I used to think that cardboard turned into glass if you left it out in the sun long enough.
Why? Because we were in an accident that smashed the car window. My dad put a sheet of cardboard in its place. One day, it was glass again!
All those toilet paper tubes I left outside never turned into glass.
Okay, but I have to ask where you learned that, because it’s not true. The islands are in the Pacific Ocean, and belong to Ecuador, which is a South American country.
I remember talking about the Peanuts comic strip and pronouncing Beethoven’s name as ‘‘Beeth-oven’’, with the first ‘‘syllable’’ rhyming with ‘‘wreath’’ and the last two pronounced just like the appliance in which you cook food. I was just a kid then, but I was in my forties before I learned that the line in Kung Fu Fighting was ‘‘Those cats were fast as lightning’’, as opposed to ‘‘Those kicks were…’’.
I thought Angela Lansbury’s name was actually Mrs. Murdursheeroat.
I use to think “pedestrian” was a religion, and I wondered why “pedestrians” weren’t allowed to walk in certain areas.
I thought you could get pregnant from thinking about anything sexual. At one point I knew I was pregnant and felt actual shame…this was in 4th grade…
When I was 9, I woke up really sick one morning and told my mom that I had morning sickness. She laughed and told me that only pregnant women get that. Of course, this obviously meant I was pregnant.
My parents divorced when I was really young. I remembered my mom having a lot of friends that were men when she was going to college (back when I was between the ages of 5 and 9). It didn’t dawn on me until WAY later that they were her boyfriends. It never accured to me back then that my mom could date.
When I was 5, I loved the song We Built This City by Starship ( I was 5). However, I sang the line “we built this city on rock and roll,” as “we milked this city from Idaho.”
My mom and brother still talk about that last one.
Ha, me too. When I was somewhere between eight and ten my great-grandmother asked me to tell her the names of religions I knew. That I listed Catholicism seperate from Christianity put her in a snit…but mostly at my father who taught me that it was a cult religion. 
When I was very young, I thought that “drinking and driving” meant drinking ANYTHING and driving at the same time.
It took years for my mom to figure out why I’d get mad at her when she’d drink coffee while driving me to school…
When my Dad would say grace, I wondered about this process called “bodilinerishment”, that somehow involved food and God. Finally I asked, and “bodily nourishment” was explained.
A newspaper article made no sense. A police officer was chasing someone in the patrol car, but for some reason stopped, dug a hole, and put part of the dashboard into the hole. 
I asked Dad what that was all about. He thought it was hysterical that I didn’t understand having “the speedometer buried.” :rolleyes:
Does he also think it’s funny that I don’t understand what it is either?
It’s actually the needle that’s buried. In other words, the person is driving so fast that you can’t see the speedometer needle anymore, assuming you have a semi-circular 'dometer.
How to Eat Like a Child, anyone? 
In one of my classes in elementary school, someone expressed a similar idea about the country Niger.
I used to think that a minute was an incalculably short period of time, and that one hundred was an incalculably large number, more or less infinite. I thought it was stupid for people to say “I’ll be back in a minute,” since the very act of saying that consumed a hundred minutes, or an infinite number of incalculably small units of time.
I also had the notion that God was actually a job, a position that had to be filled on a rotating basis by fathers. Sort of like jury duty–when a father’s number came up, he went up to the clouds and sat at a huge console with monitors showing what everyone on earth was doing at all times. I wondered when my father would be called for God duty. I had a list of things that I was going to ask him to do, when his turn came.
… a car on a highway, naturally, was speeding. I understood the word to mean, simply “moving fast.” Not “breaking the law.”
My Dad and I would return from some trip involving a highway and I would announce to my mother, “We were speeding on the highway.” Inevitably my father would chime in, loudly, “We were NOT SPEEDING!” I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry.
I was raised Catholic, and don’t remember even hearing the word “Protestant” until I was about seven, when a babysitter took my sisters and me to a church service and I asked afterward why there was no communion procession. Needless to say, the ensuing explanation did little to clarify things in my mind.
The confusion grew even worse when, some months later, my father told me that my mother was pregnant. I couldn’t figure out why dad was telling me this. After all, mom had always gone to the same church as the rest of the family.
Then there was the nice lady who came to my first grade class to talk about Hanukkah. She asked if anybody knew what a synagogue was. Thinking she had said “son of God”, I raised my hand and started talking about Jesus. I still blush furiously over this one.
I had the same idea. I thought the dangerous part of drinking and driving was when you get to the end of the can of soda and have to lean your head back to get the last few drops. At that point you aren’t looking at the road and will get in an accident! :eek: For years later my dad drank with a straw when he was driving to keep me happy. 
I know people who still think that. :eek:
The Flinstones is not a documentry, folks!
I think this is actually really interesting. You made an observation, formed a hypothesis and then devised an experiment to test it. Scientists make some great discoveries that way, and here you were just a kid!
I couldn’t figure out why there were so many arrows pointing up on freeways and roads, because who could drive straight up in the air?
I thought it was “I pledge a legion to the flag” and wondered what kind of furniture a legion was and why I would bother to pledge it, since Pledge was furniture polish.
We would pass a “No Trespassing” sign on our way home every day (I lived 5 miles up a dirt road on a mountain) and I thought it meant that we couldn’t pass the trees, and I asked my mom why we didn’t get in trouble for passing the trees. I also found it very confusing the first time I heard the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer, because to me, trespassing meant going on someone else’s land (according to how my mom explained the sign to me). I wondered why it was such a big deal to forgive someone who had gone on your land without permission.
Oh, man, that’s great. Love it.
On a similar note, I thought “La Hoya” and “La Joll A” were two different places–one I’d heard about, and one I’d seen on a map.
“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all the *popsicles * in my way”
Long after I forgot that version and learned the right words, I associated rain songs with popsicles, and had no idea why.