I used to pronounce “interminable” as “inter - mine - able”
Ohhhhhh… I get it! “Termin” as in “terminal” as in “end” … as in “never freakin ending”… Oops.
And ratty, I pronounced it “deb - riss”.
::: looks at lno :::
::: doesn’t point and laugh :::
It’s okay, dear, it’s okay… We’ve all thought silly things like that. Errr… yeah. Okay, well, maybe not quite like that, but you know what your mama done tol’ you. Yer speshul.
I once thought StarTrek was cooler than Star Wars.
What was I thinking?
When I was a kid, there was a store we would pass on various trips named “The Grease Monkey”. I always assumed it was a restaurant, but was more than slightly surprised to find out it was a car repair shop.
When I was very young I came to the conclusion that the coming of fall / winter was caused by the devil. You see, the devil is in Hell which is underground. The devil doesn’t like flowers (because he is bad and they are good) so he would pull them back into the ground by their roots. Ergo, the devil caused fall / winter (which is the time when the flowers go away).
I feel a little better today. Thank you for your pity.
That confession, along with Jerry Lewis / Jerry Lee Lewis, wasn’t merely the confusion of a young child. I believed these well into my adult life. As a child, I thought when someone was fired from a job, they were tossed kicking and screaming into a fireplace. As a man, I thought a cervix dilated to ten inches.
As a child, I thought that if you touched a certain bush with red berries on it in the neighborhood park, you would die within a day.
…as a man, however…
We were playing Outburst. For those unfamiliar with the game, one team draws a card which has a topic and ten answers to it. The other team must name as many of the answers as they can within 60 seconds. For example, a topic may be “John Wayne movies”.
The topic we were given was “Countries in which baseball is played”.
Our team came up with the US, Canada, and Japan off the bat.
(I swear I didn’t mean to write that pun.)
We blanked. 55 seconds to go, and we had no idea what seven other countries were that played baseball. So I started singing Yakko’s World, from the Animaniacs, to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance.
In those 55 seconds, I made it to ‘Palestine’, fourth from the end. The last three were Fiji, Australia, and Sudan. Australia was the last of the ten answers.
What’s most shameful about it, though, is I could have gotten through all of the countries, if I didn’t have to pause to hum the instrumental bridge between verses. Otherwise I’d lose my place. I was rattling off countries of the world, but then would pause for five seconds to hum to myself periodically while my team shouted at me to keep going.
That isn’t ignorance of the scale of ten inches, but rather ignorance that cost us a close game.
Australia, you suck.
Can we get back to the nipples?
Is this true? I am a happily married man with two kids and I didn’t know this. Is there anything else about Mrs Owl that I need to know? Is there a manual?
Yes, more nipples please.
As a long-time lactator, Owlie, I can verify that it is indeed the truth. The one-hole misapprehension no doubt comes from the widespread use of bottles, the nipples of which indeed have just the one hole. Scoot on over here for everything you need to know about breast anatomy.
Now for my shameful secret – in my mid-20s I realized the word “eunuch” that I had seen in print, was indeed the same thing as the word “unick” I had heard people say. It wasn’t pronounced “eenuck.” Thank heavens I’d never said it aloud (and you gotta admit, it’s not a word that’s much called for in ordinary conversation).
Another one: I walked around for weeks mystified about the movie Moulan Rouge. What’s all this caberet singing stuff? Why am I not seeing clips of jungle and killing and death.
Oh … that’s the Khmer Rouge. :o
This is why message board anonymity is a good thing.
Until 5 years ago I mis-pronounced vignette (vin-yet) as (viggen-ette).
Until I saw the word in a “Cathy” cartoon in my thirties I had never heard of a “trousseau”. I had never seen the word or heard it used in conversation before that point.
I was 18 when someone pointed out that you don’t pronounce e-pit-o-me as (epi-tome) and that I had the context of the definition wrong also. I thought it meant “highest” or “best” instead of “most representative”.
I misunderstood and mis-used the term “quasi” until halfway through college, as meaning “partially”, instead of “resembling or seeming”.
The term “Dew Drop Inn” - I always thought it was just a folksy term for a generic rural bar-restaurant and never thought any more about it. The self evident, slap-you- in- the- face pun escaped me until a year or two ago.
Most embarrassing is –
I got very high scores on my verbal SAT without knowing very much formal grammar, other than guessing as to sentence structure. I failed my initial mandatory English 101 college grammar exam to the astonishment of my teacher. (This is the same teacher who made me write out an essay in front of her to make sure I was not copying my work out of books). I took it again and only passed the grammar exam by 2 points. I’m still clueless about formal grammar.
:smack: I just got that. I am a fool.
Being deaf, my parents mispronounce a lot of words they read. I grew up thinking it was las-agg-nee, thumb, and lin-ger-y. Also, it wasn’t until I was around 16 that I realised that “misshapen” is miss-shapen and not miss-happen.
Well, as someone who has been nicknamed the WordMan by his friends, I have had my share of word mix-ups. As a kid, things like asking who Don Quicks-oat was (aka Don Quixote), or what an Aak-uh-see-uh was (an acacia). But recently for some reason I just realized the word is “exorbitant”, not “exorbinant”. I have always thought it was with an “n” and must’ve mentally overwritten any “t”'s I read…I typed the word in a document and my spell-checker caught it and I about slapped myself silly once I did a check to make sure the spell-checker wasn’t going for a different word…:smack:
When I was a kid I used to worry about the signs in bars saying minors were forbidden. I thought it was so unfair, they came up out of the mine all tired and sweaty and they weren’t even allowed to have a drink. I once got very vocally indignant about it in a restaurant.
Instead of ordering an appertizer, until recently you’d think I was discussing a Spanish prostitutes ovaries.
I was thrilled to learn that the C in C-section was in reference to Caesarean.
As a kid I’d read Rock Island RR cars as “rock is land”. Rock is land? Duh.
I didn’t know the nipple thing, either.
And I originally thought rhododendron was pronounce RO-DOD-EN-DRON, with emphasis on the DOD.
I’m sure there are many other little stupid things, but none are springing to mind quickly.
I thought I was the only person who felt this kind of pity for those poor hard working miners… of course, I was also puzzled as to why they would forbid miners in a city where there was no mining.
At the time I thought it was maybe because they were just really dirty and the business didn’t want their chairs messed up.
Oh yeah, anyone else pronounce “douche” like they just made a nice point in an arguement?
Oh… Douche’.
When I was a child, I once read the word “tongue” out loud as “ton-goo”. My parents found that hilarious, since my pronunciation rhymes with an Italian swear word.
I also somehow got the idea that “rag” was spelled “wrag”.
I couldn’t understand how my cousin could be older than me, even though we have the same birthday. We were born on the same day in different years, of course, but I couldn’t see how the difference in years mattered.
No, I’m laughing at him.
And pointing.
BUUUWWAAAHAAAHAHHHAAAAA!!!
Suuuure.
I should have known. You all are.
And you lied. You LIED.
Confess, you.