I use to think that all inanimate objects were alive and could read my thoughts.
I use to get confused about Washington D.C. and the state of Washington.
My mother use to have this tradition where we would not listen to Christmas music until one week before Christmas. I thought this was a tradition that everybody followed.
I thought the process of translating English<>French was just a letter substitution cipher. I concluded that learning the language consisted of just remembering the cipher.
I thought that cartoons were real. They just made everything really shiny. With, like, makeup and stuff. I also thought that you made bows and arrows by tying a willow branch onto a curved stick.
The arrows don’t go very far if you do that.
After learning about butterflies, coccoons etc, then eating peas, and learning peas came from a pod (pod/coccoon), I “put 2 and 2 together” and decided peas must be dead little baby animals. I had many strange and intense arguments with people about this… 
Back when they were heavily and crudely censoring Looney Toons cartoons it never occurred to me they were censoring them. I did realize they were old and I thought that the film was breaking when the scene suddenly jumped as the Coyote reached the edge of a cliff or started to set the ACME explosive off. I had this image of them running big reels of film held together with scotch tape.
I know I’m not the only one, but I thought that it was possible that people on TV could see into your house.
I used to think that night only ended if you went to sleep. If you stayed awake, it went on and on until you finally dropped off.
Also, that Lincoln freed the sleighs that had gotten stuck in the snow.
Quoth olivesmarch4th:
I can top that. When I was a kid, I knew that there was something called “sex”, and I knew that there was something couples did to have kids, and I knew that there was something involving a man putting his penis in a woman’s vagina (I’m not sure how I knew that last-- It might have just been extrapolation from the knowledge that boys are convex and girls are concave, so obviously they fit together), but it was a very long time before I made the connection between any of them.
I also thought (and I think this one is a pretty common misconception) that women had only one hole “down there”, that handled all of the nether functions. I was quite surprised when I learned that they actually have three.
I was about three or four, and out socializing with the neighborhood kids. The constant topic for little kids is CHRISTMAS and SANTA CLAUS. I understood that CHRISTMAS=PRESENTS, and the other kids were trying to explain to me that those presents were brought by Santa. Then they got detailed, and told me Santa lived at the North Pole.
Pole? The only pole I knew of was a telephone pole. In trying to elaborate for a toddler’s mind, I was told that the North Pole was at the TOP.
I got it twisted around in my head, to mean that Santa lived at the TOP of the telephone pole.
For years, I thought Santa lived in one of those cylindrical transfer cases you see at the top of some power poles.
~VOW
What’s even creepier is when the people on the newscasts and such say, “We’ll see you again tomorrow,” as if to reinforce the idea.
I also used to think that telephone operators listened in to your telephone conversation.
And this is before I learned about the FBI.
And now the NSA and the rest of them that really do. Everybody, let’s give a big shout out the government agents that get notified about this thread based on language parsing technology. Hi Big Brother! We love you!
My parents never had the “sex talk” with me (assuming, I guess, that I’d get it during recess in school), so as soon as I became aware that one could get a girl pregnant, I was under the impression that once she was officially knocked up, you’d have to keep on doing it, or you’d only get an arm or leg instead of a whole baby. :rolleyes:
Quasi
I was probably in junior high before I realized guerilla warfare did not involve non-human primates.
That the whole world spoke my native language.When my father explained to me it wasn’t so, I was stunned. I spent many days thinking how people interact.
I was about 5 then.
That it was my mother’s permanent job to dress me. One of my early memories is of feeling intense self righteous indignation when she told me I was old enough to start dressing myself - that was her job!
Not really a belief, but one time I was listening to the TV and heard somebody speaking with an Irish accent. I turned around and looked, and it was a black man. That blew my little ignorant mind :eek:.
A couple of years ago, we had a childhood friend of the SO stay with us for 3 months. He had never been out of the state of Louisiana. Never been on a plane, etc. He was 47 years old.
He called everyone he ever knew and told them he was in Washingtron, DC.
I wasn’t confused about Washington the city and Washington the state, because I live right on the edge of the former. As such, I fervently believed that Washington, DC was the capital of my home state of ‘North Virginia’.
If you are travelling in a car or bus and you pass a cemetery you must hold your breath until you are past it, or vague bad things will happen to you.