The Most Wrong You've Been For the Longest Time

[rhysf]

From 1980 until 2005 I thought the Moscow Olympics theme song had the same tune as 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!' by ABBA, even though I have a strong memory of the real theme song. They were both getting a lot of airplay (at least in Australia) around the same time and my six year-old brain must have conflated them. I figured it out after I heard Madonna sampling ABBA in 'Hung Up.'

For about the same period, I believed the adage that eating carrots is good for eyesight when in fact it comes from a British wartime propaganda campaign intended to hide the development of radar from the Nazis.

[GuanoLad]

Originally Posted by Lamar Mundane

All the way into my late 30's, I mistakenly believed that the "hoi polloi" referred to the elite rather than the proletariat as it actually does. Good thing that I had few opportunities to use it in speech or print.

Possibly you were confusing it with "hoity-toity."

[Nobody]

Up until this very minute when I looked it up in Wikipedia I thought that hoi polloi was Hawaiian instead of Greek.

[thirdwarning]

Originally Posted by Lamar Mundane

All the way into my late 30's, I mistakenly believed that the "hoi polloi" referred to the elite rather than the proletariat as it actually does. Good thing that I had few opportunities to use it in speech or print.

I might have learned the difference somewhere here at the Dope. It's not exactly something you talk about much.

[Zsofia]

Originally Posted by Nobody

Up until this very minute when I looked it up in Wikipedia I thought that hoi polloi was Hawaiian instead of Greek.

That's poi, the purple bland paste that's the staple starch of the traditional Hawaiian diet. Made from taro.

[Nobody]

[what do I type here]

I assumed chocolate and coffee came from the same bean until I was about 20.

[StephenG]

Originally Posted by Nobody

Doing a Google check, apparently vacume is the spelling used in Ontario & Quebec.

You'll note that that definition has nearly as many thumbs down as up. It's not spelled that way in either province (in English nor in French).

[Namkcalb]

Originally Posted by what do I type here

I assumed chocolate and coffee came from the same bean until I was about 20.

I wish! coffee-flavoured chocolate is L-U-S-H

[Pixel_Dent]

I believed that old panes of glass were warped because glass flowed from 1979 when a teacher told us that in class until the early 90's when I started reading the old a.f.u. usenet group.

[Corcaigh]

Originally Posted by bup

The Space Shuttle Enterprise was real, although it never went into space.

She wasn't thinking of that though, she thought (and probably still thinks) that Star Trek was real...

Originally Posted by pulykamell

Hell, this is the first I heard of it.

I, too, just assumed she was just trying to crawl away. Never affected my impression of her, but it just would never occur to me that crawling back to retrieve the portion of someone's skull or brain would be something to do in that situation. Of course, now that I think about it, crawling would just make you a bigger target, but I never really thought about it.

I too thought she was crawling out of the line of fire, then some 20+ years ago someone told me that in fact she was trying to catch a hold of a piece of JFK's head.

[Morbo]

I was older than I should've been (as in, late 20s and married) before it was explained to me that women have an actual pee hole, and don't just drop urine out of their vaginas like an airplane dumping bathroom waste.

In my defense, I grew up with four brothers and no sisters.

[Taomist]

I've never been confused about lemon-lime, but now that I live in northern Mexico <read: S. California> I realized that everything with lime in it <and EVERYTHING has lime in it> shows a lime, with the word 'limon'. I asked what the word for lime was and it's 'lime', apparantly. Nobody knows why they use the word for lemon on things that contain...lime.


And hey, just found my own answer..."The -on ending is an augmentative. It makes the word for lemon in spanish look like "big lime"." Lime is lima, so limon is actually...with lime.

Ok now I can be not wrong about that.