You've probably experienced that moment when you share a childhood memory that you think is perfectly normal and a friend or spouse is like, "Uhhh...that's wild."
Recently, we rounded up some funny and baffling stories from the BuzzFeed Community. The response in the comments was overwhelming (and hilarious). Here are some of the best replies:
1. "My dad thought our family was the only one that said 'going commando' when not wearing any underwear. He found out the truth when I asked him if he wanted to go on a ride at a state fair, and he yelled out that he couldn't because he was 'GOING COMMANDO!' He wondered why everyone was looking at him weirdly, and we were mortified."
—rachadach23
2. "My dad taught me that the way to know if oil is hot enough to fry something is to spit in it. If it bubbles, it’s ready. I was WAY too old when someone told me that you could just drop water in it. I spit in SO many people’s food when I fried something!"
3. "I moved to the US from England as a kid. I remember back-to-school shopping and asking a sales lady, 'Where are the rubbers?' She had a look of horror on her face until another lady came over and said, 'She means erasers.'"
—vicky9
4. "My partner, his best friend, and I use 'bukkake' to mean anything terrible/bad/annoying. 'Ugh, traffic is bukkake.' 'Bukkake! I forgot to thaw the chicken.' It’s become so engrained in our friend language that we all have to be realllly careful not to let it slip out around anyone else."
5. "My parents would refer to a penis as a 'birdie,' and I still have to convince myself that no one else says that."
6. "My mom once tried to say, 'There are underpants in that store window, it’s scandalous!' But she actually said, 'There are scandalpants in the window!' So now we call underpants 'scandalpants.'"
—kittylane276
7. "Our little neighborhood group played this game called Dumpo. You would fill a bucket with water and ask each other questions that no one would know the answers to. When they guessed wrong, you'd dump the water over their head while saying 'dumpooooooo!' When you get enough kids doing it, you forget that the people one street over do not understand what it is and do not like you pouring water on them when they are not expecting it."
8. "I was well into my 30s before I realized 'go about your rat killing' was a strange thing to say to someone."
9. "I always thought it was the Heimlich remover because if something is stuck in your throat, it needs to be removed. It wasn’t until I took a class to become CPR certified that I found out it's actually the Heimlich maneuver."
—mrscrum10805
10. "My college boyfriend thought reindeer were mythical creatures, like a unicorn or yeti. I had to explain to him that they were, in fact, a real animal and not exclusive to Santa Claus's North Pole."
11. "My father whistles whenever he gives directions. 'You go down main street (whistles), turn left down 2nd street (whistles), keep going for about a mile (whistles), and you're there!'"
—justinac2
12. "My family and I always sing the last big note of a movie production. I didn’t realize it was weird until I did it at a sleepover, and they stared at me like I grew a third arm."
—lalalace1640
13. "My childhood next door neighbor was a woman in her 60s named Sharon. When I was 4, I stole a forbidden snack from the pantry. My mom confronted me about it, and the first thing I thought to blurt out was 'Sharon did it!' My mom asked, 'Why would Sharon have done this?' and I replied, 'Sharon did it...when she was a baby!' So the joke for the rest of our lives is that whenever something bad happens, Sharon did it when she was a baby."
—rohasi
14. "I teach preschool, and I get some of my best mispronounced and made-up words from them. 'Hanitizer' for hand sanitizer seems to be something said by kids everywhere. Lemonade will forever be known as 'lemolade.' Sunscreen is 'sunscream.'"
—s4e3512291
15. "My dad always called Teriyaki sauce 'pterodactyl sauce' when I was growing up. When I went on vacation with my friend’s family at 16, we ordered food from a restaurant. I asked for pterodactyl sauce on the side, and everyone was SO confused — including me, once I found out that it wasn’t actually called that."
