I used to think the reason why George Washington wasn’t smiling one the one dollar bill is because he had wooden teeth.
I also used to think the purpose of table salt was to cool off the food that was too hot.
I thought Hollywood was it’s own state. Possibly even an island off the west coast.
Funny anecdote: My young brother, like many young children, did not have very good pronounciation skills. He did have a wild immagination from watching too many cartoons though. So this led him to believe that he wanted to grow up to be a “warrior”. Not a soldier, or a policeman; but an honest-to-goodness axe-swinging menace to all evil doers. So whenever you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he would try to say “warrior”. Well, he slurred it slightly so everyone always thought he was saying “lawyer”. Which always struck people as odd because they had never met a four year old who wanted to grow up to practice law.
That’s not why he isn’t smiling??
You’re not alone. In fact, yours is probably one of the milder ones, in that a watching adult wouldn’t be freaked by your actions. But when my stepson started kindergarten in 2003, there was a late 2002 school orientation session for parents and kids alike. Great idea. The kids went to spend half an hour in the class of their next year’s teacher to overcome the fear, and the parents attended a talk by the deputy principal regarding the nuts and bolts practical things of bringing a child to that school. As the talk wound up and we were about to leave, the deputy finished off with, “And dads with sons coming next year, PLEASE OH PLEASE PLEASE take them to a public toilet once or twice beforehand so they can use a urinal. Some little boys come here with some VERY STRANGE IDEAS.”
So I think it’s universal.
I jumped out of a tree with an umbrella once. In my defense, I knew in advance I could jump out of it without hurting myself anyway (the branch I used was pretty low). Because, you know, jumping out of trees is a perfectly sensible thing to do when you’re a boy.
I thought that grapefruit was bitter because of the soap they used on the robots at the grapefruit factory. That’s particularly weird for me to have thought, because I’ve always been into science.
I thought the Iron Curtain was an actual wall made of iron around the USSR. I knew it couldn’t be a curtain like what you have on windows, but I also knew castles had “curtain walls” so I imagined a sort of high tech castle.
I thought sex was kissing while you were naked.
(C’mon, who didn’t think that at first?)
Heh. I knew that babies grew inside of uteruses when I was around 4, but I don’t think I was clear on what happened before that until I was a little older.
There was a lot talk in the news about Quebec seceding from Canada when I was small. When lived just shy of the Canadian border, and have Canadian family, so we followedCanadian news a lot. I always thought if Quebec seceded it would break off from Canada and float a little out sea.
Watergate broke when I was a small kid, too. I thought it had something to do with a dam breaking. To this day, I picture rushing water in my head when I talk about Watergate.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I observed that old people always drove slower than everyone else. I quite logically figured this was because they had learned to drive back in the days of the Model T when cars weren’t built to go very fast. I knew this from the little Model T mockups we drove at Cedar Point. Top speed maybe 5 mph.
Yeah, I remember that now you that you remind me. All the kids believed that when we were about 4 or 5. I thought I had made up the idea on my own, then discovered to my surprise that all the other kids believed it too.
I liked astronomy at the age of 5 or 6, but the word sidereal always gave me an eerie feeling. I didn’t know it was derived from a Latin word for ‘star’ and was pronounced si-DEER-ee-al. I thought it was “side real.” Like “surreal,” another reality alongside this reality. What could that be like? It was a bit scary, but fascinating to imagine.
I was terrified by Bartholomew and the Oobleck in preschool because I was afraid that the president (George H.W. Bush) would decide it was a good idea and we would all die. The day that we made the stuff (cornstarch and green food coloring), I just about had a panic attack.
I thought that same-sex marriage was legal as long as one of them dressed as the opposite gender for the wedding. This came from when I went with my parents to a same-sex (two women) commitment ceremony at our church and one of the women was wearing a suit.
Slightly off topic, but I once had a German friend ask me how long it would take to fly from LA to Hollywood. I told him it wouldn’t take long.
When I was very small I thought pregnancy happened by…well, telepathy I guess. They (happily married couples, even though that’s not how I came about) would sit across from each other and…commume. Somehow. Problem was if someone walked in between at the wrong moment (including guys) they end up pregnant themselves. Well this was my theory.
