I don’t want to admit how long it was until I caught the joke in the name of the Southpark movie, “Bigger, Longer and Uncut”.
That one word for me is ‘segue’. I read it, got the meaning, mentally pronounced it ‘seg’. I’d heard people talking about ‘segways’, and understood it, but thought it was a variant phrase - a segue way.
To this day, I cannot read ‘segue’ as ‘segway’, and generally say ‘seg’, too, even knowing it’s wrong.
Please Sir!
We are discussing stupidity, NOT suicidal tendencies.
I have a mental block when I read the word infrared.
I always have to pause to not pronounce it (in my mind) in-frared (rhymes with ‘scared’).
mmm
Yes I think this is what happened with me. I read “corps” before I started hearing it out loud. Or maybe I never connected the two. So there was also a time I thought the Peace Core (that I heard people talk about audibly) and the Peace Corps (pronounced “corpse”) were two different things. I found it strange how no one ever mentioned the Peace Corpse out loud. What was this core they kept talking about?
I know I’ve had a bunch of those where I didn’t realize the written word and the spoken one were the same, but I can’t think of any examples offhand.
It was only in the last five or so years that I realized that the song, “Nights in White Satin” was not spelled “Knights in White Satin”.
I think it was Chris Rock (or maybe someone else) who said that one advantage of being a black guy is that you can honestly answer this question with an enthusiastic, “Hell, yes!”
Southpark-watching pro tip: Assume everything you read or hear on that show is a filthy double entendre. You’ll only be wrong, like 4% of the time.
Not long ago I realized: Arby’s => R.B.'s => Roast Beef
Surprisingly, a coincidence - while Arby’s is derived from ‘R. B.’ it’s from the founders’ names - Raffel Brothers. (Thus the possessive.) I discovered that not long after having the same false realization as you.
Well shit. I’m still stoopid.
It was aborigine for the longest time for me.
I did too.
It ws ennui for me.
Yikes! Until just now I’ve never seen nor pronounced the first R. It’s always been infa red to me.
Been using Palmolive dishwashing detergent for years. Easy on my hands of course…
I always assumed that it bifurcated into “Pal” “Molive”–ok, it’s my hands’ best friend, last name Molive for whatever arbitrary reason…
Until one day last year I was idly looking at the bottle when it hit me:
Palm Olive.
:smack:
Not made any easier by the ladies in the old ads always splitting the syllables my way (“Relax! It’s PalMolive!”), and how neither of the plants in question ever adorned a bottle in either words or pictures (that I can remember)…
When I was a little kid, there was this soap called Solyptol. For some reason, I thought that it was called Solypot and I could not be convinced otherwise by my older siblings. I remember the day I looked at the word and realised that they were right. For some time I’d been laughing my head off at the funny name Solypot. I’d thought it was hilarious.
My dad asked if I knew where his “baked potato chips” went this weekend. Until I found them I was under the misconception that someone had come up with baked potato flavored chips.
For me it was paradigm. Well into my 40’s before I matched the word to the spoken.
When are they going to start including instruction booklets in those things?
mmm
The OJ thread in GD reminds me of another one of mine. For the longest time, I thought that the Kardashian girls were mixed race because I was confusing Johnnie Cochran to be Robert Kardashian.