When my mother pointed out movies at a flea market were “pirated”, I immediately got the image of classic eyepatch wearing and hook handed pirates stealing movies from a plundered cargo ship and selling them at our local flea market.
In case you’ve never seen it:
I give you, Video Pirates!
When I was four years old, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. And I knew for sure what I wanted to be when I grew up, a paleontologist, duh.
Anyway, I knew my brother was a year older than me. So that meant he would die a year before I would. Then my chance would come. I’d have that one year as a very old paleontologist to track down his grave site in some desert canyon, dig up his bones, and put them in a museum.
I also remember seeing a picture of a tuatara in a book. It was a drawing of the little guy sitting on a rock, and the caption said that the tuatara lived on a small island called “New Zealand”. I thought the rock was the island, and the guy lived on an island that was only a little bigger than he was.
I was very perplexed the first time I heard the phrase “fish ladder”. I had no idea how such a thing could work.
Seriously? I’ve known the answer to that even before my college days, and until I started doing some hobby stuff a few years ago I had no particular interest in electronics.
Could this be a recent thing; college electronics having to teach analog and digital and so the students just draw that wrong conclusion on their own?
Paragraph 1: When I went back to college in the late 1980s, I took a biology class from a professor who also taught a science class designed for LPNs who were studying to get an RN degree. She told us that none of the students in that class knew what “AIDS” stood for; they knew what the disease was, and most of them knew some of the words, but this was at a time when it was pretty much the #1 news story every day, and they didn’t know that AIDS was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. :smack:
Paragraph 2: Awesome toys adult kept all to themselves - yeah, you got that right! 
Am I a bad person for chuckling at that? Assuming your mother is Caucasian, it’s a pretty safe bet that she got some strange looks.
I had the same problem in reverse. I grew up in Chicago, so the big water was to the east. . .I lived in San Diego for 12 yrs (with the water on the “wrong” side) and never completely got used to it. Thank heavens the water is back on the proper side now!
mc
Responding to my own post, before anyone gets the wrong idea: There is nothing funny about “white” and “colored” drinking fountains, etc. I envisioned a little girl being puzzled about the clear water (I HOPE) coming out of the “colored” fountain, and that’s what made me chuckle.
Yes, she is white and from North Dakota. She was hoping it would be some color like red or purple or pink and maybe flavored and yes, she got some strange looks.
On the same note, back in my school days we always wanted to sit in the back of the bus because it was away from the driver and was where all the cool kids hung out. So the big confusion as to why Rosa Parks wanted to sit in the back?
I had that part figured out by then but a critical part the mechanics escaped me. “How is this limp little thing going to be inserted into anything?” I had a vague impression a vagina could open and close like a mouth so she would take it in and he would pee semen or something. I still remember the epiphany I had about 12 when I was puzzling over why my penis got hard when I thought about girls* and the penny dropped.
*Not even naked girls; I was so naive.
Yes! This is exactly how I imagined video piracy happened.
Not mine but a cute story. My boss told me that when he was a kid, he could hardly wait to start school. He had an older brother that was in school and was always telling him about his “glassroom”. He said he was so disappointed on his first day of school when he realized he wouldn’t be in a glassroom - just a plain old classroom.
Was very excited about visiting the Rocky Mountains. 'Cause that must be where Rocky and Bullwinkle live.
The real kicker to this story, if O. Henry or someone like that was telling it, would be that the guywas indeed buying panty hose because he intended robbing a bank.
When I was 12 I found a dirty joke book. From some of the jokes I somehow got the idea that when you were an adult your penis was erect all the time. I solemnly informed my younger brother of this amazing fact.
TV host Art Linkletter had a segment on his House Party show in which he interviewed kids, and published a book of their bloopers as Kids Say the Darndest Things, which I read. In one of them, a little boy said that you could recognize an octopus because it had “eight testicles.” At the time (I must have been eight or ten) I had never heard that word, and thought it was funny because the kid was mispronouncing “tentacles.” One day I was in the car with my family and I loudly repeated the joke, with no idea as to why it was actually funny. I was mystified when it was greeted with stony silence.