Shortly after I learned to read and made a habit of reading the sunday funnies that always had Peanuts on the front page,
I always wondered why a lot of the charaters would say “Sigh” and wondered what they were talking about since I never heard anyone exclaim “Sigh!”
Remember back when you were younger and learning the joys of math?
I could not grasp the concept of the fifteen minute mark on the clocks (15-13-45-60) were quarters of an hour.
Because Four Quarters, as everyone knew, equalled a dollar and that was 25 unit, not 15. So the whole thing of a quarter past twelve thing mystified me because that was 12:25, not 12:15.
I was probably in my twenties before I grasped that one.
Word Fun
Omnipotent is **not ** pronounced: Om-ni-po-tent. Yeah, good times with that gaff. It’s ohm-nip-oh-tent.
I was hanging out with a group of my fellow law students, two males and one other female, and I used the word “smegma.” One of the guys looks totally boggled, and asks what smegma is. I try and suppress giggling and tell him to look it up later, that it’s not something you explain in polite company. He insists. I giggle more. I turn red. He keeps insisting. Finally, the other guy comes to the rescue and pulls him aside for a little chat. When they come back, the first guy is red as a beet.
When relating this to my boyfriend, who is from Canada, where for the most part penises roam unaltered, he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that a guy wouldn’t know that.
I also saw a face with a big nose in the USPS logo. When trying to explain it to my mother, she never understood what the hell I was talking about. I am so happy that I no longer feel weird. 
Also, for many years I pronounced “thoroughly” as “thruffly.” My parents loved that one.
I would never have known about it if my table in biology hadn’t…
<wavy flashback sequence>
Partner 1: Yesterday we signed up for different kinds of cancer to do a presentation on!
Me: I was gone yesterday!
Partner 2: Don’t worry! We picked for you!
P1&P2 in perfect unison: PENILE CANCER!!!
</wfs>
I sure did do penile cancer. I explained penile cancer and smegma until everyone in the room regretted giving me penile cancer. As a topic, of course. Not that I have penile cancer from them.
My own: I just realized the other day what it means when someone ends their post with ::d&r::
For years and years I thought that “pseudonym” was pronounced SWAY-duh-nim. I still think that Mom didn’t have to laugh for quite so long when she heard me say it the first time. 
UB40 isn’t “YouBeForty”! Not that you had any reason to know.
Let me get that nit for you. Hay may be grass but usually isn’t in my experience. Alfalfa is flowering plant that resembles sweet clover but with purple flowers. Cereal grains such as oats can be baled and used as feed but that’s technically grass.
Yes, it is: PookahMacPhellimey was referring to how the band’s name is pronounced. 
This has been fun reading. Mine are too numerous to mention, but I will confess that I pronounced ‘paradigm’ phonetically a few times before being gently corrected.
I do want to say that if hay and alfalfa are the same thing, I’ve been royally shafted by the farmer down the road, who meticulously tends his alfalfa fields (fertilizing, reseeding, cutting at prescribed times, and then selling to me for 2 bucks a bale) This had better not be the same hay I cut and bale without another thought.
I also wanted to present this from WBEZ in Chicago, as it’s all I could think of while reading the thread. Give a listen to “a little bit of knowledge” from last week.
:eek: you can? But… but… but…
Guess who has been just using the juice for 15 years. Apart from when I’m too lazy to mess about with the press, and just crush a sliced clove with a knife and throw the whole thing into the sauce :smack:
A well, my ignorance has been fought, but it is not yet defeated…
Living on an ice camp less than 60 miles from the North Pole in April of '90 and hoping to the seeing Polaris directly overhead…:smack:
Last night I finally realized where the name “Borg” (as in the Star Trek monsters) derived from. I’d always assumed it was a cool made-up word.
Constellation gazer here–I don’t get it? Was there too much sunlight already?
Earlier today (make that yesterday now) I was reading a Yahoo! news item and saw the word “underfed” and it took a few moments for me to quit wondering what “derfed” must mean.
Other words that have had that effect were:
barfly
gunshy
misled
I just figured that the man had to be on top, and gravity did the work…
I was VERY naive as a teenager, due in part to the fact that I was very shy. (I had a total of one date before graduating from high school, and it was such a disaster that the boy who asked me out assumed I hated him and immediately started dating someone else.) However, I read a LOT, and read lots of British fiction, especially my senior year when our English teacher took the course name very literally.
During my Freshman year at college, I took a course in lexicology. One day, we were discussing things that are named after the substance they are made of, like glasses, and the professor asked the class to come up with other examples. The first one that came to mind was “rubber”, which to me meant overshoes or erasers. Given that I was a very shy, quiet student, the professor and the rest of the class just stared at me, dumbstruck, for several seconds. Finally, the professor asked me to explain what I thought the word meant, then gently explained to me that it meant something completely different in the US (although the example was still a good one). One of the other students was kind enough to define it for me after class. Twenty-five years later, I still blush when I think of it.
So if *Segue * is pronounced seg-way, is *Fugue * pronounced fu-gway?
Sorry, couldn’t resist… 
**STILL ** don’t get it.
Oh man, I still have trouble with that word: even though I know it’s BAR-FLY, whenever I see it the first thing I hear in my head is still BARF-LEE. :smack:
My 11 year old has this problem. If I tell him to be here at say, a quarter after 12, he always questions when that is, and I have to change it to 12:15 to get him to understand. And he’s an honor roll student!!
In addition to “elb” being the initials of owner Charles Bronfman’s daughter (as described in the link), the Expos’ logo also reads as “eMb,” which stands for Les Expos de Montréal Baseball. A very interesting stylization to make up for for the lame fact that the team was named after a fair.