attached to other words and got double barrelled words mixed up. I always wondering why multi-storey car parks weren't multi-coloured.

Heather

As I was a quite chatty child (verbal-diarrohea) as my parents called it, I was told one day at about age six that you could only say 1000 words in your lifetime and then you wouldn't be able to talk anymore. I was fairly quiet for a short time after that!

Breezy

When I was little, I always misheard the word "ultimatum" and thought it was "ultomato." I didn't understand what making demands had to do with tomatoes, but I figured it was something bad.

Jennifer F.

My grandparents used to always tell their dogs to "shut up", so I thought that the term was only used for dogs. Then one day my mom playfully told me to shut up, and I told her, "I'm not a dog!"

TheLoudPlayr

In 1959 I had a class about menstruation.(They didn't call it a "period" way back then). I had never heard of it before. Then on TV they kept saying it over and over and I wondered why the men were talking about it. I asked my teacher..she watched and really listened to the news....she said they were saying Adminstration. I was very naive

Deloris

I used to think "prima donna" was actually "pre-madonna" and it meant people who were full of themselves before they actually got famous.

Matt

In kindergarten, my friend’s house number was 101, and I thought it was wrong for people to say it “one oh one”. I would say, “it’s not a letter O, it’s a zero! Shouldn’t you say ‘one zero one’?”

EJ

I use to think people who were "chinese" were "chinnys"
So during kindergarden with the 3 little pigs, "Not by the hair of my chinny,chin,chin" I asked the teacher if the pigs were chinese."

aliena

I wrote in my first degree essay that a bilingual friend spoke Polish because she had grown up in Walsall. The lecturer wrote (quite harshly I feel!) "I wasn't aware there was a large Polish community in Birmingham". I'm just glad papers were marked anonymously!

Deb

When I was younger I would latch onto words I didn't know and try to figure out what they meant without asking. Bad words? No. Just boring ones. Like I always thought the word "behalf" was another word for one's behind. When someone would go before a crowd and say "On her behalf..." I was shocked they were allowed to talk about that in front of people! I knew it had to be a more acceptable form of that word because of that.

Jay

I used to believe that "perhaps" was only used when you were tired of saying "maybe", instead of just being an alternative word, and I asked people who said it if they were tired of saying "maybe". I had a children's dictionary that explained that they meant the same thing by saying "'Perhaps' is a word you use when you are tired of saying 'maybe'".

perhaps

I used to think the LMNOP part of the alphabet was, elemenopee.

Christina

I thought the phrase "throw the towel in" had to do with throwing one's swimming towel into the pool/ocean/lake/river.

Anon

I used to take grammar a little to seriously in my fervour to learn of speech. Convinced of my brilliant intellect, and chuffed with being able to figure it out for myself, I often came out with comments like "That's a good you-dea", and "Open sesa-you"...

Gioval

I use to think elevators were alligators & cantalope was antelopes.

Anon