It’s only a couple of years ago that I discovered that the Christmas carol that I’d been bellowing away for forty odd years actually went “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen” rather than, as I‘d always thought, “Good King Wencless last looked out on the feast of Stephen.”

My wife meanwhile, was also comfortably in her ’40s before discovering that the phrase about reckless behaviour leaving you in a situation from which you can’t retreat was “burn your bridges” not, as she had always thought, “burn your britches”. Her explanation, something about standing too close to the fire at the risk of setting alight one’s trousers as a metaphor for reckless behaviour does have a certain amount of logic I suppose.

Meanwhile a mutual friend of both me and my sister, who we got to know separately via another mutual friend when we were both adults living in different parts of the country, with (as she’s married) different surnames, knew us both for a good fifteen years before discovering that we were related.

that Led Zeppelin were called Led Zeffflin for some reason.

I was 8 - but there's no excuse

It seems to be hereditary as my little boy seeing me with a bottle of Becks said "you like beard don't you, daddy?".

"Subtle" and "Suttle" were two different words that meant the same thing. Imagine my chagrin.

post-1975. He was drafted in as an emergency replacement when the singer/guitarist/front-man/writer Tom Johnston retired hurt.

There's a view that the band's best work was done when Tom Johnston was at the helm and the McDonald-era was merely milking it.

This view, of course, ignores the fact that the McDonald band had all the real commercial success :-)

but I love the sound that McDonald era Doobs make

The sublime Minute by Minute is a great example

http://open.spotify.com/track/7mPvuDk62fewbtei7TO23U

churning out covers, he really does have one of the white soul voices. I thought the Doobies very strange at the time, going from anthemic chugalongs to suddenly being all blue-eyed balladry, so I tend to think of them as 2 distinct groups, rather than subscribe to the schizophrenia of their greatest hits package.
.
What was that Yah-mo be there all about, tho'? That nearly made me never ever risk his name again, not least as I kept calling him Malcolm McDonald.

..of alterna music history Yacht Rock.

...I thought people used to see in black and white (perceptually not morally). And that girls were never taught history because it was deemed too bloodthirsty.

... was a pun. How did I miss that?

In my early years I was convinced that stuffing was actually poisonous unless you ate it with chicken or turkey, which my infant mind presumably thought contained the "antidote." I have no absolutely no idea how I got this idea into my head, beyond observing that people only ate stuffing with chicken, and assuming that must be the reason... I've been over it for a few years now though :)

When Stuart Maconie was on the Radio 2 Drivetime show, they had a phone/text-in about a topic similar to this. Someone called in and admitted that, for years, they'd thought the phrase was "no rest for the whippet." I nearly crashed the car from laughing.

When I was very young, there used to be a request slot on a local radio show, and I genuinely thought that lots of bands sat around in a room, only for one to be chosen. The band would then play live, while the other groups would commiserate with each other and think: "maybe next week..." Ok, I admit, I was 27 at the time.

Only well into this century did I learn, from some doco, that Led Zeppelin is a pun. It's obvious really, and rather heavy-handed at that.

For years I believed it was pronounced "inkses"

I was the last to find out he was gay

that Axl Rose is an anagram of "complete tosser"

Not whether he likes blokes or not, who cares, but given the vague suggestions that he speaks for transgender individuals, is he transferring from "Wayne" to "Jayne"? Just interested. Suppose it's a bit nosy, but....

He sounds like an amphibian trapped in a well if you ask me.

Read a report in New York Times recently that suggested frogs were becoming hermaphrodite through ingestion of pesticides - maybe that's what's happening?

Remember the long-running BT ads starring Maureen Lipman as a stereotypical Jewish mum called Beattie? It was about five years into the campaign before I realised that her name was a pun on the advertiser’s name. I think I actually blushed when it dawned on me.

D'oh, penny drops......

...could never understand why Judy Garland wanted to "weigh a pie" in Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

and salubrious

One is a bad thing, the other a good thing.

But the one that is good I thought was bad and the one that is bad I thought was good

Barry Scott: Cillit Bang!
Wonderfully inventive dipthongs.
Laugh, I snorted the whole bottle!

for many, many years by Hugh Cornwell's line in Peaches about "Is she trying to get out of that clitoris?"

I was 12. I thought maybe women shed their skins, like snakes.

