What stupid things have you believed/said/assumed before finding out to your embarrassment you were wrong?

I only realised very recently, at the grand old age of 32 that mange touts are not pronounced manga-towt. And I thought the shop assistants in sainsburys were the thick ones for not knowing what I meant! Ditto, MediSed, got funny looks in Boots asking for med-iced

I also made an arse of myself once, by remarking how uncanny it was that every judge had Justice for a first name in a room full of high brow professionals (of which I am supposed to be one).

The Yosemite one is new to me, have always thought it was Yo-Semite. Yo-se-mit-ey sounds weird in my head.

i remember ds coming home from yr 1 and telling me about the new star wars film and the new baddie 'daft mole'

My parents pissed themselves when for some unknown reason I mentioned the US state oo-hee-oh (ohio), I also thought organdie was a colour , no idea where I got that from. Dp thought that babies were like dogs and didn't open their eyes for a bit, he asked me when dd would open them, I replied most likely when she woke up, he was very .

Sorry if this is a repeat...have read some but not all the messages yet..
I thought until recently that the bad guy in Star Wars was Dark Raider! :o

I convinced my sister that pelican crossings made their loud beeping sounds so that blind drivers knew when people were crossing.

"Add message | Report | Message poster tallulah Sat 27-Aug-11 22:01:11
DD1 was 21 when DD2 was born. The first time she saw her she exclaimed "she has knees!". She thought they grew later, like teeth."

I think kneecaps do grow at about 18m - i have a 2yo and she has them!

How many of us had vaguely heard of "Donkey Houghtey"?

I also used to think jaywalking was somehow linked to prostitution. Still not sure exactly what it is - crossing the road? From a country that lets everyone carry a gun...

my mum still says half caste except when she catches herself on and says coffee and cream

i wish i were dead then

My DS's DP was convinced that the phrase was 'all intensive purposes'. Not 'all intents and purposes'.

Purposes looks weird when you write it down...I'm paranoid now that I've spelt it wrong.

Which reminds me that back in the days pre internet when I had a long distance relationship with someone, it massively annoyed me that he wrote 'weird' as 'wierd'.

When I was 14, a friend told a group of us that she had had a dog when she was younger, but it had got ill, so her parents decided the dog would be better to go and live on a farm. The next day everyone was pissing themselves laughing about it, which I thought was really cruel - I'd be so upset in her position. They had to explain what 'going to live on a farm' meant.

DS thought that the Paolo Nutini song was 'But vegetable, I've got my baby!', not 'But best of all'.

Until reading this thread, I thought a liger was a joke from Napoleon Dynamite.

really did laugh out loud at that one keep haha :)

Another one I never connected was Illinois with 'Illi-noy'

hahahha keep

Up until yesterday I thought whether was spelt wether.
It looks right to me spelt wether & in my daily goings I type wether a lot.

Yesterday I typed an 11 page document that was spattered with wethers, I was very when my new boss took a red pen out to ^ a h all over the document.

I went back to my office to google it and he was right

I also thought it was a trombolish in that song so thankfully I have learned 2 new things this week!

I do love a moan when 'modern' songs come on the radio.

"I just wanna make you sweat" by snoop dog. How revolting I said. Why on earth would anyone find that attractive, I continued.

My 16 year old son then pointed out that its the radio edit and they had changed the word from wet.

"Wet!" I exclaimed. What's he going to do? Hose you down? Has he got a water pistol?

And then the penny dropped.

Which wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't four of my son's mates in the back seat of the car.

Scampi are creatures, they're Dublin Bay prawns!

(Or so Rick Stein says ... is he lying to me again?)

Until quite recently, I was pretty sure Lichfield was somewhat oop north, near Berwick-upon-Tweed. No idea why. And I thought that Moscow was really, really cold with snow on the ground all year long ... I took the mickey out of this guy who said it was actually quite warm there in the summer compared with the UK and laughed at him in the middle of a party.

Turns out he was right, and as he grew up there he would kind of know! (and I married him so I am never allowed to forget it.)

I also thought jaywalking was an American word for street prostitution until very recently.

Arkansas!?!? Arkensaw?!?!?

Hmmm I used to believe that a man (or woman) sat inside a cash machine and dispensed all the cash and pushed it through the slot.

I was TWENTY before the penny dropped

I thought a 'bomsy tit' was some sort of slang for a messy room. I was 40 (40!!!) before I realised it was 'a bomb has hit it". I told my elder sis, she hadnt realised either :)

DD2 calls lingerie 'linger here'. Maybe she's right :)

Until about a year ago, I thought planes carried parachutes for every passenger

I've been legally allowed to drive a car for a goodly while. I thought until a few years ago that when you want to thank the driver behind, for letting you in, you quickly braked 3 times so as to get the flashing lights. In the car with my sister one day I did this and she was" WTF are you doing Tufty?". Explained in an 'I cannot believe this is what you thought!' voice about the hazzard lights.

Read 'sonofabitch' as sonar-far-bitch for years.

Also, DH phsl when I panicked that leaving a plug socket switched on with nothing plugged in would mean electricity would leak out

my son used to insist on calling an elderly family friend called vernon, vermin!

Oh, and my then 9 year old asked me about the 'gentleman's club' in our town. He said he'd seen a sign advertising laptop dancing, and he wondered whether they had specially strengthened laptops that didn't break when you danced on them.

also the guerilla soldiers in S Africa. I thought they were gorillas

Oh that's good Euphemia, well makes me a bit better at least!

at 'rest bite' - has anyone pointed this out to her I wonder?