I read a ton of Sherlock Holmes stories when I was about 8. One description that puzzled me referred to an upper class character as having been “ruined on the turf”.
Best as I could figure at the time, this meant he’d suffered a really bad sports hernia. Only much later did I realize that this was a reference to his having blown the family fortune betting on horse races.
Any good whooshes from your early readings?
Well, I don’t know if this quite fits the bill, but when I first read Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” as a child, I thought that “cask” was short for “casket” and referred metaphorically to Fortunato’s burying place.
Reading one of the Anne of Green Gables books, there was a dialogue with a literary reference that I only recently caught. Sally and her Aunt Mouser are talking with Anne about some of the wedding guests at Sally’s wedding:
Aunt: And what’s happened to Mercy’s complexion? It’s become awfully muddy.
Sally: giggling “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
Aunt: reprovingly You shouldn’t quote the Bible so flippantly.
Sally: giggles again
It was only after I entered college that I realized Sally wasn’t quoting the Bible, but Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” LM Montgomery had a lot of stuff like that in her books, actually. I thought they were supposed to be for children. :dubious:
Well, it’s possible that her contemporary audience would have caught the reference more than today’s readers. Reading aloud was a pastime with many families and Shakespeare was a popular subject. From what I’ve read, many schools used memorization of Shakespearian (and other classical works) in their cirriculum.
Today, few people outside of a classroom setting read Shakespeare. They may have seen a play or a movie once or twice, but that’s not usually enough to be able to quote it like people quote Pulp Fiction.
I’d gander to say that recognizing your Shakespere quote was almost an expectation of cultural literacy. It would be much like not being able to recognize “Play it again, Sam.”
Citizen Kane, right?
Or even “Play it, Sam.” 
No, the Woody Allen movie .
Not quite the same, and involving my brother.
Brother had brought a science fiction book home from the library and said that the book was “really weird”. This guy stored something in the boot of his car, and looked under the car’s bonnet.
The book may have been really weird, but the car having a boot and a bonnet just indicate that the author of the story (and probably the setting) was British, rather than American.
I fear my brother was disappointed to find this out.
When I was eight or nine I watched cluelessly as Rocky and Bullwinkle searched for the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam.
Sir Rhosis
And don’t forget their pursuit of that magical hat: The Kerwood Derby.
I actually caught that one the 3rd or 4th time I saw it.
Durward Kirby actually threatened to sue Jay Ward Productions over the satire of his name. Ward’s official response: “Please do- we’d love the publicity.”
Not to mention Boris Badenov. I was in high school before I came across this book . . .
My fifth grade teacher read the Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to her class. We loved
'em, and I still do. But I remember all the giggles in the classroom when the bank VP in “The Red-Headed League” complains vociferously about missing his weekly game of “rubber” (bridge).
When I read The Time Machine as a kid, I got half-way thru the book before I realized what the “Haves” and “Have-nots” were. I had been reading those words with a long “a” (hayvz) and figuring it was just some grown-up thing I didn’t understand.
The writers were brilliant. There are tons of references like that in those cartoons. Fractured Fairy Tails were my favorites.
Was this funny then, or is it just really funny now?
We knew the real fairy tale stories, so it was obvious they were “updated” even if we didn’t get all the jokes. But yes, they’re funnier now even though they were plenty funny then.
Fractured Fairy Tales were my favorites too. I wish today’s cartoons were nearly as clever. The only one that I thought came close were the Animaniacs.
On about page 3 of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Clarence comes up to Hank, introduces himself, and announces that he’s a page. Hank replies, “Go along, you ain’t more than a paragraph.” This made no sense to me (I knew that a page was an apprentice knight and couldn’t see past that knowlege). I read it several times and gave up, going forward somewhat puzzled. YEARS later, and I decline to say how many years, it suddenly hit me. I felt retroactively stupid.
In the Hardy Boys books, which I absorbed as a child, people were always getting knocked out by “sharp blows” to the back to the head.
I actually tried to knock someone out once by blowing (air through my lips) “sharply” (quickly) on the back of their head, and was quite disappointed when it didn’ t work.
I’ve also since learned that a blow to the head sufficient to knock one out is quite often fatal, so it’s probably better that I didn’t know what it meant (although I doubt I’d have actually struck anyone in an attempt to knock them out.)
Not very literary, but for years I would ocassionally ruminate about the maddening brain teaser that was the following joke:
“If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?”
“Pilgrims!”
WTF X 10.
I was 11, sitting in a KFC in Bellaire Plaza in Daytona Beach when I finally got it.
… oh.