GF's mom thought that the song lyrics were "Why do you feel me up, Buttercup" until sometime in the last 10 years or so.

I thought that "rendezvous" (pronounced exactly how it is spelled) and "rondayvoo" were synonyms until I said "ren-dez-vous" in my 12th grade AP English class. Someone said "ren-dez-vous lol" and I was all, yeah, it means the same thing as ron-day-voo.

lol - words that i have heard otherwise intelligent people mispronounce horrible include inchoate and paradigm

the president of the Kings NBA team is named Geoff Petrie. My friend pronounced it Gee-Off Petrie for like 3 years untill I was finally fed up and told him he was an idiot. He still says it like that to this day because he knows hes right.

Don't have anything specific that I can think of, but good thread.

Do have one from my sister. She was convinced that at the grocery store when they had free food for you to try, it was called "zamples". I tried explaining to her it was samples, and she said that was something totally different.

We called a friend of ours Gee-Off just for the hell of it. Not abnormal IMO.

I heard the word re-SIT-if-eye from someone who had just read a book where "rectify" was used frequently.

Was their pronunciation of paradigm para-dig-em?

My parents made fun of me when I was like 10 and talked about the choffer. How the **** was I supposed to know how chauffeur was really pronounced? Also it was a pretty dick move to make fun of a 10 year old.

I also remember realizing in high school that segue was pronunced seg-way even though I knew what segue meant when people said it out loud and what segue meant when written and knew they meant the same thing but somehow always though they were different words and then I realized I was ******ed.

i was in late teens/early twenties before i realized what the real reason was that noah brought 2 of every animal on the ark. i always thought he was just bringing a spare in case one of them died.

(please don't derail thread, i went to catholic school growing up)

my wife thought similarly freshman year of college. i made fun of her

Yeah calling people named Geoff "JOFF-ree" or "GEE-off" is totally standard.

Playing some Nintendo game circa 1990 a friend kept saying "I beat ZEE-iss!" I was like "WTF it's Zeus". "No it's not - how does that word spell Zeus?" "OK then tell me how you spell Zeus" (crickets).

Also I thought until like a few years ago that fancy people were saying "chow" when they were saying goodbye. I'm pretty sure they are saying "ciao" but I'm not 100%. I'm 32 fwiw...

i went to highschool who spelled and pronounced his name like this.

to be fair, i had some strange notions of how certain words were pronounced

reading ghost rider comics, i somehow thought that "vengeance" was pronounced "vay-gance"

reading visions of gerard in high school for a kerouac project, i thought catechism was pronounced "catch-uh-kism" (not catholic imo)

maybe i don't read so good

it may be standard but its certainly wrong to say Ge Off

I had a (blonde) friend who in HS asked if I had an enthelope to mail a letter in.

I played a video game Bump 'n Jump, the manual referred to crap in the road as debris. I always thought it was pronounced Deb-riss.

In elementary school I reported to my teacher that my mom would regularly drink and drive. I didn't know the difference between alcohol and Coca-Cola -- it was all drinking to me.

I also remember having either firemen or police come visit the school and talk to us kids. One thing they told us was that you should call the police if your parents ever leave you home alone. A few days later I woke up from a nap and couldn't find my mom, so I called the police. Shortly after I saw her speaking with them on the front lawn, where she was out talking to a neighbor the whole time. When she came in to find me I was hiding under the bed.

I took my elementary school lessons very literally apparently.

Stupid things I thought when I was a kid.

There are some amazing ones in there. GOAT is still "everything was black and white until about 20-30 years ago"

Not me, but innumerable people I know call realtors "relators." I want to beat them every time I hear it.

Pinhead O'Downer

when i was a kid reading hulk comics i always thought "puny" was pronounced in a way that rhymed with "funny" even though i knew the word "puny" and its proper pronunciation. i guess i thought it was spelled differently.

when i was really young i thought you pronounced the t at the end of "chevrolet" and i thought it was some kind of knock off of chevrolay.

I did that with a friend as well, but people thinking it is actually pronounced that way is a pretty huge fail.

Another common mispronunciation hyperbole = hyper-bowl.

I was watching Colbert on Ash Wednesday this year and incredulously asked why Colbert had a small black cross on his face.

I thought the word "ratio" was "rat eee oh" and was bitter when I learned I was wrong because I thought it sounded way cooler (which it doesn't, wtf).

I also learned it wasn't Typ-er-writer until far too late in life.

Pudge, when did you learn about milk in non-bag form?