Getting it wrong -- language edition

There's a huge thread (over 800 comments) on AskMetafilter about this question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

A lot of the answers have to do with language, especially mispronunciations resulting from only seeing a word written -- or from seeing and hearing a word, but not realizing that it's the same word. Some of the more common examples seem to be "awry" (the second syllable sounds like "eye," not "ee"), "segue" (two syllables, not one), "victuals" (not pronounced how it looks), "infrared" (three syllables, doesn't rhyme with "scared"), and "beck and call" (not "beckon call"). A couple of them seem to be based on dyslexia: "larynx" (people pronounce the last syllable as "nix") and "remuneration" (people mix up the "m" and "n").

This mistake is surprisingly common:

Definition of 'erstwhile' - I thought it meant strong and steadfast, instead it means former. (link)

In senior year of high school, I had a logophilic friend who gave me a copy of his yearbook photo. On the back of the photo, he wrote a nice note with a pen and signed it: "Your erstwhile friend, [his name]." When I pointed out the correct definition of the word to him, he added a superscript "1" after "erstwhile," then wrote a footnote at the bottom: "1. And current!"

Here are some more language-related realizations:

I was in my teens when I realized that those "hors d'oeuvres" that I read about and those "ordervs" I heard people talk about were one and the same. (link)

I thought Chanukah and Hanukkah were two different holidays, and that I'd just never heard the first one spoken since I'd never heard anyone say CHanukah. One day I was in line at the grocery store where I'd shopped for years. The person in line in front of me had a loaf of challah bread on the belt. The cashier said "Man! Isn't our HALLA bread just the best?!? And I immediately said to myself "OMG Chanukah is Hanukah!" I was 25. (link)

I didn't know what "penultimate" meant until recently. I thought it was a synonym for "ultimate". Oh the shame when a friend corrected me. (link)

A few years back I learned that the proper spelling of dilemma does not have a silent n. Up until that moment I was 100% stake-my-life-on-it certain it was spelled dilemna. (link)

Macrame and macabre are unrelated words. (link)

I was nearly 30 before I realized that my parents had been talking a Wodehousian language during my youth and that normal people didn't refer to each other as "old bean" or "the mammal" or share a refreshing snort before dinner. (link)

I was about 25 when I figured out that Soup Du Jour wasn't actually a certain style of soup. (link)

I was probably 12 before I realized that people on the radio singing to "my baby" weren't singing to their infants. (link)

NEXT: More things gotten wrong.