I thought that a man and a woman sleeping together would result in pregnancy. No other activity other than sleeping was required.
Having gone to catholic school resulted in a few:
I thought all our neighbors were Jewish. We were taught in school that there were Jews and gentiles and somehow, my 6 year old brain managed, gentile = catholic, so being no other options but Jewish and Catholic and the neighbors didn’t go to our church, they were all Jewish.
Also, misheard the Hail Mary when I learned it in first grade. Instead of “pray for us sinners now,” I heard “pray for us sooners now.” I figured sooner was better than later, I guess. (Now I joke that I spent years praying for Oklahoma.)
My older siblings tried to convince me that actual marbles were used in marble cake and that dried apricots were rat brains. (This was particularly disconcerting since we had a pet rat at the time.)
My dad used to cut wood on the “radio alarm” saw. I was probably in my teens before I realized it was actually a radial arm saw.
I remember getting all excited when the power went off and my dad said he was going to go take a look at the transformer. I was extremely dissapointed to find out that it wasn’t a robot that could change into a car.
I was a little frightened about joining the Cub Scouts, because I thought that there was a possibility that I would get drafted and sent off to war.
I thought that the more serious of a crime you committed, the higher the authority you had to answer to. If you jaywalked, you answered to your city councilman. If you stole something, you answered to the mayor. If you hurt somebody, you answered to the governor. And if you killed somebody, you answerd to the president.
I thought that in England, the Queen rode through town every day making people bow to her, and that those who didn’t were thrown in prison (like Daniel & the Lion’s Den).
As a child, I assumed that the candy and gum that fell to the floor of a supermarket (specifically, under the candy/gum racks) was free, because once it touched the floor, who would want to buy it?
I got busted by my sister who demanded to know where I’d gotten the Hubba Bubba. I told her, she told mom, mom dragged me back to supermarket to pay for the gum and apologize.
On another note - I also assigned genders to numbers. I’m so glad there are other people out there who did that!
At about 4 or 5, I knew that only adults grew beards and moustaches, but I didn’t realize that it was only *men *(usually). My grandpa had a moustache and smoked a pipe, and so I wanted to do both when I grew up. I remember being kind of bummed when I found out that I would probably never grow a moustache - and if I did, I’d be considered funny-looking. Later, I realized that women don’t typically smoke pipes, either, but I got over that one when I learned about lung cancer.
Like many in this thread, I thought pregnancy could result from French kissing. I knew about sperm and eggs, but not much else. Shortly after Christopher Reeve was paralyzed, there was a television report about how he and his wife were considering having another baby, despite the difficulties. I was eight at the time, and asked out loud, “What’s the big deal? They just have to kiss!”
I was convinced that every year, new car models were released primarily to increase fuel efficiency.
Perhaps similarly, I thought Judaism was one of the largest religions in the world. I went to a Lutheran school, so the only other religion I heard anything about in class was Judaism. I knew about Buddhism and Hinduism and Neo-pagan things from going to the local shiny rocks/pagan supply and tea/herbs/pagan supply shops for shiny rocks and beads, gossip, rose absolute, and shampoo with my mom, but I barely heard about Islam at all. One of my classmate’s fathers was Jewish and several of my parent’s friends, and I went to the synagogue once a year to eat blintzes and bagels and buy used books, but I never did anything related to Islam. So for years, Islam and Judaism had approximately opposite populations in my head.
We could probably start a misconceptions your parents had when you were a kid thread. When I was a kid, a bit too old for transformers, there was a younger kid in my carpool. My mother asked him what he got for Christmas, and he replied “Transformers”. My mother said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were into electronics!”
This reminds me that the Beatles song Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite scared the heck out of me when I was about six or seven. I thought the line that actually goes “And tonight, Mister Kite is topping the bill!” went “And tonight, Mister Kite is having his meal!”
In my head, I pictured some villainous, vicious raptor-person (I wasn’t good at hearing lyrics correctly, but I did know that a kite was a kind of predatory bird) eating his helpless human victims in the middle of the night.
I guess the freaky carnival music of the song reminded me of horror movie music somehow and - wait, did you say ‘adorable’ misconceptions? Never mind.
My friend’s son, during the 1980s, overheard on the TV news each night about the Ethiopian famine. He couldn’t understand what was going on, though, and one night he asked her, “I just don’t get it. Why does everybody want to eat the Opians?”
