# Adorable misconceptions I had as a kid. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 13, 2009, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491 "2009-11-13T21:50:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/201 "2010-09-20T09:35:50Z")
I’m another one who thought that songs coming out of the radio were always being sung/played live at the radio station. I wondered why money existed and thought that since people went to their jobs to get money, and since it took money to get stuff, people ought to just cut out the troublesome practice of using money and just go do their work, and then when they needed something they should just go to the store and get it. I also thought Paladin’s first name was “Wire”. ---
**Author:** ![Astral\_Rejection](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/258eb7/32.png) [@Astral\_Rejection](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astral_Rejection)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/202 "2010-09-20T15:54:20Z")
Mine’s been mentioned a whole bunch, but I was at Six Flags for their annual halloween thing, and my dad told me that the disembodied heads were down-on-their-luck bums who had been paid to get killed for real. He had a whole story that went with it. The executioner paid them first, because otherwise after their heads were cut off they couldn’t make sure the executioner put enough money in their wallets. I spent the whole night fascinated, trying to figure out why someone would want to do that. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong or terrifying about that story. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Bloody\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac8455/32.png) [@Bloody\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bloody_L)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/203 "2010-09-20T17:10:58Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > > [@Always Brings Pie](#): > > > > Also in elementary school we read the book Secret of Nimh. > > It’s _Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH_. Note capitalization. I only mention this because I was about 25 years of age the day I realized that [NIMH = National Institute of Mental Health](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml), not some murky underground animal experimentation lair the author invented. That never occured to me. You just blew my mind. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/204 "2010-09-20T20:33:16Z")
> [@Oldeb](#): > > I thought the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the Arlington one) was literal. It is. Well, at least in the sense that unidentified remains are buried there–they’re not just monuments (many countries have them). ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2010, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/205 "2010-09-20T23:48:26Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I wondered why money existed and thought that since people went to their jobs to get money, and since it took money to get stuff, people ought to just cut out the troublesome practice of using money and just go do their work, and then when they needed something they should just go to the store and get it. > . Are you saying you were a “communist” as a kid? Adorable indeed. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/206 "2010-09-21T01:10:17Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > > [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > > > I wondered why money existed and thought that since people went to their jobs to get money, and since it took money to get stuff, people ought to just cut out the troublesome practice of using money and just go do their work, and then when they needed something they should just go to the store and get it. > > . > > Are you saying you were a “communist” as a kid? Adorable indeed. I came up with communism on my own as a child and thought about it a lot during commercial breaks a lot between The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. It seemed like a no-brainer at the time. Then I turned seven and the whole thing sounded ridiculous. There were probably lots of thinking kids that came up with the same thing around the same age. Almost all of us grew out of it early but a few didn’t and that is when the problem started… ---
**Author:** ![Oldeb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ea666f/32.png) [@Oldeb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oldeb)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/207 "2010-09-21T01:47:42Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > > [@Oldeb](#): > > > > I thought the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the Arlington one) was literal. > > It is. Well, at least in the sense that unidentified remains are buried there–they’re not just monuments (many countries have them). Yeah, I know. But I didn’t think of it like that at all when I was younger. I thought it was just one guy’s tomb and The Unknown Solider was the name everyone knew him as. Picture the Lone Ranger participating in WW2. (And I know now that it was built before WW2 as well. ;)) ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/208 "2010-09-21T02:13:26Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > > [@BigT](#): > > > > Are you saying you were a “communist” as a kid? Adorable indeed. > > Then I turned seven and the whole thing sounded ridiculous. There were probably lots of thinking kids that came up with the same thing around the same age. Almost all of us grew out of it early but a few didn’t and that is when the problem started… Exactly. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/209 "2010-09-21T02:26:48Z")
I’m another person who thought there were two diseases: Pneumonia and Neumonia. I remember I thought one was much worse than the other, but I don’t remember which was the bad one. When I was a teen I thought TBA was the name of a band. ---
**Author:** ![Beerman1963](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/2acd7d/32.png) [@Beerman1963](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beerman1963)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/210 "2010-09-21T02:35:38Z")
I thought that the highways had two speed limits. One for us and then the ghost speed limit. white sign black letters for the living black sign white letters for the ghosts. ---
**Author:** ![Beerman1963](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/2acd7d/32.png) [@Beerman1963](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beerman1963)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/211 "2010-09-21T03:13:15Z")
remembered to late to edit A mustache was just nose hair that you combed out. My cousin told me that we had to be ready in case we (the U.S.) lost the Vietnam war the Vietnamese would invade and it would be up to us to fend them off. ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Woodhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/838e76/32.png) [@Miss\_Woodhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Woodhouse)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2010, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/212 "2010-09-21T03:21:02Z")
