My mother spoke Swedish. I was absolutely sure that when she spoke this gibberish, she and her friends heard it as English.
I was pretty sure that the day would come that she would impart some bit of knowledge to me that would allow me to decipher Swedish and hear her conversations in English, which, of course, is the language of thought.
I grew up in America.
I don’t know if anyone will find this adorable, but I used to think French kissing led to pregnancy, and I don’t mean indirectly. The man’s tongue emits sperm which travel down the lady’s esophagus and implant themselves in her tummy.
I thought “sleeping together” literally meant sleeping together and couldn’t figure out what the big deal was, but I suppose that was pretty common in the days before cable TV.
I thought all the “___ Realty” signs were advertisements for reality stores. You see, this world is a lie, but for a fee you can see what’s really behind it.
I remember telling people my father served in World War I and commuted to New York everyday (rather than World War II and Los Angeles). My sense of time and distance were a bit off.
Cartoons with laugh tracks (these were common in the '60s and '70s) confused the hell out of me. I knew cartoon characters weren’t real, but they obviously had audiences. How did that work?
I was in college before I realized that “victuals” as written by literary highbrows and “vittles” as spoken by hicks and hillbillies were actually the same word and that VIC-chew’l is not a standard pronunciation.
My worst when I was little involved television. I knew shows with regular people in them were filmed with actors, so I thought cartoons were, too. I thought they were shot on other planets and that different companies produced their “movies” on different planets, which was why Warner Brother cartoons looked different from The Flintstones and Tom & Jerry, for example. The reason the cartoon characters didn’t look like real people was because they were aliens.
I watched a lot of soap operas with my mom and grandma. I knew that getting pregnant before you were married was a Very Bad Thing. But (like a few people on here) I thought that getting pregnant just happened. So I wanted to get married ASAP so I wouldn’t get in trouble when I got pregnant.
I also wanted to marry my cousin, so I wouldn’t have to change my last name. I would have picked my dad, but he was already married to my mom.
Holy crap, I didn’t even make that connection until you pointed it out to me! 
smack:
I thought “elemento” was the 12th letter of the alphabet.
I thought Alzheimer’s disease was “Old-timer’s disease”
I thought Jenga was an old Jewish game, like dreidel. I think this came from playing it with a Jewish friend I had as a child. I believed this for a very long time, almost into high school.
I think there were more that I can’t remember now.
[ul]
[li]I was well into adulthood when I realized that the phrase is ‘for all intents and purposes’, not ‘for all intensive purposes’.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]I had a black co-worker who swore she thought, as a child, that white people did not eat.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Again, well into adulthood: I didn’t know that the written word epitome was pronounced as it is. I had heard people say it and knew its meaning, and I had read the printed word and knew it’s meaning, but I had never made the connection that it was the same word.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Similar experience with the word hors d’oeuvre.[/li][/ul]
I’m such an ee-diot.
I had that for “misled.” I knew the word (pronounced liked “miss-led”) when spoken, but when I read it I pronounced it “my-zyld” in my mind.
The funny thing was, when I got older (after I figured out the problem) I had some friends who used “myzyld” as an invented word - it means hiding the good beer in an unlikely place like the vegetable drawer, while leaving out the bad beer out in the fridge for guests to drink - it was named after a friend who had this habit! So I ended up actually using at as a word. How random is that!?
Me, too. I think I was in high school before I realized ‘hors d’oeuvres’ and ‘or-durves’ were the same thing.
The Fisher Price Airport Playset provided the basis of a long-lasting misunderstanding about what this common signage indicated. (I thought these signs meant that there was a helipad nearby, until I was about twelve.)
We used to get record club catalogs, and in the little space under each album picture would be a list of the first few track names, invariably followed by “& 4 more” or however many there were. I simply couldn’t understand how every album from any artist would end with a track with such a similar name.
I used to wonder how hard it had been to make the telephone system not only transmit English, but all those other languages I heard used in the city.
I couldn’t figure out how the electricity knew that there would be somewhere to go when it reached the end of the wire, before it even started. What else would explain the necessity for there to be a closed circuit before the power would flow?
My father’s farm had an old-fashioned hand-powered petrol pump. I just assumed it was built on top of an oil deposit of some sort, and you were just pumping petrol from deep underground. Also I assumed all the wind-powered artesian pumps in the country were pumping oil, because they looked like the oil derricks in American movies.
I thought that you went to a church based on where you lived, like you went the school in the district where you lived. I couldn’t figure out why the people on our block didn’t all go to my church, since the children on my block all went to my school. I figured that they must be breaking the law by not going to the church they’d been “assigned.”
I thought that moving the gear stick while the car was stopped would put it in motion, even if the car was off. I was also afraid of the hazard light button and was sure something bad would happen if I pushed it.
I had a big misconception of what circumcision was - I thought that the penis didn’t have a hole and circumcision was cutting the tip of the penis to make a hole so you could pee. This was cleared up when I asked my dad how people who weren’t circumcised could pee.
I also thought that a woman randomly got pregnant, and that the baby came out of her stomach (which is understandable since I was born via C-section and I have no siblings).
One time when I was around 6 or 7 I did something mean on the playground because my friends put me up to it. As punishment, my mother made me write an essay on “peer pressure.” Except, having never seen the word in print, I wrote it as “pure pressure” instead.
I remember watching a bit on the Walt Disney show where Walt himself explained how animation works: draw a picture, then one a little different, and a little different again, and so on. The segment went on to show the pics one after the other, starting slowly, and faster and faster until the motion was smooth.
Then I realized that the artists must be REALLY good to be able to draw the shows with the live actors!
I knew that gasoline came from underground in deposits, so I thought that the the reason gas stations were always found in clusters was because that’s where the oil was and it they were pumping it up directly into cars. I couldn’t figure out how they lined the street corners up over the deposits, though.
Back when my daughter was tiny, she actually prefaced a question with “Back when you were a kid, and the world was black and white…” I don’t even remember the question because that part was so darn cute. She also got this idea from the b/w movies and photos.
Well, since one in four children born today will be Chinese, eventually the odds catch up with you.
You know the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Boxer”?
The third verse goes:
“Asking only workman’s wages
I come looking for a job
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the **whores **on Seventh Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.”
First time I heard it (around twelve-years-old), I thought the word “whores” was horse. Like there was some talking horse who told the singer to come on, and on lonely cold nights they’d sleep in a stable together.
I don’t think I figured it out for some years after.
I thought that calling someone a “Jew” was disrespectful, like calling someone a n*gger. I thought the proper term was “Jewish person.”