Similar to this, when I saw business signs that said “est. 1918” or whatever, I thought it meant, “were not sure exactly when this business started, so here’s our best guess…”
For the longest time, I thought “Godfearing” was “Godfaring”—you know, like “Seafaring”? It seemed to make sense—if a sailor or someone traveling on a ship was a “seafarer,” a Christian might call themselves a “Godfarer”—and fancy and all poetic-like.
And I thought the “Gate” in “Golden Gate Bridge” referred to some physical process, like galvanizing, that gave it it’s color. (And that “Golden” was more or less ad copy—It’s kind of a non-gray, yet metalic color. Sort of. Kinda.)
OK, you know that song in Mary Poppins, “Feed the birds, tuppence a day”? I thought that the word was “tuffins”, and that it was a sort of biscuit (since, you know, it rhymes with “muffins”). So feeding the birds tuffins a day meant scattering pieces of biscuits for them. Why would the birds want to eat coins? Of course, this left me bewildered why anyone would put tuffins in a bank…
Ironically, after many years of reading English books, I’m now the unofficial British-American translator in my family. When we went to Ireland, Mom was always asking me what things meant, and I had to correct her a few times lest we confuse the locals.
I grew up on the coast, and there was a shop up the road from my house that had a huge maroon billboard with the word “BIKINIS” on it.
When I first learned to read, that sign used to baffle me. What is “BIK-in-is?”
I’d never been to the shop, so it was a couple of years before I looked at it and went…“Wait! Maybe it’s ‘Bik-EE-nee!’ A two-piece bathingsuit!”
At that point, I had also vaguely heard of Bikini Island, and of some “testing” going on there, and I assumed it must’ve been experimental swimwear fashion.
At the church we went to, there was a Wurlitzer piano in the choir’s practice room, and I mentioned it to my parents for some reason. Only I couldn’t recall or make sense of the word “Wurlitzer.” I called it a “Twin-Zinger.” Because I’d had the Zingers cakes (like Twinkies, for those who don’t know) and for some reason I decided that that third syllable must be “Twin.”
I am 27 years old. I have yet to live it down, lo these twenty years later.
Finally, my best friend told me all about sex when I was six years old, and when she pointed south and said the man puts his weenie “down there,” I assumed she meant in the ass, for some reason. I only knew of two openings at that point, and since I couldn’t imagine a penis fitting into where I peed, I assumed, quite logically, that she must mean the other one.
This really grossed me out. It was several years before I was enlightened.
My mum told me about periods and making babies when we took a bath together when I was about seven or eight. I vividly remember the mental picture I had of the sperm wiggling up the woman’s leg to get at the egg.
My mother tried to explain about periods at the same time but I had absolutely no experience upon which to hang any of what she was sahing. As she got out of the bath I noticed a bit of cotton thread hanging off her upper thigh which I assumed had come off the flannel so I reached up to pick it off her. (!) She smacked my hand away embarassedly and said crossly, “NO, what have I just been telling you?” Well, she’d been telling me about periods and not bits of washcloth string, so I had no idea why she was cross, and I felt slapped down and silly. Took me another three or four years before I worked that one out.
And when we sang our songs in Sunday school I was convinced we were singing “I am the Lord of the Dance Settee” and I had an image of Jesus and a lot of little kids bouncing about on a sofa.
Without condemning your mother in any way, Hokkaido Brit, your tale is perhaps an illustration of why it isn’t always a good idea to bathe along with your children once they’re self-aware. Particularly if your offspring is of the opposite sex.
Yes, well, it was over 30 years ago, and I am the same sex as my Mum!
Hee…my girlfriend in college – extremely bright & extremely well-read, and definitely English-speaking – also thought that “misled” was the past tense of “misle”.
