Jul 9 2010
And you thought native speakers knew it all…
Misspellings, mispronunciations and much more on this great Ask Metafilter thread: What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along?, where people confess things like these:
Primadonna was pre-Madonna to me until I was about 19.
It took me a few decades to figure out that the “Champs Elysees” thing I was reading about was the same thing as the “shomza leesay” thing that I heard people talking about.
I always thought the phrase “play it by ear” was “play it by year”. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I heard someone say ear and asked.
For a while, I thought “beta” meant “better” version.
