Adorable Things You Believe as a Child

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We do these threads from time to time. Let’s have another go!

[ul]
[li]I believed that “doll” was pronounced “dal” (as in “pal”), and that anyone who pronounced it “doll” was just putting on a poncy accent.[/li][li]I believed that Jesus Christ was put to death for refusing to worship the Roman gods (I was about 15 or 16 when I finally was set straight on this one :smack: ).[/li][li]I believed The Ramparts were a baseball team ("…or the ramparts we watched…"). Seriously. The first exposure I got to the National Anthem was watching baseball games on Grandpa’s knee, so…[/li][li]In Illinois, you have to call this 800 number before you dig in your yard, lest you hit an underground utility line. The program is called J.U.L.I.E., which stands for Joint Underground Line Information Exchange (or something), and has been in effect since I was a small boy, if not before. When I first started getting exposure to the ads, I thought there was a real woman named Julie, sitting at her desk in Springfield, answering calls about utility lines all day. “Before you dig, call Julie!”[/li][li]I believed that cities “owned” their professional sports teams. As in, the Chicago Cubs were as much the property of the City of Chicago as are Chicago’s buses, schools, etc.[/li][li]I believed that governments existed to punish criminals, and that the lower levels of government dealt with less serious crimes. For example, if I stole some candy I would have to answer to the city council. If I stole a car, I’d have to answer to the mayor. If I robbed a bank, I’d have to answer to the governor of Illinois. And if I committed the worst crime of all (killing someone!), I’d have to answer to the president! :eek:[/li][/ul]

2

When watching Wimbledon tennis, when the umpire called ‘deuce’ I thought he was saying ‘juice’ and was calling timeout so the players could have a sit down and a drink.

3

When your nose runs, that’s your brains coming out. If you stick your finger up too far when picking your nose you will damage your brain.

Hm, maybe those are not adorable things…

4

I never thought that there were tiny people living in the TV, but I did think that songs on the radio were played live at the radio station. I pictured all these musicians with their instruments, waiting in the lobby of the station for their turn to go in and play their song.

5

I’ve run into adults in their 40s that pretty much think this is the real deal. :rolleyes:

I remember the cold war, and believed if Russia won, they would enslave us. If we won, we would all get our own personal Russian slave.

6

My Grandfather always told us that we needed to eat whatever vegetable we didn’t want to eat because it would “clean your pipes out”. The only pipes I knew about where the ones under the sink, so for years I assumed we all had metal pipes and Ujoints inside us. He also used to tell us that eating with our fingers was “bush league”. Growing up in central Illinois, I knew the Busch family owned the Cardinals and somehow eating with your fingers made you part of their baseball team/league. Never could figure out why that was a bad thing.

7

I believed my brother when he told me that cottage cheese was harvested from the eavestroughs of actual cottages in the deep, damp woods.

8

Told this before, but I used to think as a preschooler that evil leprechauns hid in the sewer drains at stop lights, where they controlled the signals for maximum chaos and minimum efficiency (as that is indeed what traffic signals seemed to do to me). That’s what happens when you combine precocious prescience and an overactive imagination into one little brain.

9

when I was little and my parents would do that “put the kid on the phone to talk to grandma” thing, in my mind I envisioned the other party speaking to me as if in person; e.g standing in the kitchen facing me. It didn’t occur to me that they would have a phone handset stuck to their ear too.

10

Me too!

Whenever we would drive past the radio station I’d stare at it intently, hoping to see Kenny Rogers coming out after his song!

11

Yep, I thought that too.

I also thought that girls only pooped. And in my little kid logic, it made perfect sense. I knew that girls sat down to go to the bathroom and always took a long time. Well, if I’m sitting down to go to the bathroom and taking a long time, I know what I’m doing.

12

Me three. When I asked my brother “How do they fit all those people with all their instruments in the tiny radio station?” he laughed at me then told me how it works.

One of his friends told me that his cat mated with a rabbit and had cabbits. I believed that one well into my teens. :o

13

It’s “Miss Dig” here in Michigan, and I thought the same thing. Only I always envisioned her as a Muppet pig girl like Miss Piggy.

I used to think if you panted like a dog, your brain would short-circuit and you’d forget how to breathe properly. To this day, I do not know why.

14

I believed I could get out of the car and run home, get my tricycle, ride back to where the car was, and follow along behind Mom on the highway, and that it would be FUN!

I stopped believing about it being fun along about the time I fell out on the side of the road. Turned out to only be fun in a no-fun-at-all sort of way…

15

I believed that if I swallowed my gum, it would stick to my appendix. I think my grandmother told me that whopper.

Not me, and not as a kid but my older brother told his girlfriend that stop signs with white lines painted in front of them were optional. A stupid thing to do as she could have gotten killed but a policeman disabused her of that knowledge when he pulled her over after she ran one. He took pity on her and just gave her a warning and told her to stop being so gullible and get a new boyfriend…

ETA: I also believed my hand would blow off if I stuck it out the car window. Thanks, Dad.

16

yeah, that’s an old wives’ tale. I remember the kid across the street’s grandmother telling him the same thing.

17

When I was but a wee tyke we used to go to the beach, and I’d go play in the waves and be amazed at the power they had to push me back on land. But I always felt sorry for the poor kids who lived on the other side of the ocean whose waves moved away from the beach and would surely push them out to sea if they dared to enter the water.

18

i believed that all cats were girls and all dogs were boys.

and i thought that you could call information for information about anything, as though it were a phone encyclopedia.

19

Yeah, as a kid I thought that each traffic light was controlled by a person inside a building near the intersection, who would watch the traffic and decide when each side had had its fair turn and make the light change.

I believed until I was an adult that gum would stay in your stomach for 7 years.

Another thing I believed until I was grown:
My mom had a garden, and one year there was a pumpkin with a scar in the exact shape of my name. My mom told me the fairies must have written it. Being a skeptical kid, I scoffed and said there were no such things as fairies. Then she told me it must have just grown that way and it was a coincidence that it looked like my name. Well, that was more like “science” than fairy tale, and I really believed it until I was a teenager at least. I remember telling someone about it and how cool it was and then going “Wait…” :smack:

20

I’m not sure what I believed about male genitalia, but I do remember when I saw a picture of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ feeling very cheated. REALLY? That little thing was what all the fuss was about?

I also believed that that if Grandpa would just not cut down his bean stalks every fall, we would eventually be able to climb on them up to the clouds the next spring.

And that little people lived in the branches of the trees and below in the roots, a la Zelpha K Snyder.

and that all it took to defy gravity was a little practice; well, a lot of practice.