I thought the expression "play it by ear", was actually "play it by year" until about 6 months ago.

The thing is I use it fairly frequently but because they sound so similar I was never called out on it.

Theres also another common expression that I have wrong and my girlfriend corrected me on it recently but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.

Ugh, I couldn't actually think of something until I read the "rendezvous" one from English class above. Now I'm squirming because it brought back such bad memories.

In 8th grade English, every Friday, the class would look through a dictionary and nominate "words of the week". You would then have to know their definitions for a quiz the next week. One week I picked the word "imbecile" pronounced "im-bess-il". I gave the definition and a few seconds later one of the kids realized what I was trying to say. If there is any word to mispronounce I had definitely found it.

I did the same thing with Geoff because I used Geoff Rowley in the Tony Hawk games (street skate > vert skate)

For the longest time I really thought nacho cheese was a type of cheese since I would see it on the labels of tons of junk food. Also didn't understand the puns on "nacho cheese" for a long time.

Wait, what? That's another 'r' I've been leaving off.

I'm from NJ, I've always said both. Is 'standing in line' really that much more more standard than 'standing on line?'

EDIT:
Seriously, I didn't think the point of this thread was to learn a lot of things I didn't know.

I feel like this is something I've heard my parents say and something I've probably said at some point, although I don't know if it'd be the first phrase I'd use. I knew what you meant by it right away, but looking on Google I can't find any references to it. Surely other people use this, right?

And it makes sense if you think of it as "no more" = "not anymore." The word order is a bit odd, I guess, but that's common enough in idiomatic phrases.

We've done this before, but "on line" seems to be an NY-area regional thing so I guess it depends on if standard is defined by volume of people or of land mass.

Yes, if you're not from the NYC area.

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/...maps/q_93.html

When I was a kid there was a church named Grace Baptist in my neighborhood. One day we were driving by it on the bus to school and I asked if anyone had ever met her.

I like this thread, a lot of these are good. This one was special though. Please share more.

More of a misconception really but when I was like 5 and my mom would go to the mechanic/oil change the manager was always super nice and would walk up to the car when we were done and give my mom a handful of scratch-off drawings where the grand prize was winning a new car. Our car was a POS Ford Escort that my dad was always cussing at so I honestly thought the manager was annoyed/sick of seeing the car or whatever and really really wanted us to win a new one. lol. I had no idea he likely handed these things out to everyone, because I never saw that. I thought he was secretly angry that he worked on our car a lot and had no idea that this was how he made money. Also, these trips were likely just oil changes but at that age I thought our car was broken or something.

Yes

Mom always served pb&j with tomato soup (my favorite lunch at the time and I still eat it) so I always thought pb&j was the standard side to tomato, not grilled cheese.

On Long Island it's probably split. I've definitely used both but it depends on the context.

"I'm going to wait on this line, I'll meet you there".
"This line is so long, I can't believe I'm standing in it".

epi-tome

+1

More " things I did or thought that were wrong " and less " words I mispronounced "

imo

hahahaha

Dids,
As far back as I can remember I had seen bagged milk and milk in cartons. That does remind me of a good one, I remember in middle school all my non-Jewish friends were saying that they drank milk with dinner, more often than breakfast and as someone who only drank milk with breakfast this was groundbreaking.

I was pretty stunned to find out "duck duck grey duck" was apparently completely bizarre (despite being obviously superior).

Also at age 10 or whatever, after we got our first one, I was supposed to magically glean that you can't put tinfoil in the microwave.

I have a decent one. I hosted a game in college and had a facebook group. A new kid wanted to come to the game, his name is Kenan (for some reason I thought it was Kennan and pronounced it 'Ken-nan'). So I introduced him to the game as 'Ken-nan' and he became a friend/regular. Everyone knew him as 'Ken-nan'. He was a reserved guy and I guess didn't want to correct me at the time.

After about a year we were playing our typical game and I asked him something trivial like, 'Hey 'Ken-nan', need a drink?' and he flipped out (on purpose for a laugh). He stood up, threw his cards down and said something like, 'you mother-****er. My ****ing name is 'Kee-nan', not 'Ken-nan'... you've been saying it wrong for a year. GET IT RIGHT!'

We all bursted out laughing.

I pronounced it CROWN as a kid.

Oh, the day I found out that not everyone says "hella"

Unfortunately there's not much else to the story. What little else there is you can find in my ask me thread, which I will shamelessly plug here. Feel free to bump, as I am a blatant attention whore.

For the most part Norm was pleasant to work with. He's eccentric but not a total dick. But I was only a PA at the time and didn't have much interaction with him. I do remember hearing that as the show was starting to go down (ratings wise) he chewed out all the writers on stage in front of some network people during a run-through. That's not really a cool thing to do.

My best guess at why he's not more popular is that he just doesn't have a broad appeal. He's snarky and dry and a bit weird but it's hard to picture him playing a sympathetic character in a lead role. He certainly didn't pull it off on the show I was on with him.

Here's some super embarrassing **** right here.

So junior high school (7th grade, 12 yrs old) was when we started wearing jock straps in gym.
All the boys received their jock strap in the mail, along with text books, our gym uniform, schedules, and other things needed for the upcoming year, so that we would be well prepared for day 1 of this new school lifestyle.

Prior to the first day of school, I found out that a bunch of my friends had the same gym class as me.

So first day of school, amongst many of the first day questions that we asked each other was about our jock straps. "Hey did you bring yours?" "Are we supposed to have it for today?" "Are we going to get in trouble if we don't have it?" etc.

Much to my surprise, not one of my friends had remembered to bring their jock strap, so I felt like a total baller in that I'd get some major brownie points for having remembered mine. I was a very Martin Prince kiss-assy kinda kid.

Even once we were in the locker room, I didn't see anyone else with a jock strap and thought, "Man, I am so winning Junior High right now."

We're out there in the gym, with a girls' gym class as well and our gym teacher Mr. Bagg (lol) was taking roll call.

"Anderson."
"Here, sir."
"Bailey."
"Here sir."
"Double Down."
(step forward) "Here sir!!"

He takes a good hard look at me.

"Say, Double Down?"
"Yes sir?"
"Jock strap goes on under your gym shorts. Go change."

F
M
L

First day of junior high. Yeah.