Apparently it's a pun on a french bathing suit - no bloody good to me now, is it, Wikipedia? Where were you in '78?

none of you can top this.

First episode of Knowing Me Knowing You, with Alan Patridge, and I took it seriously. I was genuinely horrified that Roger Moore wasn't going to turn up.

*edit* okay it didn't take me years to realise this - more a week or so, when i recognised the guests as being 'recycled' but as the group is fessing up, i thought I'd get this one off me chest!

But when I was a primary school kid, my mother convinced me that newsagents were open after school hours only for the sale of the evening newspaper (the Liverpool Echo, in our case) and on no account for the sale of anything else they may ordinarily have on offer.

Like sweets, for instance.

I believed this right through my teens.

And a part of me still believes it, deep down.

...with a piece of bread. It's something my dad has always said. I happened to mention it at a posh Sunday Lunch once, and got into a big debate with the host as to whether it was, in fact a word. I bullishly retrieved a dictionary, though it must have been defective as it wasn't mentioned...

I say it SHOULD be a word.

I was given the role of narrator in a school play because the kid who was supposed to do it was ill. I was doing great until I saw the word 'Xmas' and pronounced it with an 'x'. The room filled with laughter, I felt like a twat and yet didn't understand why everyone was rolling around on the floor. My teacher informed me afterwards that it was pronounced 'Christmas'. I think my hatred of Christmas was born that dreadful day.

Thankfully I can hide behind the anonymity of the board and confess that until the age of 11 (might have been 12) I thought dogs were male dogs and cats were female dogs.

As a small boy I would like to listen with my Dad to live football commentaries on the radio.

Often as not, at the end, I'd hear the commentator state 'Well, we're into injury time now...'

To my pint-sized mind this conjured up graphic images of the actual game being forgotten by the players as they leapt at the chance to legally beat f*ck out of each other. I thought it meant it was time for them to injure each other.

It was only some years later while in my teens and watching MOTD I realised it referred to time added on due to stoppages made to treat players injured earlier.

Felt a numpty then - feel a numpty now.

I always thought when a horse was "scratched" from a race and would not run that it was due to a physical injury. My young mind always got sad and thought, "Why don't they do something to protect them and stop these poor horses being scratched all the time?"

...Leonard Cohen. A blind spot rectified.

When I was in my early twenties I must have read an article somewhere about Jeff Buckley and thought he would be to my taste. However, when I remembered to check him out I mistakenly picked up an album by Jeff Healey and couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I took me a good few years until I realised my mistake and I could have kicked myself. I even missed seeing JB at the Reading Festival in 1994 (gnashes teeth).

As a boy , and for an embarrasingly long time , I thought that "Tigger" was a perfectly valid pronunciation of "tiger" and both could be used in normal conversation.

When I was 15 we moved to North Wales. I'd see signs with the words 'Hotel Gwesty' and for years I thought this was the name of a hotel chain until my dad gave me a withering look and told me that "gwesty" was Welsh for "hotel".

I know there's some program called 'Never Seen Star Wars' but a few months ago a friend sent me the URL for this video which I think is quite amusing in the context of this thread:

My Mother-in-law, an otherwise highly inteligent and academic woman, was in her 40s before she found out that sea horses were not mythical beasts.

Conversely, one Saturday afternoon the film 'Splash' was showing - my friend's son (18 at the time) whilst gazing whistfully at Daryl Hannah, asked me rather hopefully if 'mermaids actualy existed, historicaly?'.

That whisky was good for you. Made you feel good, you see.
And obviuosly the more one drank, the better one felt.
Can't even stand the smell, 25years later.

rather sweetly believed that her pet cat did actually decide to go off and live in the woods one day well ino her 20s. Until, rather cruelly I felt - her mother, of all people - let the dreadful truth be known

1. "four inches of rainfall overnight"

This implies that if I walked along the road, the water from the fallen rain would be sloshing over my toes.

But does it actually mean 4 inches in a measuring tray at the BBC weather centre? If so, doesn't the size of said tray determine how many inches of rainfall are measured?

Let us suppose that the thinnest test tube in the world is 4 inches long - and it is only wide enough to accept a single raindrop. That raindrop might fill up the thinnest test tube in the world. Is that "four inches of rainfall"?

2. "a south-easterly wind"

Does that mean where the wind is coming from, or where it is going to?