**Ranchoth ** – are you aware (now) that there was a Golden Gate before there was a Golden Gate Bridge? Might’ve helped clear up the confusion… 
Less of a word or phrase, but meaning - I spent many of my younger years thinking that Motorcylists were mini-funeral processions (pet fish died?) as the only vehicles I normally saw with daylight headlamps lit were of the funereal persuasion.
When I was little, I had a huge confusion over the word “bad”. I knew that bad people got taken away by the police and put in jail, and I also knew that sometimes my mother would say I was being bad. I had nightmares about the police coming to get me and taking me away because I was bad.
I often wonder if that confusion has anything to do with my current er…issues with being “bad”. :o
Am I completely confused, or do some cultures not practice “communal bathing” where you scrub off clean and then get in a tub and soak for a while? Not to mention, there’s a huge difference between “self-aware” and “able to get clean by one’s self.”
Back to the topic… I confused “coached” and “coaxed” for the longest time.
Where I grew up there were signs on freeway on-ramps that said “No Peds” (meaning: Pedestrians).
To me, “peds” were ankle socks (that often had little pom-poms on the back.) When I eight years old I finally asked my mom why ankle socks weren’t allowed on the freeway.
I think I knew by about age 9. Though for awhile I nicknamed f the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge as the “Silver Gated Bridge.” ('Cause it was gray.)
We lived in a very small Arizona town until I was 10 years old. As far as I know, the only company that delivered freight to this town was (maybe even still is…) a company called “Dickie Trucking.” For years, even after we moved, I thought that all semi trucks were called “Dickie Trucks.” I think I was in high school before I figured it out.
My great-grandparents had lived in another small AZ town called Quartzite before I was born. Every time any adult talked about “Quartzite” I thought they were saying “Courtside” and I pictured a huge cement slab with basketball hoops all around it. I knew that lots of people went there in winter with their travel trailers, so in my mind it was a basketball court surrounded by old people in their mobile homes. I couldn’t imagine why my great-grandparents liked basketball so much. It took an Arizona Highways magazine with an article about Quartzite to clear that one up.
My husband thought that the song “Drop Dead Legs” by Van Halen was about literally dropping dead legs. He said that he pictured a pair of severed legs hitting the floor. Yuck!
I used to think that a baseball hitter who was called out when he “got cuaght looking,” was thrown out for looking to see what pitch sign the catcher was making to the pitcher.
Sir Rhosis
I always used to get the more complicated colours mixed up. The one that still sticks in my head (and still takes me a moment to figure out when people mention it) is “lavender.” The smell made me think of a beige colour, so it was disorienting to discover that it’s actually purple.
When I was around eight I heard a reporter talking about war casualties and I thought he was talking about people who got hurt, but not badly. You know, kind of…casually injured.
When I was kid, maybe 7 or 8, there was a commercial on TV for a personal deodorant called “Ban”. But like many commercials for personal items (particularly in the early 1960s) they didn’t seem to say exactly what the product was or how it was used.
Their slogan was something like “Ban takes the worry out of being close”.
“Close to what?” I always thought, but they never said.
The cold war was in full swing at the time, and you constantly heard on the news of one scary thing or another and how close we might be to war.
Conflating these two things in mind, I just assumed that everyone knew that nuclear war was just around the corner, it was obviously common knowledge. And whatever “Ban” was, it helped you not worry about it.
Obviously I wasn’t using Ban, because I worried about it every time that damn commercial came on.
I had the ceiling wax confusion. I also had the seed, as in “she’s the 5th seed for Wimbledon” (or whatever) confused with seat. I still prefer “seat”, since “seed” makes no sense (but that’s tennis for you).
My mother was very distressed as a child by the phrase, “his heart on his sleeve”–it seems it conjured up a very graphic, bloody mess for her!
I know I have many more, but can’t think with this stuffy head.
Oh, the phrase, “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth” made no sense to me (still doesn’t, really) but I pictured a frozen girl with a pat of butter on her tongue!
I thought “Brainwashing” meant that someone took your brain out of your head and, you know, washed it. Ewwwww, I thought.