When I was kid, TV Shows almost always had a presenting sponsor. At the end of the show, there was a often voice-over such as “The Beverly Hillbillies is brought to you by Marlboro cigarettes.”
“is brought to you by” was often said very quickly by the voiceover. Wanting to learn new words, I asked my Mom what does “izbrattuyubye” mean? She would have this dumbfounded look on her face.
My dad was military and we were stationed in Hawaii from when I was about 4 till I was about 8 years old. Toward the end of that time, I came up with a very handy phrase which I thought had originated with me–“the day after tomorrow”. I heard other people using my phrase and was quietly pleased.
Shortly after that, we were transferred to Dayton, Ohio. Imagine my pride when I discovered that my phrase had already swept the nation! Luckily, this was a modest pride and I didn’t tell anyone else about my accomplishment. I think it finally dawned on me that I was not the inventor of this phrase when I read it in books that were older than I was. It was a glorious feeling while it lasted though.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t necessarily the brightest child sometimes. When I was really young, I was convinced that I could fly if I wanted to. I never wanted to because I’ve always been scared of heights but I just knew that I could.
I thought that when you rewound something on the VCR, it rewound television for everyone. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it worked- I finally settled on the idea that people only rewound if they really needed to, since doing it too often would piss everyone else off.
I had a similar experience as a wee lad during one of our first shorter-term moves to Canada. My mom is French Canadian and she’d been teaching my sister and me some basic French, but not enough to converse fluently yet. I could ask for a glass of milk, for example.
My parents found a French kindergarten and pre-school for us. The teachers could speak English, but few of the other kids did. Since most of it sounded like gibberish to me, I figured what the heck, I’d speak gibberish back: “Garflebarble snaggruffuff!”
And wouldn’t you know, it worked! I would “speak” to the other kids and they would speak back! I was speaking another language! I was SO awesome!
So years later my mom had taught us more. We moved to Canada for a longer stay and went to a French school where we really did speak in French all day, and I thought back to my pre-school days and thought: :smack:
Of course all the other kids were responding to my “Barbble-put-put schnuggerwoof patooie!” They were probably all standing there asking me: “What the hell is wrong with you? Did you hurt your head?.. Should we alert the teacher? Maybe it’s a seizure.”
Oh, and despite being a kid who climbed and fell out of trees, regularly crashed my bike, and had spectacular wipeouts on my tobbogan, I never seriously injured myself as a kid. So when I heard the term “broken arm” or “broken leg” I thought it was more like dismemberment.
For example, when you break a stick, it breaks in two. When you bent the Six Million Dollar Man action figure’s leg - snap! - the leg would break right off. So that’s what I thought happened to people who got a broken arm or leg. A cast would be comparable to taping the two ends of the broken stick together, except that since humans are alive, the broken limb would reattach itself as it healed.
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.
I never believed in Santa but I did believe in the Tooth Fairy. Most times when I lost a tooth, I could feel the money being slipped under my pillow. I always wanted to catch the Tooth Fairy in the act so I could see her but I was afraid she’d bash me in the head with her magic wand.
One time my little brother asked me what whiplash meant, and to screw with him (I think he was maybe six or seven and I would’ve been ten or eleven) and I replied that it was when you got into a car crash and your neck fell off. It’s still kind of a running joke with us.
When I’d go to church, and hear it referred to as “God’s House”, I’d always wonder where his bed was. I also used to picture him wandering around the church during Mass, just checking everything out.
Since my mother* AND both of my maternal grandparents’ wore dentures, I thought that when you got old, you could just automatically take out your teeth. I always thought that would be so cool. (And my grandfather would always make me laugh by pushing his lower teeth way out over his lower lip…I thought it was hysterical)
*She never had good dental care as a child
I thought the same thing. When the next door neighbors moved to Washington, and new people moved in, I assumed that they were from Washington, and didn’t find out until years later that they had come from just a few miles away.
I thought the same thing. I remember my mother explaining to me that when a shuttle goes into outer space, they have to break through the atmosphere a certain way so that it wouldn’t burn up. I assumed it went straight up (to China) and broke through the other side of the earth. Even now, I still can’t believe how flawed that logic was…I mean, they could’ve just dug a hole and saved a lot of trouble. 
This one wasn’t mine, but a friend of mine used the term “silhouette” in what I thought was an odd way and I asked for an explanation. He told me that he knew better now, but when he was a kid, he heard the song “Two Silhouettes on the Shade” by Herman’s Hermits. He asked his brother what a silhouette was and the brother replied that it was the string with a little plastic loop on it hangs from the bottom of the window shade.