At times, I have raised these questions and the initial snorts of derision turn into hesitant stacatto as people gradually realise that they don't know either.

When radio/TV news reports talk about 4 inches of rain falling overnight, I *do* visualise wetness on the ground to roughly that depth and think "blimey - that's a lot of rain". As you say stimpy, the actual surface and gradient and drainage makes a big difference. It makes me wonder why weather reports are so specific in the measurements. Why not "the wettest night for 2 years" to give you an idea of just how wet we're talking here.

... it dawned on me that Sandie Shaw is a pun.

that the chain of Q8 petrol stations were called thus because all the petrol derived from the said country.

Not exactly obvious as a kid!

Up until the age of 12 I somehow thought that a Tampon was inserted under a bra strap to nstop it falling down. Embarrassingly a few years later I was talking with a girlfriend of mine about nurturing babies. I knew that she was adopted at birth but still asked her if her adopted mum breast fed her. I couldn't understand what she found so funny.

Regarding Good King Wenceslas - I am glad you sorted that out because I also thought it was 'last looked out'.

..on a car's fuel gage? The side of the empty / full arc its on refers to the side of the car the fuel cap is on. Very useful when your hire car is running low and you need to pull in to fill up. Apparently everyone else knows this already..

completely new to me

I thought that having shaded side of dial on right was just Johnny Foreigner nonsense

Everyone knows that fuel runs out to the left in this sceptred isle

For years, as a catholic child, I thought God had 2 names:

Our father who art in heaven, Harold be thy name

and

Priest: Let us give thanks for blah blah blah
Congregation: thanks Peter God.

Genuinely puzzled me.

was very worried about the nefarious influence of Elvis Costello's pop tune "I Love a Zombie"

Myself I never made the connection between the archetypal New York cop Sgt O'Ma-HOE-nee and O'MAH-hon-ees bookshop in downtown Limerick.

The reason I have been wary of his work is because I thought he was the bloke from Bauhaus. I still think he might be, so shall remain wary.

until I knew what Protestant meant. I thought they only lived in Northern Ireland. I didn't realise that I was one.

It was only this weekend that I found out that the Elgin Marbles aren't objects of a spherical nature.

Isn't Noah's Ark or anything to do with that. Confirmed to me by my incredulous GLW a couple of days ago.

And according to my son's Horrible Histories book, the Holy Grail isn't the goblet Jesus used at the Last Supper.

Every week when I was studying history that I never understood. Since all the rest seemed to know exactly what it all meant I just kept quiet about it. Once I got my degree I didn´t really care anymore as they never seem to show up outside of University.

When quite young, I managed to combine the two meanings of the word 'engaged' - and genuinely believed that, once you had agreed to marry someone, you lost your telephone service until you actually got hitched.

And a musical one - although I'd known for years that the song 'American Pie' was about the death of Buddy Holly, it was relatively recently that I realised that the line 'This'll be the day that I die' is a pun on 'That'll Be The Day'...

a friend of mine used to argue till red in the face that it was "Dark" Vader, rather than "Darth". Tit.

...Trotter's Independent Traders. The series had long finished by the time I got that one.

until that unlikely Rock names list came up that Gram Parsons real name was Cecil Ingram Connor III

Probably pronounced Cee-cil

When the fil Willow was released I saw the trailer on television. It featured repeated shots of the dwarf actor who played Willow, but the gravelly voiceover repeatedly announced 'Val Kilmer ... in Willow!' Naturally I got it into my head that Val Kilmer was the name of the actor who played Willow.
A couple of years later I heard that Oliver Stone was making his Doors film, and that Val Kilmer was to play Jim Morrison. Confusion over the nature of the casting resulted.

first time I heard the name Leonard Cohen, that's what I heard. I imagined all sorts of Hawkwindesque drug taking and leather weirdness - you can imagine my disappointment.

are the finest Scottish strike duo since Dalglish and...er...

someone on this website - http://www.kissthisguy.com/ - thought the lyric to 'Addicted To Love' was actually 'A Dick With A Glove'

..in Games Without Frontiers.

This was, for years, a rumour which went round school. No-one believed it. I swore blind it got played on Radio 2 once by Richard Allinson and I had a lengthy (and good-natured)exchange of emails with his producer about it - he denied everything.

