Is this related?
When I was in elementary school, I thought that if you were giving someone the finger it was the* little * finger. Not the middle finger. I had always heard that one wrong. 
Not merely a BJ but one in which the giver hums.
Back at school when we learnt about organisms we had to do an oral presentation and there was one kid who was a bit slow did his and every time he was meant to say organisms he would say orgasims and didn’t know which meant what. Was by far the best presentation I had seen, I was pretty much crying by the end form laughter.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade, one of my classmates did an oral report in front of the class about ocean life.
She began talking about these tiny orgasms at the bottom of the ocean.
Sadly, I was too young at the time to really appreciate how hilarious it was. Luckily for her (my classmate) the rest of the class didn’t get it either.
The teacher did inform her that she should be pronouncing it organisms, but only after she had used it a few times.
I was on the opposite side of the organism/orgasm confusion. In middle school, one of my enemies taunted me with, “Yeah, Bayard, I bet you don’t even know what an orgasm is!” I replied that I most certainly did, it was any living thing… The howls of laughter indicated that I had made yet another social faux pas. I brought my biology lecture to a halt, although I still didn’t know what an orgasm was.
So the point was moot, but not mute.
Though we tried repeatedly, we could never correct our young tenor’s tendency to sing A wand’ring menstrual, I.
Aaaaaah. It all makes sense now.
A high school classmate thought being “superfluous” was a good thing, and was quite adamant about applying the term to himself, even after another classmate and I attempted to explain it. “Super” is part of the word, so it has to be a good thing, right?
It was even more funny because this person was, in fact, superfluous.
You think that’s bad. When I was a wee banana sprout in primary school, we had a “homo sapiens” / “homosexual” confusion. Yeah, we were clearly morons.
Bookmaker.
I even know what the word means. I’ve got no problem with the expression, “to make book.”
But everytime I read or hear the description bookmaker, I think that the person so described must have something to do with the printer’s art. Usually I’m thinking high end books, too - leather bound, hand stitched, true works of art. Sold, of course, in really snooty shops that just smell so wonderfully of old books, and dust, and a hint of leather.
I’m glad I’ve never gone looking for a bookmaker’s establishment, hoping to simply watch a craftsman at work. Though I usually think about it, when I hear the term.
"He really likes country music…the circle jerk that he is."
Remove the word “circle.” Maybe even replace it with “silly.”
I saw it as her good-naturedly calling him a jerk (presumably because she doesn’t care for country music), and mistakenly thinking that “circle jerk” was just an embellishment on that.
For me, it’s people who think “penultimate” means somehow even better than ultimate. For example, in a thread about a G. I. Joe aircraft carrier, someone wrote “it really was the penultimate toy.”
“Penultimate” means next to the last, not the best ever.
I posted the a while back, but it’s worth a retelling:
OK, here’s an experience from my own family. My mom is Vietnamese (I’m half Vietnamese, half American). We both came to the US with my dad right after I was born. She speaks English fluently now, but when I was a kid her English wasn’t so hot.
Once, when I was seven years old, a few weeks before Halloween, Mom informed me that she wasn’t going to let me go trick-or-treating. When I asked her why, she told me that there were widows who liked to put poison in candy and give it to kids. Knowing what widows were, I argued that, while they might have been sad that their husbands were dead, I didn’t think they’d poison my candy. “No, I reading in the paper and I see on TV. There are widows that putting poison in the candy!”
It took at least five minutes of back-and-forth along these lines before I realized she was trying to say weirdos. :smack:
Oh! I just thought of another one:
A couple of years back, my wife had a question about something or other… when she asked me, I also had no clue. She said, “Why don’t you ask those people on the internet? You know, the uh, uh, Stray Dorkers!”
So I did.
Discussion among a bunch of college friends.
A: So, what church do you belong to at home?
B: Reform Baptist
A: What makes them different from just Baptist?
B: You know what Reform means?
A: Yes, . . .
B: That’s it.
A: But what’s different about it?
It took two or three reiterations of the core of this discussion before the Reform Baptist guy finally grasped that to his audience, “reform” means something akin to “change”, where in his head it meant something special about the Holy Spirit or something.
There was a Candid Camera thing where they stopped random people on the street and asked them, "What would you do if your closest friend confessed to you that they were in fact homo sapiens?"Most of the people answered some variant of, “Well, you know, that’s their choice.” One guy obviously knew what it meant and deadpanned, “You know, I’ve had the suspicion for a while that most of my friends, are, in fact, homo sapiens.”
:rolleyes: Again: Do you generally pronounce every single consonant in “asked”, “instinct”, “Arctic”, and “old-fashioned”? If so, are you a robot?
BTW, one of my high school classmates once asked why so much art of ancient Greece showed “their Gentiles”.
Yes and No. Why wouldn’t someone? Well, except for my SO who says axed instead of asked when he wants to annoy me.
Those examples don’t really work when the anecdote was about someone not saying the first letter of a word and most likely not even realizing that they were using it incorrectly.
Similarly, my Turkish brother in law was trying to explain his fear of lasers to us one day. He said “The lasers, they burn your eyes you know. And the gentiles!” We asked him to repeat that last part and he gestured to his pants and said “You know…gentiles!”
To which my husband quipped “Lasers: the gentiles only weakness.”