I was a senior in high school before I learned to spell Massachusetts correctly. By the way, I live in Massachusetts.
For my whole life I spelled it Massachusettes. Those were the days before spell check and I don’t know the last time I ever really needed to spell out the whole word before. It was always Mass. or MA.
There are other examples; as a child, I believed I had a SEVERELY narrow type of dyslexia. You see, every single time I read the word “pigeon,” my mind’s eye reads this as “pig one.” For years, I did not even know what a pig one was. Luckily, there are not many pigeon-centric children’s books out there. But I literally read this as PIG ONE…two separate words. What kind of dyslexia is that?! Can I have a single word dyslexia? Perhaps it is called “monolexia” or “unilexia.” This happens even to this day!
You are among a very small group of intimate friends here . You can tell both us anything. So, go ahead, fess up: What assumptions have you been carrying around with you that ultimately proved to be wrong?