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

Not quite the same but when I first got to UK with my limited knowledge of the language, I somehow managed to mix the words "network" and "Natwest" and for several months used "Natwest" instead of network and believe it or not no one had the guts to correct me until I realised myself. Oh they must have laughed!

Liking 'hyper bowl'. This can be done with many words, providing simply hours of educational fun for all the family!!!
Awry - Awe Ree; Misled - MyZuld; Weeknight - Wee Knight; and so on.

Vivid - isn't monkfish extremely expensive? Not exactly cheap 'scampi' flesh!

Another one who thought Tripoli was in Italy and that the Jedi order carried out their fight with Light Savers.

a friend of mine (who did not have children at the time) thought Inset days were 'insect days' when all the children studied insects for a day.

BalloonSlayer Im glad I wasn't the only one to think that!

AlfieandannieRose when I was PG with DS2, we were thinking of moving to get another bedroom, and DS1 and DD drove me barmy by constantly saying things like: "Oh this house is perfect for us Mummy! There's a cot in the bedroom!"

No matter how hard I tried to explain that those things belonged to the vendors and would not remain in the house should we buy it, it never sunk in.

I think they are still sad that we didn't get the house with the TV in one of the children's bedrooms. They were both hoping to get that room.

Pacific of the four Christian gospels, some are more reliable than others. The . . . ahem . . . least reliable, according to scholars is the Gospel According to John (I think they have managed to work out that it wasn't written very near the time Jesus lived, whereas the others were).

Anyway, it is in John's Gospel that has the most detailed bit of the Jews shouting for Jesus's crucifixion, and even a bit which has them shouting [basically] "let our descendants be punished if this turns out to be the wrong thing to do." This has been used as a stick to beat the jewish race with ever since.

When i was about 7 my parents were looking for a new house to move to so we would visit lots of newly built showroom houses that were set up with furniture, to make it feel like a real house. At the time I thought the house was set up for the family that would be moving in, so if it had a nursery it was built for a family with a baby, or a girl's room they have a litle girl etc. When we left the house that had a nursery room we passed a family with a baby and I said 'Oh that must be the family moving in'. No they were just browsing like us. NOBODY corrected me! Why couldn't someone have explained it to me?!

LRD, the penny re the meat/muscle bit only dropped for me during my first anatomy dissection with real cadavers - and I had grown up very rurally, seen animals slaughtered etc.

Imperial, sorry I missed the "carrots" at the start of your message - it's been a long day!

Much of the persecution of Jews over the centuries has been justified with 'well, they killed Jesus' which is wrong as it was the Roman wot did it, and even if it had been 'the Jews', they'd've killed one of their own, and anyway what kind of justification is that to go after a whole ethnic group??

Sorry to go all serious.

I thought the Outer Hebrides where somewhere in the Caribbean until I moved to Scotland. In my defense, I am not British and did not grow up here. But still... .

balloonslayer love the 'chester draws' made me lol

And am also a bit disappointed aeroplanes don't have parachutes for all of us...

When I was a young Neighbours fan and Guy was in court for 'GBH' whenever they referred to 'grievous bodily harm' I assumed this was a person...

pacific - my dad still thinks that about meat and muscle being different things - we try to explain it to him but he is adamant that muscle is the gristly bits only. He's a reasonably intelligent 61 year old man who's lived in close proximity to farms for over twenty years ...

As an 8 year old I told my parents after moving to new house...I was surprised that it it so windy here........."even though there are not so many trees".

P.s. I am now a trained English teacher

As far as I know it should be hy per bo lay as vivid says, allowing for different accents.

Yes, vivid, I knew it was pronounced like that, just wondered whether carrots' teacher was making them pronounce it the other way.

She pronounced it hyper bowl.

hy-per-bo-lee

Carrots, which way did your teacher tell you to pronounce 'hyperbole'?

carrots, thats a bad one! I was once in a geography lesson and the teacher came to ask me where Gibralter was on the map, she couldn't find it so I told her where it was and she still couldn't find it!

Lol er never really thought about it! Was never mentioned in our religious classes at school either!

What did you think he was?

I did not know Jesus was a Jew