Now, whenever our family heads out to an Ethiopian restaurant, we say, “Let’s go eat some Opians!”
Another friend’s son thought the alphabet went “Little minnow pee”. He was quite upset when he learned it correctly in kindergarten and realized she never had bothered to correct him because it was so cute.
My daughter used to love the nursery rhyme “Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John…” When she was 12, she actually read it for herself, and for the first time discovered that the words weren’t “Diddle diddle dumpling, mice on John…” She accused me of deliberately mispronouncing it for all those years. I’d had no idea she thought that’s what it was.
I’ve got one that goes further back. In the '60s my grandmother bought a Ford Mustang, to which an old aunt of hers said “I didn’t know you liked horses!”
IIRC this concept was presented on The Simpsons. I believe it was part of Homer Simpson’s “retrospective” on the series, perhaps upon one of the show’s anniversaries. This episode also had Homer, presumably the series producer, remark that not one day went by that he didn’t think of eliminating Marge from the series. You expect him to say something terrible about her. The he makes an off-handed explanation: “You know, just to break the monotony.” Or words to that effect.
He said that the first few episodes were drawn “live” by the animators. But that had to stop because it was just too hard on their hands.
I’ve presented the concept with a deadpan look and voice a few times. People listen intently and try to process my statement seriously. Then they realize the stark absurdity of what I have just said, and crack up.
Back to the topic:
I thought that Jimmie Dodd on the late '50’s TV show Mickey Mouse Club literally had magical powers, as when he gestured and made a piano appear. I was a bright kid, even in kindergarten and the first grade, but I had never had the very basic special effect explained to me. I recall being very envious and plaintively saying that I sure wished I could do magic.
Oh, and I was sure that scarfing down dome spinach before going out of the house again would make me strong enough to defeat my five years-older brother and his bullying friends. I don’t imagine anyone will be puzzling over the origin of that one. Arf arf arf!
I think that’s why they chose spinach as Popeye’s source of strength, as kids weren’t eating spinach back then (gee, I wonder why), and this was a way to get kids to like the stuff. I remember reading somewhere of letters from housewives all over the country saying that “little Jimmy used to not like spinach, but now that he’s seen/read (might have been before TV) Popeye he can’t put the stuff down!”
OK, time for my adorable misconception that’s actually very embarrassing. Ready?
First time I saw a Wii and the warning about to make sure the Wii remote is in the jacket, I thought that Wiis came with a special jacket (ie like what you wear) as part of the kit and my brother-in-law just lost his (like people tend to do with electronic pieces from time to time). The embarrassing part: this was last Christmas and I was 36 years old at the time. :o
I thought how you killed someone was by bending various body parts of their’s until they died. It was from looking at the Stations of the Cross on the walls of our church. When they were nailing Jesus up, it looked like they were just manipulating his joints and stuff like that.
I remember hearing commercials about “alcoholism” and drinking “alcohol”, and
I didn’t get how anyone could drink alcohol and not die. Alcohol = rubbing alcohol.
I used to watch Guiding Light with my mom, and one day when an actress was replaced, I asked her what happened to the old one. And when she told me she had been fired, I took it literally: like they had shoved her into a fireplace.
Oh, and I don’t know about anyone else – but sex was kissing when you were naked.
So, my dad’s family is Jewish, but I grew up in a town with very few Jews. Anyway, the name I’ve always called my grandmother is “bubbe”. When I was a kid and mentioned my “bubbe”, I would inevitably be asked what that meant and I would say “oh, that’s what we call my grandmother.” I swear I thought it was a made-up word until I was fifteen or sixteen or so and finally read it somewhere - you could have knocked me over with a feather.
In case you don’t know, it’s the Yiddish word for grandmother. D’OH.
Along those lines, a friend of mine is Thai-American and grew up in Michigan. She once told me that when she was a kid she though Thai was a language that her parents made up because no one else she knew ever spoke it.
I grew up in a family where there was no cursing at all — at most, the occasional “Hell” or “Damn” from my Dad, followed by an angry glare from my Mom.
I assumed that “Fuck” was a surname — after all, the only place I’d seen it was written in sidewalks (vandalism done while the concrete was still wet) or in graffiti on the side of a building, and when people did that, they usually wrote their names. I’d never met any of those Fuck kids at school, but I assumed that it must have been a pretty large family or that they got around a lot, because I saw their name all over the place.