Discussion on the previous post led to mention of the phenomenon in which those of us who grew up reading a lot pick up words that aren't used by the people around us, so that we invent our own pronunciations, which are not always correct.

I experienced a slight variation of this: in at least two cases, the words were in fact pretty common, but I did not connect the word on the page with the word I heard, and so possessed a couple of half-invented words, which I pronounced as myzlled and awree. The first is pronounced like "puzzled" with "my" substituted for "pu". The second is more or less like "tawdry" without the "d".  Or "outlawry" without the "outl".

They were spelled "misled" and "awry." 

I had the sense of "awry" more or less right--I thought of it as something close to a synonym for "crooked." I'm not sure that I didn't use it in conversation, though if I did no one ever corrected me.

"Misled" was more of a problem, because I conceived it to be the past tense and passive voice of a verb, "to misle" ("my-zzle"), meaning "to sow confusion." I was a little, um, puzzled that I never heard this verb used in any other form, e.g. "The British set out to misle the French about the strength of their forces."

I was in my late teens or early twenties before I realized my mistake. I was a little embarrassed, but only a little. To tell the truth, I still sort of like "misle"/"myzzle" as a verb. And I was pleased a few years ago to learn that my then-boss, a woman with a Ph.D., had suffered from the same confusion, and similarly thought it a rather good word in the sense that we understood it.