speaking

I don't recall believing anything that I've since outgrown. However, I couldn't believe that pronunciations could differ. It was a great concern of mine when I was nine and we were to move from Tennessee to Illinois. I remember repeating "bean" over and over and never believing that it could be pronounced other than the way I's always heard it. Big surprise!

Claudia

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

Aerith

I used to believe the word "movie" was pronounced"wee-oovie"

M

When I was very tiny, I used to think that a portrait was just a rubbish picture of someone. Clearly I had deciphered the meaning correctly from the context, but added a bit of my own. I was outraged at the shoddyness that the people talking would accept when they said that they would like a "poor-trait", so I insisted that I would only accept a "bettertrait", oh yes indeed.

Lawrence G

for some reason, when i was little, i thought "wealthy" meant "poor".

parachute

When I was little, I had this poor habit of repeating every angry thing that I heard on TV because I thought it would make me sound cool. For example: "Mommy, what the hell is that?" "Oh, I didn't wanna come to this stupid place anyway." "Everybody SHUT UP!!!!!" "Will ya knock it off already?" Oh yeah, I heard a lot of this stuff from my dad too (not bad language really, but a lot of the above). My parents would slap me up and down for saying it, and of course never tell me why it was wrong.

Michelle

In primary school, my best friend's older sister told her that the word 'yellow' could also be correctly pronounced 'lellow'. She went around saying the word 'lellow' so much that it became really annoying. I had a huge row with her about it, so we decided to have a vote amongst our other friends. They all decided that 'lellow' was in fact the correct pronounciation, and we all went around saying 'lellow' instead of 'yellow' for the rest of primary.

overactive imagination

I used to believe that 'blanket' was pronounced 'blanklet' until I was about 10, I was very embarassed when my mum finally told be the correct pronounciation.

Ness R.

When I was in 5th grade, I mixed up the words 'facility' and 'faculty'. Faculty meant bathroom, of course, since thats what the faculty bathroom was labeled, and for some reason I knew that it was a bathroom. Our music department held a 'Faculty Concert' and my teacher was going to be in it, so, even though I was confused, I went. On the way there I expressed my confusion to my mom about why it was called a bathroom concert.

Anon

When i was little i used to think the word "Under" was "Behunder" so my mom would ask "Nick, where are my keys" and i would say "Behunder the couch mommy"

Nick

When I was about 5 or 6, I would always wear bike shorts when I wore skirts, because I get paranoid about things pretty easily. Well, I also liked to use big words (to which I rarely knew the definition of) to make me sound smart. I'd recently heard the word 'obsessed,' but didn't know what it meant. One night, my babysitter came over. She noted the biker shorts I had on, to which I replied "Well, I'm obsessed with people seeing my underwear." She just sat there and stared...

Emma

When I first met a deaf person who could speak, I assumed she was from some foreign country, because she talked funny.

Anon

My brother thought that truce was truths.

"Let's make a truths"

Usagi Ohkami

I used to think that "infared" could be pronounsed either "infa-red" or "inffrared" (pronounced in-frared(like in-prayer-ed with an f insted of a p )

Now i know there is no such word as "infrared"
I still think infared looks like infrared though.

KrazyK

I could not figure out how one could feel sorry for *themselves* (it just seems so circular) until one day it hit me that that's what I was doing. I think of that often now, whenever I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Sarah

One day I said "No, I don't want to go to school right now I want to go to school at three o'clock" and my mother said "But them school will be boring!" But I didn't know what "boring" meant, so I thought it meant that it would be raining (as in "pouring")!

ANONYMOUS

I believed that certain words were pronounced one way when spoken and silently pronounced another way when read. For instance the nut "pecan" was pronounced with a short e in the first syllable and a an aah sound in the second one, but when read it was silently pronounced as pee-can. This is probably too complicated to explain but it was one of my rules.

Stephen

I was at a Tim Horton's one day and I was looking at all the good stuff to eat.Then I decided I wanted an eclair.I had never seen the word before so I said 'Mom I want an ecler" With the er instaead of air.My parents have never let me heard the end of it.Even though Ii was 7

Jet

At age 7 my daughter had great fun shooting "baby guns" at summer camp (well, they were little and that's what I thought the counselors were saying", she explained. Okay I can see that but this next one???

Her and her friends thought that being "raped" meant being attacked with a garden implement, in other words *raked". I chose not to correct them on that one....they figured it out themselves when they were old enough to know.

Ladybug2535

When I was young maybe 5 yrs. old whenever my mom would talk on the phone I always thought she was saying to the person she was talking to "potatos again". So I thought eveyone she spoke to ate only potatos. It was 4yrs. before I realized she was saying "Say this again". And I don't have a hearing problem.

Sherri