When I was little (say, less than 5 years old), I didn’t differentiate between the words “veteran,” “veterinarian,” and “vegetarian.” Therefore, I thought all the people any of those three words applied to were animal doctors who had fought in a war and didn’t eat meat. I don’t remember when I figured out the truth.
When I was young, I thought that women had penises too - only smaller (note: I’m a relic from the times when porn mags carried no frontal nudity).
I also used to think that bats could pass thru windows.
I remember being very angry at my father because he refused to give me a straight answer to the question “Where was I before I was born?”
First he told me that I was in my mommy’s stomach. But, I reasoned, that was only for a little while, a year or two. What happened before that? He said I was in heaven before that. Well, heaven is where dead people go and I obviously couldn’t have been dead before I was born.
He never gave me a satisfactory answer. That was when I knew grownups didn’t know everything. It was a hard lesson to learn at 4.
I thought that foreign languages were just codes. If you replaced A with H, B with N, etc., you’d get French. Rearrange them another way and you’d get Spanish.
I thought New England was a neighborhood of Boston.
I thought I could see Europe from the beach in Maine.
I thought everyone with the same last name was related. I also thought this about first names for a while.
–sublight.
I had a decidedly secular upbringing. I was at a nursery school when I was four. A little girl asked me, “Do you know Jesus?” I told her I didn’t, and she said I was “going Down!” I don’t know if she said it specifically, but I understood that “going Down” meant going to a firey place where you get burned up, and there were monsters. I had trouble sleeping for a few nights because I was afraid that my bed would descend into the Infernal Pit, or tip so that I’d fall into the same.
A year or two before that, Dad was stationed in Japan. My mom and I were at the O-Club at the base there, and there was a dog outside a window. I was speaking Japanese to it. Mom asked why I wasn’t speaking English. Aparrently I looked at her as if she were mad and explained that it’s a Japanese dog! What else would I speak?
After watching Unsolved Mysteries type shows, I was convinced that the aliens would be coming to abduct me anytime now. And the way I could thwart them would be to cover myself entirely in blankets while I slept. Then I would just look like a heap of blankets on my bed, and they wouldn’t take me. Breathing was always a chore in my alien armor.
When walking on my wooden porch, I was scared, because I thought I could conceivably fall through the tiny spaces between the planks.
At one point, I knew sex somehow involved sticking the penis into some kind of hole. Since I didn’t know of any other holes, I assumed that all sex was anal. Before that, I assumed that once people were married, the woman would occasionally become spontaneously pregnant. I also thought that diseases like AIDS arose spontaneously from having sex while not married. I can directly attribute this misinformation about sex to my conservative Christian upbringing. I once remember a preacher saying “The only protection from AIDS is a marriage license.” So I assumed that married people magically did not get AIDS, and everyone else that had sex did.
I was sure that my stuffed animals heard and understood everything I said to them, despite their somewhat unresponsive nature.
Things you ate were processed on a conveyor belt in your stomach. I think “educational” cartoons had something to do with this.
Also, your body was filled with blood, like a water balloon. That’s why no matter where you get cut, you bleed.
There was a great Calvin & Hobbes comic about that very subject. Have you read it?
As for my childhood misconceptions, I can only think of two at the moment: Until I was 11 or 12, I thought that wax in candles didn’t burn. I heard a classmate say something about almost starting a fire due to burning wax getting out of control, and I thought “Wait, that can’t happen…” I thought the wick was all that burned, and the wax was just there as a fire resistor to make sure the candle didn’t catch anything on fire. Why else would they have a wick? And why don’t you see the wax burning? I’m still having trouble believing this one…
For a while, when I was aobut 4 years old, I thought that all males were right-handed and all females were left-handed. It happens to be true in my immediate family, so I assumed it was true for everybody else.
And, of course, I thought the sky was a dome, and I believed a lot of the other misconceptions you people mention…
When i was real little, my neighbor had this parrot. And I always thought that it could really understand what i was saying. My neighbors had trained it to say “Yes” “uh-huh” and “ok”…hahaha…this kept me busy for hours.
You like Scooby-Doo? “Yes”
It’s fun. “Yes”
I want a bike. “ok”
I’m thirsty. “uh-huh”
How old are you? “ok”
hahahaha…my family still laughs about that.
If you got a really good job you got French benefits.
“90 days same as cash” meant if you waited for 90 days you got it for free.
PopPop wore the worst after shave. He was actually an alcoholic.
Bigfoot lived in the woods behind my house.
That when the lights were out and I got scared of the dark Jesus would stand at the door and make sure the monsters wouldn’t get me.
Dark Jesus? WTF?
I like the misunderstanding of Aristotle, who thought all cows had the same number of teeth as humans, although cow skulls must have been plentiful in every butcher’s trash pile in Greece, where he went for much of his other anatomical insights.
As a kid I would hear the commercials on TV selling things like albums or the latest gizmo and they would always end by saying “Call now, operators are standing by.” I would envision doctors and nurses standing around an operating table (operators do operations, right?).
Like some others, I also thought the real world was black-and-white before the advent of color TV and that babies came from naked kissing.
imagine a comma after “dark”… then perhaps it’ll read better for you.
In the civil-rights song “Marching to Pretoria” I though the words were “Marching to Peoria” and I could not figure out what was so all-fired important out there in Illinois. (okay, I went to a hippy-dippy elementary school, so sue me. I also knew all the words to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and thought it was “kids music.”)
My mother complained that after her day in the office, she was to tired to give me the attention I demanded. “How can she be tired?” I thought suspiciously. She just sits all day, she hasn’t been running!
I used to think that thunder was clouds bumping into one another. (Thanks Dad!)
I also thought that my last name was “Hansen Jr.” So I called my grandmother “Granny Hansen Jr.”
I used to think that every single phone line had its own personal operator, like the press ‘0’ operator. That’s right, one person, waiting 24 hours a day for our family to call asking for information or to connect a call or whatever. The mathematics of this never really dawned on me.
You mean there isn’t? Next you will be telling me there is no Easter Fairy and Tooth Rabbit
I had the same belief about foreign languages as Sublight: by changing each letter with another one in an English sentence, you get that same sentence in French.
I thought each floor had its own elevator; if you get in the elevator on the 5th floor, it is different from the one on the 6th floor.
I thought that you get at the destination faster if you embark on the first wagon of the street car, as opposed to the second.
I thought that she cow makes milk, and he cow makes cocoa.
I didn’t think that actors in TV shows were given scripts. I realizd that it was all just pretend and not really happening, but I thought that the actors were just told a general idea of the plot, and they had to ad-lib it from there. And of course a half-hour sitcom was filmed in half an hour, with no retakes or editing. I was always so impressed that the actors could come up with such clever lines on demand so quickly. :rolleyes:
I thought that you got pregnant by getting married. Sex did not factor in in any way; babies just came spontaneously after the wedding. Then I saw some high school girls who were pregenant. I didn’t think you could get married so young, but that must be the way things work…
I thought that when a person slit their wrists they died immeadiatly, like, so quickly that after cutting one you wouldn’t have the time to cut the other because you’d be dead. I figured people must rig up some kind of contraption with two razors on a stand, and then you would just run your wrists over it and slit both at once. For some reason, symmetry was an important element in suicide for me.