Gerbils do have tails though. Hopefully you have matured enough not to test the full claim but you can if you need to.
I remember thinking that trees are evil and would attack you, especially winter trees without leaves. I’d be scared that the trees would get me on the way to the bus stop. I’m mostly over it, but I didn’t like the Ents in The Two Towers.
When I was about four, I went to a water park with my best friend and her mother. To enter the park, you had to cross a bridge that went over a small murky pool. My friend paused on the bridge, pointed to the pool, and told me that an earless monkey lived down there and if I made too much noise crossing the bridge it would jump out and eat me.
Later, I saw a large monkey-shaped slide in the kiddie pool area that only confirmed my friend’s story in my mind. Clearly, the inhabitants of this water park had built this idol to appease the earless monkey god.
I used to think that, just the way regular polo is played on horses, water polo was played on flamingos. The topic never really came up and I wasn’t cured of that delusion until at least junior high.
When I was very young, I believed (maybe only briefly, I can’t tell), for some unkown reason, that little boys would grow up to become girls and the other way around 
And no, I don’t have (or had) any gender issue.
I once (when VERY young) thought cats didn’t drink water, only milk. Our cat got a dish of milk every night and I don’t remember seeing a water bowl. And babies came out through your stomach, that was why there was a belly button there, to show where the exit was.
My father is a very kind, hardworking gent. He worked hard all his life. One day I asked him, “Dad, if someone gave you all the money in the world, would you stop working?”
I was fully confident that he’d sputter “of course not!” with righteous indignation, and lecture me on the value of working hard for one’s money, not being lazy, etc.
Yeah, that was a soul-crushing day for me.
My brother, when he was very young, thought that salt was actually called, “Salten”, because when said as, “Salt and Pepper”, it sounded like, “Salten Pepper”.
“Mom, could you please pass the Salten?”
I still chuckle at that.
I thought that the well-known boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was Muhamma Dali. I didn’t think he was related to Salvador however.
I thought that Joseph had to cut Mary open using an axe or saw in the stable. I and all my siblings were born via c-section; why wouldn’t the baby Jesus also be born that way?
I thought that “mean” comedian Don Rickles would hurt people physically. My mom didn’t know the term “insult comic” back in 1967 I guess. She probably doesn’t know it now.
Heh, yeah, like the time my younger brother ordered a “bakebuh” to go with his steak. It took some questioning to figure out that he wanted a baked potato. You see, we are from the South, and the way he was hearing things you either had fried taters, mashed taters, or bakebuh taters!
Or the time my younger sister was asked what she wanted to drink and she requested a “dimessican help.” Took quite a while before Mom and Dad understood that she was asking for Diet Pepsi–she’d seen the ads on TV with the jingle “Diet Pepsi can help.”
I’m ashamed to admit that I thought the Washington Redskins were based in Washinton State until I was college.
I use to think there as such a thing as a lemonlime. The confusion came from watching Sprite commercials (and probably other commercials for lemon-lime flavored drinks) and thinking it was flavored by a single fruit. And although I did know about lemons, for some reason I didn’t realize that limes were their own fruit for a long time.
This, apparently, is an “amusing/crazy belief” I’ve held up until about three minutes ago.
Which, really, is par for the course, considering the story I had planned to share in this thread:
When I’d go to the library, I’d hand the librarian a book. She’d check it out on the computer, then take the book and put it under the desk before handing it back to me. There’d usually be a thump from under the desk when she did this. I’d observed that, on occasion she’d forget to do this, and when the patron tried to leave with the book, an alarm would go off. I surmised, therefore, that when the librarian reached under the desk with the book, she was replacing it with a copy of the same book that didn’t contain the alarm. The improbability of keeping an complete, duplicate copy of the entire library under the check out desk did not occur to me for some time.
Okay, the really embarrassing part of this story? The library in question was my high school library, and I labored under this bizarre delusion for the better part of my Freshman year.
Going back a generation: my mother lived next door to a rotund gentleman named John Burgess. Growing up, she could never figure out why her neighbor had his own Christmas carol: Round John Burgess, mother and child. Holy Infant, so tender and mild.