Later when I learned the basic mechanics, I came up with a new idea. I thought once you got started you were basically locked together till it was over. No I didn’t get the idea from dogs, I didn’t even know about dogs, just thought so. Worried a lot about my future sex life…I mean what if a fire broke out.
My mom was extremenly uncomfortable discussing sex with me when I was all of 10 or 11. As she tried to explain menstruation to me, I only remembered her saying something about blood and babies, so when the girl next door said that her mother had a blood clot, I told her it meant her mother was having a baby! :eek:
Mom also told me that babies were a gift from God and only married people could have babies. I couldn’t figure out how unmarried girls fooled God and got pregnant… I recognize now that she’s a product of her generation and she was probably terrified at the Free Love attitudes of the 60s and what it would do to me. But I was embarrassingly old when I figured it all out.
For the record, my daughter got the real story, told in an age appropriate way, whenever she asked about it. Which reminds me of one evening when she and I were in the car. She was probably 8 or 9 at the time, and we were listening to the radio to a story that was discussing virgins. I decided to sieze upon it as a “teaching moment” and ask my daughter if she knew what a virgin was. She was unsure, so I explained it was someone who hadn’t had sex yet. Her response: “Oh, I thought that was a lesbian.”
I almost choked to keep from laughing…
You could have been the leader of several 19th-century cults!
Uncle Cecil agrees that this isn’t true: Is swallowing chewing gum dangerous?
But he also says this one is true: If you flex your muscle when a mosquito bites you, will it swell up and explode?
When I was 7 or 8 I snuck into our neighbor’s pumpkin patch and poked a hold in nearly every pumpkin with a pencil. My post-poking paranoia grew and grew until I was convinced that, as with Beadalin’s “pee detector,” the neighbors were investigating and knew exactly who did it. I was certain I was to be arrested shortly and finally went to my mother and confessed . . . I was so frantic I was on the edge of a little kid nervous breakdown. Mom walked me over to the nice neighbor lady and I sobbed out the truth; the neighbors, of course, had not noticed anything wrong with their pumpkins.
I also poked holes in the Hoppity Horses my brother and I received for Christmas. With a pencil, naturally. I also poked a classmate in the scrotum with a pencil and stabbed another in the hand with one. Hmmm . . .
In Utah, where I grew up, the freeway entrance signs said the usual things about no bikes, but there was a mysterious mention of “No Peds.” I was mystified for years, as I always wore ankle socks that were called “peds” by my family. Why couldn’t you wear short socks on the freeway and would I be caught?
I was about 5 when I noticed a tag hanging off the mattress. I just felt like the mattress didn’t need a big old tag hanging off it like that, so I decided to remove it. It was a struggle! It was made of some sort of tough fabric stitched right into the mattress surface. I tugged and tugged and finally got most of the thing torn off.
Only then did I read the tag - “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW” - and scared myself half to death the cops were going to catch me!
Pre-school, George H.W. Bush…you youngster you! I think you may still be a kid. 
I’m glad I never heard the one about holding your breath while passing a cemetery. I grew up across the street from one! It was a great place to play and was only annoying during funerals, when Mom made us be quiet.
I had a similar misbehavior/paranoia event. I lived in a small town and went to the mall, in a larger nearby city, only infrequently. A highlight of the trip was the chance to walk through Spencer Gifts which were fun, funny and racy. (And occasionally baffling: anyone remember the posters and puzzles featuring Bridget, I think was her name, who was enormously overweight and naked?)
Anyway, when I was about 10 I was walking through, perusing the gag gifts and opened a can. BOINNNNG! Out popped a “snake” that launched itself somewhere into the store. I quickly replaced the lid and tried to walk nonchalantly to the door. I made my escape, but was immediately convinced that they had videotaped my crime and were busily running it through enormous databases (c. 1973) which would provide them with a complete file on me, my name, where I lived, everything. I was sure I’d be captured at any minute, for weeks to come.
Dang. I’ve never heard that word pronounced by anyone else. I wonder if the people who heard me say “side reel” think I’m an idiot.