> [@Dickerman](#): > > When I was a kid I thought that when people moved, the two families exchanged houses. So in order to move, you had to somehow find a house with a family that wanted to move into your house. Yes, I thought that it would be a very difficult to thing to accomplish (our family never moved). It took a while for me to catch on. My parents did it this way in '79. It was a three way house swap and done to avoid mortgages at a time when interest rates were so high my parents wouldn’t have otherwise been able to move. I don’t know how it all worked exactly, but I do remember my parents paying the owners of one of the homes a small amount every month to make up for their home being worth less than one of the others. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/213 "2010-09-22T00:14:33Z")
> [@moonstarssun](#): > > Numbers, letters and colors had gender. Odd numbers were boys, even numbers were girls (single digits), and multiple digits were friends. The letters and colors were less evenly distributed. I still sort of identify these things as gendered, but not as strongly as I did when I was a kid. > > Also, before I understood the concept of “places” in numbers (ones, tens, hundreds), I thought that writing 137, for example, numerically was 100307 (one hundred, thirty, seven). Fascinating! Did you grow up speaking a language that uses grammatical (non-intuitive) gender? ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2010, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/214 "2010-09-22T00:26:46Z")
I thought: [ul] [li]You could turn off the TV in the middle of a program, then come back and finish watching the same show hours later.[/li][li]There was a city called Sandy Eggo and a state called Las Vegas. Note, this was years before there was such a thing as an Eggo waffle.[/li][li]Commercials were sort of like PSAs intended to helpfully inform you about available products. I didn’t think they were produced by the government, or “the TV people”, but neither did I realize their primary purpose is to sell stuff.[/li][li]When I was about six, my father held me up to the eyepiece of a telescope to see the moon. Since he had a green tinted filter on it, for a long time I thought the moon was really green, even if I never subscribed to the cheese theory.[/li][li]I thought babies had to consciously learn to talk, as if studying a foreign language. They’d have to learn and memorize vocabulary words, conversation phrases, and so on.[/li][li]Same with walking.[/li][li]At about four years of age, we went to the airport to meet my grandparents. I had this bizarre notion that I would somehow end up on an airplane, as if the gate lounge could somehow become an airplane. At that time I didn’t like the idea of flying at all, so I kept asking, “We’re not on an airplane are we?”[/li][li]More to come, probably.[/li][/ul] ---
**Author:** ![Find\_Friends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c37758/32.png) [@Find\_Friends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Find_Friends)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/215 "2010-09-24T14:10:45Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Commercials were sort of like PSAs intended to helpfully inform you about available products. I didn’t think they were produced by the government, or “the TV people”, but I didn’t realize their primary purpose is to sell stuff. I was told that it was bad to brag. Few TV commercial slogans in the later '50’s and early '60’s were as bold as “Bumble Bee Tuna is Best!” \* (Of course all commercials were trying to hype a product, but usually with a less “bragging” tone.) I thought that it was rather shameful that they were so clearly screaming about their superiority. Directly implying that all the other brands were inferior in comparison! Tsk! _ **- Me** _ - ETA: Or maybe: “Bumble Bee **Brand** is Best!” ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/216 "2010-09-24T15:02:43Z")
> [@Clothahump](#): > > As a child, I believed all the crap my parents told me: Santa Claus was real, Jesus was real, the Easter Bunny was real, etc. I thought they were actual, living beings. Discovering your parents were not real people must have been shocking. ---
**Author:** ![Dogzilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@Dogzilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogzilla)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/217 "2010-09-24T15:35:36Z")
> [@Tahssa](#): > > > [@Critical1](#): > > > > I thought dogs were the boys and cats were the girls. > > seriously > > I thought this too and now that I’m all growed up, (30), I still sort of view them as such. Even if I know their real sex dogs still feel like boys and cats still feel like girls. I have one female dog and one male cat. Just about everyone who meets them refers to the dog as “he” and the cat as “she.” To be fair, you can’t really see the cat’s furry little junk, but I still think it’s funny that grown adults do the same thing. My Gramma always referred to all dogs as “boys” and I did the same thing when I had the male dog and the male cat; the female dog just got lumped in as one of the boys, but I’ve always been keenly aware of her gender. ---
**Author:** ![Indyellen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/indyellen/32/4176_2.png) [@Indyellen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indyellen)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/218 "2010-09-24T17:05:44Z")
> [@Larry\_Borgia](#): > > When I was a teen I thought TBA was the name of a band. I thought it was the name of a TV show, myself. When I was 4 or 5 (I think), my mom came downstairs into the family room and saw me standing next to the TV. She asked me what I was doing there, and I told her that the TV said to “Please Stand By”. So I did. (For those not old enough to remember, sometimes there would be a problem with a broadcast and they would put up a screen card reading “Please Stand By”, along with a voiceover asking for your patience.) _(I do vaguely remember doing this, I don’t think it was just a “Mom” story.)_ ---
**Author:** ![etv78](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/d78d45/32.png) [@etv78](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/etv78)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/219 "2010-09-24T17:40:05Z")
I thought Cont’d in TV listings meant “couldn’t” ---
**Author:** ![Dogzilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@Dogzilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dogzilla)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2010, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491/220 "2010-09-24T19:24:18Z")
Actual misconception I had: You know that tiny little baby stem-like thingy you see when you break a peanut in half? It’s in the top left corner of [this picture right here.](http://www.purcellmountainfarms.com/Roasted%20&%20Salted%20Jumbo%20Spanish%20Peanuts.htm) My sister convinced me that those are poisonous. Only she’d been given the vaccination, so she was immune and they wouldn’t kill her. Too bad for me, they stopped giving the vaccination in 1968 (I was born in '69). So for several years, whenever I had peanuts (and I LOVE peanuts), I had to break 'em in half, pop off the little stem thingy and give it to her to eat _so I wouldn’t die_. 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adorable-misconceptions-i-had-as-a-kid/517491.md?page=12)