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For quite a while as a kid, I thought that a “student” was someone who threw rocks and stuff at windows and policemen - presumably, that would have been the 1969 Paris riots that I’d seen on the news. I remember being frightened when I found out that we had students living nearby (we lived near the University).
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My father, when he was a kid, read in some kid’s story-book about someone being disabled in a fist-fight when he was hit in his solar plexus. Puzzled, he asked his father where the solar plexus was. Uncharacteristically, Granddad was not in a mood for answering questions, and said brusquely “behind your left ear”. My Dad believed him for quite a long time.
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My mother carefully explained the facts of life to me one day. She did an excellent job - no trauma or embarrassment or anything - but I misunderstood one vital part of the description, and thought that the man’s pee-pee went into the woman’s bottom-hole. Luckily, I found out the truth before too long. “You mean they have two holes???”.
when I learned that a nickle was like 5 pennies, and a dime was like two nickles, etc, I also “figured out” that if one opened up a nickle (like a fopil covered chocolate coin, but much harder to do), you would find 5 pennies squashed into it. Hey I was 4 or so…
regards
FML
When I was little I was under the impression that islands floated – that they were just big chunks of rock and dirt, unconnected to the earth below, that drifted along in the ocean, and that given enough time, they could theoretically end up anywhere. After all, that’s how the island of Atlantis sunk, right? It just slipped into the sea.
Then there was a period when I was old enough to be indignant at any perceived sexism, but not old enough to understand the way sex worked. Thus the time in a department store when I angrily complained to my father that it wasn’t fair that men were always accused of rape, when surely women commited just as many rapes as men!
I was in college before I knew this. And the amazing thing is that there are women who don’t even know how many holes they have.
Ummm, last time I checked I had three.
When I was about four (1969ish) our neighbor’s toddler daughter broke her finger in their front door. Since my sibs and I were outside playing at the time and heard her screams I was very interested in the accident.
I was really quite desperate to know all the details, like did her dad just pick the finger off the ground and how did the doctor make the finger stay on. I remember being disappointed when mom told me that it was just broken inside her skin.
There have been SDMB threads where it has turned out that some women have very little understanding of their plumbing. I guess it’s not so easy when it’s all hidden behind folds of skin.
My dad used to watch hockey all the time, and when they went to commercial they would say “This game has been brought to you by…” and then the sponsors’ names. “Brought to you by” always sounded like one big word, and I had no idea what it meant. Bratiyubye.
I think there was a time when I actually bought into the submarine ride at Disneyland. I thought we were really diving way underwater, and seeing mermaids and sea monsters and whatnot.
I remember in year 11 (aged 17 or so) a girlfriend complained that she had to wee, and wasn’t it a nuisance because she’d put a fresh tampon in.
Funny. I thought Sesame Street was “procta-ued” by the letter K.
I thought that all girls were born with a baby in their bellies, and the babies growing inside made the girls grow up on the outside. I think I got this idea when I asked my mom why pregnant ladies’ bellies were so big.
I remember taking some figurative sayings literally.
I used to have dreams where I’d walk into a room. My parents were in there except they were those Russian dolls that fit inside each other, and they were broken into pieces and scattered on the floor.
My parents used to complain of being “broke.” It is interesting how a throwaway remark can have such an impact on a young mind.
I had also heard the term “screw” in reference to having sex. In some of my first sexual dreams, my penis was a big screw driver.
This could just be because in some of us, tampons have an annoying habit of working their way down too far when we pee. Usually it’s in heavier women who have given birth, though, so I’m not saying your girlfriend wasn’t ignorant of the plumbing. Just that I know the annoyance of just having put in a tampon and knowing I’m going to have to remove it before it’s time because I have to pee and it’s going to slip. (No, I can’t just shove it back up there, I’ve never gotten that to work.)
I’m joining those who were confused by ‘chaos’.
Thing is, I’d heard the word ‘kay-oss’ and knew exactly what it meant. I’d read the word I pronounced ‘Cha-owes’ and knew exactly what it meant. It was just that I didn’t manage to link the two until I was about nine. My teacher had for some reason written chaos up on the side blackboard and only when he explained to another kid what it said did a teeny little lightbulb go off in my head.
When I was about ten my mother watched old movies of Fred Astaire on television. But I always heard it as Freda Staire. I knew it was a guy, and I thought it was peculiar that a man would be named Freda.
Well, sexually, let’s just say I had no concept of semen until easily the 5th grade, so, the only bodily fluid left to exchange was pee…
I also was convinced that the Y is disney was actually a P, so it was Disnep, but for some reason the P was silent (oddly, I grasped silent letters, but couldn’t tell that that was a Y)…
I even jokingly pronounced it disneP a lot.
Well I had never noticed it, but based on this Disney logo, I can see it. http://www.cip.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~benkmana/anime/images/disney.jpg
When I was a kid my Dad would pay for something, and while he was fishing out the bills or coins he would always say “That should cover it”. So of course I assumed what something cost was how much bills or coins would literally cover the item.
That explained why things like houses and cars were so expensive, because they were so large it would take a lot of bills to “cover” them up.
I always thought banks had a big box for all each of their customers and that is where the money went into when you deposited. When you made a withdrawal, the teller just loaned you some money out of “their” box at the counter and then went out back of the bank later to your box to get the money back.
mm
Variation on the reproduction theme: when I was in first or second grade, I asked my Mom about where babies came from. She explained (as best I can recall) that women have eggs in their bellies, and when a man and woman were married, sperm came from the man’s penis and fertilized the egg. She didn’t go into any details of the mechanics of this, so for a few years I thought when a (married) man urinated (standing up, of course) sperm flew out of his penis and through the air into the woman’s belly. The man and woman didn’t have to be in the same room; they just had to be in the same house. I’d never actually seen my dad’s sperm flying through the air, so I assumed they were invisible.
hehe, I gotta admit something like that. Unfortunately I only found out last week. :smack:
You know the guy who put out the oil well fires until he died; Red Adair? It’s not a name That comes up in conversations very often, and I had never seen seen it written until Modern Marvels on history the other day. When I first heard it as a kid for some reason I thought his name was Retta Dare. Seemed like a strange , but kinda cool name. But never really thought about it very much, I had just kind of thought that was his name all these years.
When my middle sister had a baby, I overheard another sister telling my mother, “That was so stupid of B to get pregnant!” I vehemently protested, “Well, she couldn’t help it!”
I was under the impression that one just woke up pregnant someday, like the way one wakes up with a cold or a fever or any ailment.
Also, I was once reading a novel and asked my parents what the word “FAN-a-tic” meant. They looked puzzled, then asked to see the word, then laughed their heads off at me. I knew the word “lunatic,” so I assumed the pronunciation of “fanatic” from that. :smack: