Probably a reference to this thread, where people made reference to a TMBG song, and then refused for multiple posts to explain when asked.
Fruit grows on trees and that’s just the way it is. I don’t see too many strawberry trees, but so what?
or
Coconuts grow on trees, and they’re exotic, and pineapples are exotic, therefore…
Just the other week I learned that the small sea creature is an anemone not an anenome. I have said it wrong all my life and no one has ever corrected me. I guess the few times I came across it written I didn’t notice the spelling. I’m not sure I have ever needed to write the word until it was in the NYT crossword the other week. I was stunned.
Nava, it never occurred to me that people in other parts of the world might not get that “Auld Lang Syne” means it’s New Years, which probably makes the whole rest of the thing a little confusing - there’s always champagne, and traditionally people kiss at midnight, and all sorts of little thing.
There was a teacher I once had, it might have been in middle school, or maybe grade school, who told us to only call it a lavatory. We couldn’t call it a restroom because we didn’t go in there to rest, and we couldn’t call it a bathroom because we weren’t going in there to take a bath. :rolleyes:
Another one I thought of, although I think I mentioned it before; I use to think that ALL guns fired bullets. Yeah, I heard of shot guns. I thought they fired bullets :smack:. I thought that shot guns fired bullets that broke up into little pieces, instead of a gun that fires a bunch of small lead balls. I only figured things out after the Dick Cheney hunting incident.
I only found out that my toaster has a little crumb trap at the bottom of it when I read it in a similar thread here in the last year or so. Where did I think the crumbs went? I don’t know, probably whisked away to some magical kingdom.
I had never heard of the Duesenberg brand of cars until just this week… the person who mentioned it claimed the phrase “it’s a doozy” came from it. Of course I did a little research and found that although these cars were called Dueseys, the phrase predates them.
Strangely enough, just after learning of them for the first time, I watched a Family Guy episode where they mentioned a Duesenberg car in it.
What I came to mention.
I always seem to be tripped up by words I’ve known forever from reading but have never pronounced correctly.
My stepmother and stepsister thought it was very funny when I pronounced Celtic like the basketball team, though even when I look in the dictionary it seems both are appropriate.
Just about two days ago someone told me novella has a long o.
I always worry about all the times I may have said words wrong and people were too polite to say anything.
Oops. Many years ago I ran a D&D adventure with a “gibbering mouther” in it, and pronounced it with a hard G, as I’d always done in my head. A friend kept calling it a “jibbering mouther,” and I was too polite to correct him, but I carefully pronounced it with the hard G, hoping he’d pick up on the correct pronunciation.
That’s a little embarrassing.
What did he think “lavatory” means? Literally, washroom. You are sometimes going in there to wash (your hands) but mostly not. Even “toilet” doesn’t even really, at the root, discuss the actual purpose of the room. There is no polite, accurate word for a room you go to to urinate and defecate.
I assumed it was a reference to “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”…
For some strange reason, I always thought “gentrified” meant a neighborhood is heavily populated by senior citizens until about a month ago when I moved to Chicago. Probably a mental connection with the word geriatric.
And add me to the list of people who thought Pineapples grew on trees.
Nah, it was “James K. Polk.”
Until this thread, I pronounced gibber and gibberish differently.
… Coconuts do not grow on trees also! 
Woah, woah, woah…what?! :smack:
Okay, that.
I blame it on the gibbering gibbons.
I read a book about the Vietnam War, and they kept making references to some machine called a Citroen…Only later did I learn that it was a French brand of automobile :smack:
My adolescent mind kept visualizing some kind of…Jetson’s type UFO thing. That people in Saigon were hovering around in little UFOs during the Vietnam War. Simply could not figure out it was just a type of car.
Oh, ffs. Next you’ll be telling us that a banana is a herb!
It was only a few days ago that I realized that this emoticon:
:smack:
doesn’t mean “high five”
I was a teenager hanging out with a friend watching some other guys play pool. One of them kept talking to the other constantly calling him holmes. I didn’t realize it was just something you called somebody, I thought that was his actual name :o. The next I was talking to my friend on the phone and I mentioned one of the guys playing pool, “I can’t think of his name, although I think his last name was holmes.” :smack:
What was worse was that the next day my friend was using the term, so he knew what it meant but didn’t tell me about it making me feel like a fool when I realized it wasn’t an actual name.
I also use to watch “What’s Happening” I didn’t think about it in terms of, “Hey man, what’s happening?” When I saw the title, I thought it was just a statement, same as saying, “Things that are going on.” Damn! I was so uncool :(.