—maliaamari
16. "My husband was throwing away his old jacket, and I asked him, 'Are you going to keep the hood?' He was like, 'What?' So I told him that when my mom was throwing away a jacket with detachable hood, she would always save the hood to sew it into a jacket without a hood. Obviously, she never got around to it, but it was so automatic for me to think that you need to save the hood, I didn’t realize how weird it was. Now we call everything that should actually be thrown away 'the hood.'"
17. "In high school, I had a friend named Veronica who was notorious for pulling your shirt up if your cleavage was hanging out. Eventually, my whole family started saying 'Veronica' to mean 'pull up your shirt' or even 'Veronica to the back' for covering your butt crack. It's confused a lot of people who don't know the history and context."
—klavergne
18. "The first time my daughter had diarrhea, she freaked out because she thought she was exploding. Thirty years later, we still use that phrase. People in our extended family think we're crazy."
19. "My family refers to objects as 'him.' So instead of 'can you hand me the spatula,' it’s 'can you hand me him.'"
"Also, when you refer to anything as 'we,' like 'we gotta take the trash out later,' my mom would always ask, 'Who’s we? You got a rat in your pocket?'"
—lindsayw1
20. "I thought everyone played the game Out-of-Date-License-Plate when they were in the car. Turns out it was just the kids of a highway patrolman."
—pattington98
21. "My dad taught me that packing peanuts were called 'ghost poops.' I thought everyone called them that until high school, when someone was horribly confused and had no idea what I was talking about."
—tessnewberry
22. "My eyes are green, but they look more brown or green based on what I wear. My family always used Scottish slang to call my eyes 'skillamagink.' In second grade, we had to go around the classroom and say the color of our eyes. I confidently declared mine were 'skillamagink,' and the WHOLE CLASS INCLUDING THE TEACHER laughed at me for a full minute. That’s when I leaned that it isn’t a real color."
23. "My parents called the cardboard tubes in paper towel rolls 'doot-do-doos' because that's the noise that you make when you pretend to play them like a trumpet."
—retrocrebbon
24. "My mom always called my brothers' dark blond hair 'dirty dishwater' color, and I honestly never thought twice about it. As a teenager, trying to blend into a new group, I described a girl's hair color as 'dirty dishwater,' and the group looked at me like I was the cattiest person they ever met. That's when my dumb ass realized it's not a common phrase."
—emmymaupin
25. "When my sister was little, she called elephants 'defump defumps,' and we've called them that ever since."
26. "I attended an elementary school called Dewey Elementary and spent an embarrassing number of years of my life believing the Dewey Decimal System was specific to my school."
27. "Whenever anyone in my family went through a yellow light and it turned red halfway through, we'd say, 'You mothered that!' All of us (my mom, aunts, etc.) thought this was a real saying until my 20s, when I said it in front of my friend who was like, 'What???'"
"We finally asked my grandma where it came from, and she explained it was only a family saying because my great grandmother (her mother) was known for her fast driving and 'mothering' traffic lights."
—leewl
28. "I thought when Guns N' Roses sang 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door,' they were saying 'knockin' on Kevin’s door.' My uncle's name is Kevin, so anytime we went there, my sister and I would sing it as we knocked."
—auntzilla
29. "We always say 'chicken up your butt' instead of 'stick it up your butt' because my kiddo misunderstood an older kid on the school bus in first grade."
—eahall0718
30. "My family name is Harvey. As a child, I always heard my family say, 'Harvey darned.' I thought it was cool that we have our own saying! But it turns out everyone was just saying, 'I'll be darned!'"
—laurabc
"I had an opposite situation as a kid. My last name has the word 'goose' in it, so I thought that when my dad called me 'silly goose,' it was a play on our last name. When I got older, I found out that lots of people's parents call them a silly goose."
—padawanryan
31. "You know how some people say 'number one' for pee and 'number two' for poop? Instead of this, my family says 'local' for pee and 'international' for poop."
32. "When I was in college, I asked my friends, 'You know when you’re falling asleep at night and you hear voices for a couple of seconds?' Seeing their baffled expressions was how I found out that hearing voices when you fall asleep isn’t a universal experience."
—katieeighty
Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.