My grandma used to do that! I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It never dawned on me that she had dentures. I just thought it was a really cool trick and, with practice, I would be able to do it myself. I practiced for an embarrassingly long time before I figured out I was never going to master this.
Did I mention that I wasn’t the world’s brightest kid sometimes?
As I kid I had no problem understanding what “No Parking” or “No Standing” signs meant, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand “No Standing” in the context of cars. 
I’m thinking that maybe you live in an apartment building similar to mine. 
At one time I thought it rained every night. Then one day my older brothers said they were going to sleep in the treehouse that night, and I said “What about the rain?” They said it wasn’t going to rain that night, and I had to reevaluate my hypothesis.
Another hypothesis that I had was that we were created in heaven as smart as God (or at least really smart) but then God tarded us before sending us to be born. Some people, unfortunately, got a double dose; they were retarded.
I once jumped off the back of the truck with an umbrella, because I thought it would work like a parachute like it had for Mary Poppins.
Me too. I wondered what my dad did for a living, and so one day I asked my mom what dad did all day and she said he made money. I have always thought that this was evidence that she underestimated my intelligence.
Do y’all remember the first time you realized that teachers were regular people, who went to the grocery store and drove cars and lived in houses and had families and stuff like regular adults? (After typing this I read post 151)
I thought that actors put some kind of plastic or wax covering over their lips before doing kissing scenes. Surely they wouldn’t actually let their lips touch, that would be way too gross.
I thought that wearing Kid Power shoes would make me able to lift a heavy barbell over my head like the kid in the animation.
One time we were watching baseball and the batter stuck out and the announcer said that he was retired. I said “He’s retiring just because he struck out!?” I couldn’t believe someone could be such a quitter. Also, once my mom bragged that my oldest brother had stolen a base. I pictured my brother breaking into the storage shed where they kept the baseball equipment and stealing a base out of it, and couldn’t understand why my mom wasn’t mad at him.
Same here. My designations were different and much more arbitrary, though. Numbers and letters have both genders and colors.
I think a lot of kids, including myself, genuinely believed in the protective force of being completely tucked in under a blanket. I was lucky enough, however, never to have had a bed with empty space beneath it.
I knew that “ACDC” meant “bisexual” but I really didn’t have any idea of what bisexual was other than some kind of taboo concept.
OTOH I was a fairly skeptical child. I doubted the existence of the tooth fairy and proved it by hiding my tooth well enough that it couldn’t be found, and yet I still got money, so I knew it must be my parents.
And when a teacher tried to convince me that the rotation of the Earth is what caused gravity, I immediately realized that the opposite must be true.
I used to think that if I slept with a green meteor rock that it would signal aliens to abduct me.
I also spent many hours staring at the ocean trying to wish a mermaid into existence.
When I was three, my parents took me to Mme. Tussaud’s Wax Museum. For the rest of my childhood I thought that the wax figures were actual dead people put in these poses.
I also thought that the umbilical cord connected from the growing baby directly to the mom’s belly button inside.
It came as a surprise to me that people actually had to move during sex. I’d thought you put everything in the right slots and stayed perfectly still.
One of my kids used to blow on lights and other mechanized things, thinking that’s how you turn them off. (Hey it worked with his birthday candles.)
I used to think that demented leprechauns lurked under intersections and controlled the timing of the lights so as to cause maximum gridlock. Hey, seemed as reasonable an explanation as any.
Buzzsaws in my neighborhood were sure signs that dinosaurs were wandering around the streets, and would certainly come find me and eat me if I were to venture outside. At some level tho I knew these were fictions, but hey in a sense they spiced up my preschool life.
My friends kid was furious with his mother, he couldn’t get her bedroom door open, dragged a chair over to peep through the glass bit at the top and saw his mum and dad having sex. He was convinced she’d contracted AIDS by having sex.
I happened upon my granddads false teeth soaking in a glass and was horrified. Granddad was falling apart piece by piece and nobody cared.
I thought the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (the Arlington one) was literal. I didn’t know there were others or why you would need a monument like that. I did know all about the Lone Ranger and comic book superheroes. I thought he was some masked fighter who swooped into several battles in WW2 and lead amazing rallies of Allied troops and beat up Nazis.
I thought he must have been killed in his last battle (taking hundreds with him of course!) and afterwards when they removed the mask it turned out that nobody knew who he was so they buried him as the Unknown Soldier.