I used to pronounce “media” as “med-ee-ah” (like medicine)
my mother tells me of a childhood friend, who pronounced “grotesque” as “grot-ess-cue”

I used to read pacific and spicific wrong and get them mixed up,so if a teacher wanted a ‘Pacific’ answer,she would have to wait for the specific one.:)

I thought epitome was pronounced EP uh tome for a log, long time.

I pronounced lithe lith.

@dpworkin , hehehe, I can’t stop laughing at Ep uh tome

For me as a small child it was more mishearing than misreading. My mother talked about living on Dad’s small celery. This puzzled me because when he came home from the grocery store he brought a lot more than celery.

I was also certain beyond all doubt that when someone mentioned Pennsylvania they were speaking of the part of a mechanical pencil that you use to clip it in your shirt pocket. My father’s mechanical pencils all had vanias.

In school when I was learning “he, it, she, we, you, they,” my friends and I would scream out “He, She, It!” So, it sounded like “he sheeit”

My older half sister put up a sign outside her door when she was I don’t know, maybe seven or eight, as she wrapped Christmas presents.

It more or less read:

DON’T COME IN.
RAPING PRESENTS.

How unfortunate. XD

I miss pronounced pip as “pimple”. I was mortified..

@dpworkin: Ha! I did that for years when I was a kid.

@asmonet God please don’t tell me it was Ken.Barbie would be so jealous.

@ucme: More likely it was Voltron. We were far too badass for that nancy boy Ken, he’s all hers. :P

I once pronounced the word train as cocksucker when I was reading out loud in class.

fucking tourettes . . .

Once during a parents day in Kindergarten the teacher asked me “How many legs does an octopus have?” and I replied “Eight testicles” instead of tentacles.

This is one of my dad’s all time favorite stories from when I was a kid.

@Blondesjon In England the football team Everton have an American goalkeeper,Tim Howard.He has tourettes.Amazed the mother fucker does’nt get sent off more often.

My youngest slayed me when we were at a hotel he opens the desk drawer and blurts out…“Hey dad!! Look!...We have a “Holly Bibble”!!

@drClaw I walked into my son’s room the other day. He was stark naked, checking himself out, and looking at a kid’s body book laying open on his bed. He looked at me and said “The book says I have tentacles but I can’t find them.”

We own a volvo station wagon. I always refer to it as the volvo. One day when, getting ready to leave a family yoga class, my daughter yelled across the room “Mom, is it time for me to get in the vulva?

I thought vicar was pronounced vic-AHR for years.

@liminal I guess that’s an easy one for kids to mess up, but god is it hilarious!

@liminal- that’s laugh out loud funny!!

That reminds me of my son who came home one day in second grade complaining that it was hard because they had to learn all of those “two-pound” words.

My young son broke his toy car and was upset about it. I told him I thought that we could fix it with super glue.
He thought a minute and then said, “mom, I want you to use the glue, I don’t think soup will work very well.”

@wilma . . . For the longest time I always thought the waitress was asking me if I wanted a Super Salad.

When I was six and my brother was three, we went for eye tests, reading charts out loud.
I read numbers, but he was younger so they gave him a chart with pictures on it instead. I went first. He could hear me but not see me around the corner. When it was his turn, he could be heard saying “Cow, circle, house, beero, duck, circle, flower, beero, cat, beero” and so on. He came out and my mother asked him,
“Did you see a lot of beeros in there?” He said, “Well they looked more like shoes, but
Susan said beero so I did too.”

“ZERO”......

I misread a traffic sign as “Watch out for Pediatricians in the cross walk”. I had never heard of a pedestrian. Still kills my mom to this day.

Each morning at school I would pledge allegiance to ”... the Republic for Richard Stands.”

Apparently freight train isn’t pronounced the same as fright train. I had to learn the hard way.

Instead of saying paper I would say pooper.

I pronounced the med in media, like the med in medicine.

I’m still not sure how to pronounce baroque (I used to say barok, but now I say barohk, though I suspect that may be an American pronunciation).

My mother tells a funny story about her best friend at school; one day she came out with the word “grotesque”, but pronounced “grottaskew”!

@The_Idler, looks like not much has changed since February.

@Jeruba What, have all your jokes since February been so lame as that one?

=P

“caution” If I heard the word I knew what it meant, when I read the word on barriers etc I also knew that it meant potential danger but I thought it was a different word pronounced something like ca-U-tee-on. Until one day I read that off a sign to someone and… a little humiliation and much laughter ensued

hmmm that was weird…

“bikinis made to order’ when I was a kid I could not figure out what it was you could tell your bikini to do

We were Presbyterian when I grew up. I used to think it was very nice when I saw the signs “Pedestrian Crossing” .. and thought it was “Presbyterian Crossing”! Gee we have our own crosswalks!! :)

I remember reading a comic book when I couldn’t quite fully read yet (and I still have trouble understanding comic books but that’s another matter!) and I misread “Panicked” as “Pancaked” and wondered what the problem was with succumbing to pancakes.