There is a town in Ohio called Lebanon. It is not particularly close to my hometown, but I have some distant relatives there. Cousins of cousins, that sort of thing.
My grandparents used to talk about going to visit the family in Lebanon. So for a really, really long time, I had the vague idea that every so often my grandparents would get on a plane and fly to the war-torn country I heard about on the news all the time, to visit some distant family. I always sort of wanted to ask about what it was like there, but they always talked about Lebanon so matter-of-factly and I didn’t want to seem stupid.
I’ve told this one before, but the Lebanon story made me think of it.
Somewhere in northeastern Wisconsin is a town called Business Dist. I know this because every time we drove to either of my grandparents’ houses, we drove through towns that all had green highway signs pointing to other towns, including Business Dist. But oddly enough, we never drove through Business Dist itself. Weird, huh?
I remember watching TV and seeing the thing about “We are experiencing technical difficulties . . . PLEASE STAND BY.” So I did – about a foot to the right front of the TV, at full attention. Luckily my mom caught me and set me straight on that particular figure of speech.
Reproduction involves a man’s penis, and the man and woman have to be naked, right. So naturally, in order to make a baby, a man and a woman go into the bathroom and strip off, and then the woman drinks the man’s urine (out of a cup, silly, because . . . well, I hadn’t thought of putting one’s mouth on a penis, but if I had, that would be GROSS! [And drinking urine isn’t?]). Boy, was I glad to be wrong on that one.
Yeah, my Mom always used to talk about going to a California city called Ellay, which I was never able to locate on maps.
I thought “sex” referred to “kissing on the mouth.” I’d learned about the whole penis-in-vagina thing, but I blocked it from my mind, or something (it was just too icky to think about, I guess), because when my mom made me watch some video about how sex would give you icky diseases, I was afraid to kiss someone on the lips for a long time, until a later health class set me straight. (Not that kissing CAN’T lead to icky diseases, of course!)
I thought the news anchors on TV were actually talking to ME, specifically. They were looking right at me, after all!
I thought that songs in keys like D and E major were always supposed to be sad songs, and that songs in keys like C or F major were always supposed to be happy. And minor keys were always scary songs. I got quite indignant whenever I’d hear songs that didn’t fit this mold, because dammit, that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be!
I listened to a lot of folk music when I was a kid. Whenever a singer referred to “having a drink” (which they did a lot, I’m now realizing), I thought they meant a drink of water.
I’ve mentioned this in another thread, but I thought that speed limit signs automatically made your car go that speed. Then I learned about speeding tickets and it occurred to me that in order to go faster than the posted limit, you’d have to be able to control the car’s speed yourself.
I was pretty much the other way. I had seen Walt Disney on TV doing an animation demo, with still drawings and a flipbook, and a smooth transition to continuous movement. I decided live-action TV was done the same way, but the artists had to be really good!
At one point in elementary school, I thought that an “essay question” was an “SA question”. I don’t remember being too concerned about what SA stood for, though.
I was a child in the 1980’s when the “light cigarettes” movement was in full swing in the US. Since neither I nor anybody in my family smoked, my knowledge of tobacco was whatever I saw people doing and whatever I saw in ads and store displays. I figured that “Marlboro Lights”, which were in every convenience store, were called that either because you lit them up, or because they were self-lighting and could be used to light up non-light cigarettes.
That’s how Catholic parishes are organized in Spain, although people can always go to another church if they like the preaching better or it’s more convenient (plus most parishes have more than one church). That is, you don’t sign up for one, as I was told I had to do in some of my US parishes, you belong to one or another based purely on geography. I don’t know how many other denominations or religions are big enough here to have more than one district in the same town, though.
The first computer-type thing we had at home used cartridges, it couldn’t be programmed by the user. My mother was bilingual and often, after a conversation in Catalan, she’d take a while to be able to switch back to Spanish and vice versa; we took to referring to that as “changing the cartridge” and still use the expression to mean changing mental gears. One of my brothers, who must have been about 5 at the time, asked me where did the cartridge go in and out, the mouth?