Once, when I was little, I saw two dogs sniffing and licking each other then their butts stuck to each for what seemed like hours. I thought how nasty and hideous. Surely human beings would never do anything disgusting like that… WRONG! Not only us but that’s what all living things think about pretty much all the time. Whodathunk that’s the very mechanism that gives life; floras do it so much more gracefully…
In the same vein, I never ever imagined, though I had absolutely no idea where or how, babies would be coming out down there, involving pee holes near the pooh holes! That’s when I learned reality can be very disturbing. It took a while to adjust from my fantasy cerebral sex to the much organic real sex involving down there and all that.
I used to think the best way to save gas was to drive really fast. If you get there faster the car doesn’t have to run as long so it must use less fuel.
The first few times I heard someone talk about guerrillas in English, it did sound to me like gorilla. It took several minutes of turning the word around to realize what they were actually saying.
It simply didn’t make any sense, “gorilla fighting in Nicaragua”, but if it had been about, say, Congo, I might have wondered why were those people so worried about African wildlife and why would the big primates need to be fought, what with being in the list of endangered species and all that.
My older sister convinced me that the little nubbin inside a peanut (what would become the stem of the plant if said peanut were allowed to grow up) is poisonous. She had, of course, had a vaccine, so she could eat all she wanted. Sadly, they stopped giving the vaccine just one year before I was born. Therefore, I was not safe from the poisonous effects of eating peanut nubbins. I had to spit apart all my peanuts and give her the nubbins so I wouldn’t die. I did this for quite a long time and my parents never cleared it up for me because they thought it was hilarious that my sister scammed me into giving her all my peanut nubbins.
To this day, if I’m eating peanuts in her presence, I will give her a few nubbins for laughs.
Wait, what? Scotland Yard is not some castle-like complex full of detectives in Scotland? Aww man, now I have to Google that too.
When I was little the Woolworths had these giant security cameras suspended from the ceiling. I thought the anti-shoplifting people were up in the ceiling lying on their bellies looking through them like upside-down periscopes.
When I played a record (yes I’m old!) I thought that little tiny magical instrument-playing people ran up the arm of the record player and somehow into the speakers to play the music.
My mom belonged to our city’s “Newcomers Club” but I heard it as “Cucumbers Club.” I thought that people met to talk about cucumbers - you know, how to best grow them and swap recipes, etc. When she took me to one of the meetings I was so disappointed that there weren’t any cucumbers.
When I was young I fervently believed in wishes. Birthday wishes, dandelion wishes and wishing upon a star. My grandfather was always sick (various cancers). Every single wish I wished for him to get better. I never even thought once to wish for a pony or whatever, because I was terrified that if I even once wished for something for myself that was the one wish that would come true and it would be my fault that my grandpa died.
When he did die, I knew it was my fault for not wishing enough. Now I just wish someone had told me when I was little he wasn’t going to get better.
That is so adorable and sad, all at the same time!
I forgot one - I assumed that people with different color skin had different color semen. Although I was able to find unfiltered Internet porn at an embarrassingly early age, which cleared that right up for me.
Finding out that gorillas weren’t fighting wars was one of the greatest disappointments of my childhood.
I thought that, if you found the right store, you could use a coin to buy whatever was on the back. The quarter was therefore the best coin, because you could use it to buy an eagle.
If clouds overhead looked like a man, it was the boogie man. You had to run for cover, then sing “I’m Your Boogie Man” so he wouldn’t get you.
I thought the song “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was about a man who was, literally, a stone. This stone had a hat that he could lay on anything and magically turn that thing into a house.
Some fantastic childhood beliefs here, thanks all.
Two things.
I always thought cats were female and dogs were male. No good reason, never having examined any–just from the way they carried themselves, I guess.
On a long drive, we once convinced my youngest brother that his navel was a limb-disconnect device.
My parents almost plotzed when they heard his screams from the back of the station wagon when we pressed his “button”
My grandfather had a 1936 John Alden sailboat of 39’ named Sea Gypsy. Sailboats have a ventilation device called a “Charlie Noble” as a nickname. Well, we used to go sailing for a week or two every summer when my dad had leave, and there was a magical story teller on the boat named Charlie Noble that would tell us a story every evening just before bedtime if we were really really good that day … I think we figured it out about the time I hit about 7 years old =) It was actually my dad down in the galley telling a story to us sitting on the deck through the charlie noble
My younger cousin believed that if you breathed in passing a cemetary, you would breathe in a ghost. I think she had read it in a book of superstitions. Her sister and I, who didn’t believe this, used to tickle her to make her breathe.
Something somewhat related. In the Danny Thomas show, they talked about being Lebanese, and about Uncle Tonouse, who was coming to visit from Toledo. So for quite a time I thought that Toledo was in Lebanon, not Ohio or Spain.
I thought the other cars on the road didn’t have drivers in them - they just sort of robotically cruised around for no reason. I think I was too short to see into the windows so I didn’t know they had drivers in them.
I thought when you moved, you had to swap houses with someone. You couldn’t sell to one person and buy from another.
Once I asked my father why animals had tails and he told me, “To wipe their butts with.” Due to a combination of my being very impressionable and his usual dead serious nature, I believed this until I was about 10 years old.
There’s an entire website that is basically this thread.
