Watching re-runs of the Muppet show, before the start of the show was the ITC Entertainment logo It looked impressive. The music was dramatic. I never really saw it for any other show. The spinning logo made me think that I was about to watch some special or feature presentation.
One weird thing tought by my mother: We saw a squirrel in the yard and, being kids, chased it. It went into a tree and scolded us. Then it made a funny face.
We ran over to my mom and asked “Why do squirrels have round O mouths?”
My mother said “Maybe it’s to put the nuts in.”
In a similar vein…I always thought the commercials for kids’ movies would end by saying “Great at G!” – which I took to mean, “The movie will be excellent if you watch it at some theater named ‘G’ – but if you go to some other theater, you’re taking your chances!”
Turns out they were saying “Rated G” – the MPAA rating for “general audiences.”
On the street I grew up on there was an old style police call-box. They were pretty much obsolete by this time but were apparently still functioning. There were warnings about the consequences of its misuse.
I was under the impression that even so much as touching the pole it was on would set off a hundred alarms and police cars would come screaming in.
Ok, yeah, it was the Rizzo administration, why do you ask?
I should worry more about Time Lords.
Very small Time Lords, if so.
(Damn Master and his Tissue Compression thingy!)
Tissue Compression Eliminator.
I use to hear, “It’s a dog eat dog world,” as, “It’s a doggie dog world.” Although I misheard the phrase as nonsense, from context I knew what it meant.
But there is lots of room inside!
This happened when I was so young that I don’t remember it now, but my mother tells me that when I was really little I saw an interview with Boy George on one of the morning talk shows and misunderstood his name so that I thought the hosts were calling him “boygirl”. That, coupled with Boy George’s appearance, caused me to believe that there was a third androgynous sex called boygirls. She says that for days, maybe weeks, afterward I would occasionally mention that there were boys, girls, and boygirls and that I’d seen a boygirl on TV.
I thought the title of the song “Scarborough Fair” was “Scarber Affair.”
I had the impression that the world “owl” was pronounced “Al,” as in short for Albert. We had a neighbor named Al, and my mother still occasionally talks about how funny it was that I thought his name was Owl. But it’s not that I thought his name was Owl, it’s that I thought the name of the bird was pronounced Al. Also, my parents would occasionally talk about rustic camping, and in connection with this, mention the concept of an outhouse. I thought they were saying owlhouse.
As my 5th birthday was approaching, my mother found some Mighty Mouse fabric at a fabric store, and told me she was going to sew me a Mighty Mouse cape for my birthday. I belived that when I wore it, I would be able to fly.
After hearing about sex and pregnancy, I simply assumed a woman got pregnant every time she had sex. I remember watching an episode of The Honeymooners where Alice is acting strange and Ralph starts to suspect she’s pregnant. My mother had to disabuse me of that notion when I started asking, “how can he not know whether she’s pregnant? If they had sex, she’s pregnant.”
I also simply assumed that when a family wanted to move, they had to find another family who wanted to move and trade houses with them. Otherwise, if you moved into their house but they didn’t move into yours… where would they go?
I remember how disappointed I was at some point in elementary school when I learned we went to school for 9 months of the year, and had only about 3 months off during the summer. Both the school year and summer vacation seemed interminably long, so, believing that symmetry was the natural order of things, I deduced we went to school for 6 months and had 6 months of summer vacation.
I thought that a bank account was a box filled with money at the bank, and that when you withdrew money from an ATM, a little vacuum would suck bills out of the box and deliver them to you.
When I was 5, there was a partial solar eclipse. The TV news said not to look at the sun during the eclipse or you could go blind. Needless to say, I spent that day looking straight down, not daring to glimpse the sky for even a moment.
When I was 6, I was walking the dog one day, then she got out of control and dragged me across the street. I was freaked out and cried to my mom that the dog had “murdered” me. Apparently, I had no idea what that meant, just that it was bad. 
One of my Grandmother’s neighbors was named Mrs. Wolfe.
I was absolutely terrified. I had never seen her, and thought she was a wolf dressed in clothing.
I think this is a pretty common mistake, but when I was a kid I thought Neil Diamond was singing Reverend Blue Jeans about a groovy Priest. It still sounds like a good idea for a song. The lyrics don’t really support it, but then they don’t really stand out as being obviously not about that either.
I thought actors wore a special flesh-coloured bodysuit for sexytime scenes because only your spouse is allowed to see you naked.
I also thought actors used a special trick for kissing scenes to just make it look like they kissed each other - because you’re only allowed to kiss your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse.
When newscasters said “raped” I thought they were saying “raked” and there were serial rakists out there who used a garden rake to kill people.
As a kid, someone told me that actors fake kissed.
I used to think that there was a particularly bad cut of meat called “Ends Meat”. Like if you take a side of beef and slice off all the steaks, the bits left over were “Ends Meat”. It wasn’t as good as other meat, but was about the cheapest food you could buy.
Which is why when someone was having financial trouble, the adults would say, he’s “having trouble making ends meat”. I.e. he was so poor that he couldn’t even afford the worst, cheapest food.
nm
That sounds so logical, it should be true.
Before learning the details about sex, I actually thought that it was a mystery to medical science exactly how a woman got pregnant, except that it was known to involve sleeping with a man. My personal theory was that the man impregnated the woman when they kissed, but he then had to sleep with her for it to “take.” (I hadn’t yet learned that “sleeping” with someone meant anything other than sleeping.)
I also had a serious misconception as a result of watching the *Bad News Bears. * At one point in the movie the players are told they have to wear jock straps, and the hispanic players state that, as Catholics, it would be against their religion. For years afterwords I seriously believed that the Catholic church had a rule against wearing jock straps, and that as a consequence Notre Dame football players had to play without any protection for their family jewels!
I also had the same belief about childbirth being anal, and when I was taught about the actual sex act, I actually thought that the vagina referred to the woman’s anus. It took me a while to figure out that females actually have two different pipes down there.