And now here it is on YouTube. 2:32 in. If you haven't heard it before, prepare to have your eyebrows raised..

Steeley Span are one and the same. Not very Word friendly I know but I only discovered they were two different bands about a year ago.

my head chaps!

until recently "Argentinia" was a country...

I assumed John Williams the composer and the guitarist were the same person.

Also growing up in Ireland I couldn't understand why the foreign language they taught us (Irish/Gaeilge) in primary school was called "Irish", since it made sense to me that that was the language I already spoke, only English people would speak English, pheh! I used to come home and tell my mam all the new words I'd learned in "American".

I've gone at least 8 years, smiling and nodding approvingly when people spoke about Hayseed Dixie, without realising that the name is a pun. (I'm not explaining the pun, in the faint hope that someone will make me feel better by admitting they don't get it either.

I now have sleepless nights remembering all the times I've spoken with people about Hayseed Dixie, trying to remember exactly what was said, and whether it would have revealed my ignorance.

This was the first album I ever bought, when I was about 12, and I proudly showed it to my parents, older siblings, aunts and uncles. It was some years later that I first saw the album title in the place where the band had pinched it from. I almost lost the moment.

Sold in the market down in New Orleans.

The opening lines to Brown Sugar - surely? Well, so I thought for 24 of the last 25 years. In fact, even now I find it unlikely that Jagger is really singing 'Gold Coast Slave Ship Bound for Cotton Fields' - sounds more like a tongue twister. Think I'll be sticking with Coco and her cut-off ears for a few years yet thanks.

I mean, how likely is it that a song called 'Addicted to Love' which is a mainstream playlist song and was always introduced as 'Addicted to Love' is really misheard as 'A dick with a glove'? A great made up one maybe.

Few of the Stones lyrics made much sense to me growing up. In Brown Sugar, I just thought they were building a scene - a fairly bizarre one maybe, but it didn't seem at odds with the sordid, louche, decadent and law-breaking antics recounted elsewhere in their songs. There was no internet, most albums were 80s reissues without lyric sheets, and Coco and the ears she found for sale in a New Orleans market was one of the only lines in the song I sang with any confidence - I mean, what the hell was the 3rd line? Sounded like 'Sky don't stay here', but really I had no clue. And then, what was he betting your Mama was in the 3rd verse? Even if I had guessed 'tent show queen' what the hell was one of those anyway?

Reminds me, the other Stones lyric musician friends and I had slightly wrong was 'It's no pain in my cock' instead of 'it's no hanging matter' in Stray Cat Blues - no matter how many times we lifted and replaced the needle on the LP, that's what it sounds like on Get Yer Ya Yas Out, and so that's what we used to sing - in public I might add.

I always thought the Yoko Ono and Oklahoma were one and the same.

The Two Ronnies - I always thought "Ronnie" was some sort of made up title, (like "Goodies") and never made the connection with Ronald

Also, I always assumed that Dr Spock's theories about raising children were solely references to some classic episode of Star Trek in which Leonard Nimoy presumably expounded on how kids on Vulcan were brought up

As a child I thought swear words were a relatively recent phenomenon, as no one said "fuck" in old movies

Also when Run DMC released Walk This Way I presumed that Steve Tyler was some kind of comedy actor doing a "turn" as a cartoonish version of Mick Jagger or something (yes yes, I imagine a lot of people would say that's a pretty fair assessment)

Until quite recently, I use to sing along to Van's "And it Stoned Me", thus:

Half oh my from the can of fur

An ex-neighbour, took her mother (in her 60s) to see Steve Coogan, about 10 years ago. In the break, she had to explain to her mother that the various characters, Paul Calf, Pauline Calf etc. were all the same person !

instead of "I'm A Single Lady" was what I thought was being sung on that Beyonce song - I also originally thought that that awful "Womanizer" song by Britney Spears was someone singing in Swahili or some weird dialect much to the amusement of my more pop-savvy colleagues.

I was well into my thirties before I discovered that Richard and Karen were brother and sister rather than a married couple.

It also only very recently dawned on me that Oscillate Wildly by The Smiths is derived from Oscar Wilde, and I must have listened to that track several hundred times since it came out....

was between North America and South America which meant the fighting took place somewhere around Panama. That's not the case.

Pretty obvious when the cheese is called Buffalo Mozzarella.