I’m kinda freaked by the nipple thing too. I always assumed you could tweak it and shoot a stream into the cat’s mouth.
Not true, huh?
When I was a kid…
Wait, you want dumb things I believed as an adult?
Never mind.
I have to confess my ignorance about the nipple thing as well. See what you learn at the SDMB?
I remember as a kid pronouncing the word “Achilles” (as in Achilles’ heel) as a-chilis. My grandmother thought it was so funny that she drew me a picture of Achilles with a heel made out of chili con carne. Yeah.
When I was seven, my mom played in a church softball league and my dad coached her team. Their team was the only Presbyterian team in an otherwise all-Catholic league. While they were busy with the games, my brothers and I would run pell mell all over the bleachers, hoping for a handout from the parents in order to buy Charm pops.
During one close game, my parents had neglected to supply me with change and so I ran up to the chain link fence and very loudly asked, "Dad! Can I have some money for the confession stand ? To my credit, I didn’t cry when nearly fifty adult players and spectators all burst out laughing at me. 
When I was a kid, I used to see these signs that read “We do not accept or cash cheques.” I figured that all the store proprietors got their signs from one real dumbass manufacturer who couldn’t even get “accept cash or cheques” right.
And then of course, I guess I figured the credit card people had a hell of a lot of business if no one could use their cash or cheques for anything worthwhile…
I, only yesterday, figured out who “Dubya” is.
For a long time I never understood why sales clerks would smile when I asked if they had these Dockers in ka-ha-key.
When I was little, I was scared to death that we would be pulled over by the police after going through the McDonald’s drive-thru. I remember there being a lot of TV commercials at the time stressing the importance of not drinking and driving – and there was my mom, sitting in the driver’s seat, sipping away on her Diet Coke. It didn’t occur to me for some time that the phrase “Don’t Drink and Drive” only meant that you weren’t supposed to drink alcohol.
Until very recently, I was sure that Morocco was located just east of Turkey.
And my most embarrassing one… When I was 13 or so, I thought that blowjobs involved someone just sitting there and breathing heavily onto a guy’s penis. I didn’t understand the appeal of it at all. OK, I know, I was naive… Someone else must have had that misconception, right?
Tears of laughter here. Oh, I do love the SDMB sometimes !!! Ino, we’re laughing along with you, as is evidenced by the fact that this made it to two pages and is still roaring along.
I can’t figure out if I should feel smug or freaked by the fact that I knew the thing about the nipples already, despite the fact that I’ve never participated in biologically producing an child, or asking a family member/friend such a thing. :eek: 
When I was very young, my father drove by some lonely country dirt road and remarked, " Yeah, that’s a road where you can go down it and never come back and nobody’d miss you". For years after that, I would see similar ( perfectly lovely little country dirt roads ) and be completely terrified. NO WAY I was going down THAT road !!
I thought the Apollo Rocket was called" The Saturn Vee-Five", not realizing that “V” was Roman for “Five”. My parents apparently found this amusing for years. " There goes Cartooniverse’s Saturn Fifty-Five"…
As a small child, I believed that all the bands I listened to PLAYED LIVE at the radio station, each one waiting their turn patiently so that they could do their song. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the radio station- a huge wagon-wheel shaped building where the D.J. could look around and see each group in it’s soundproofed glass-walled room, waiting for their song to be cued up, so they could play. I had it all figured out, the entire schematic is still in my head. Probably could draw it out right now. I was dim enough to share this concept with my older brother and two cousins. Oh, did I suffer. 
Until I was perhaps 25, I believed that when I saw signs that said, " Speed tracked by radar" that there were police helicopters up there, moving at exactly my speed and relaying that information to the cops on the ground, who could then pull me over assured that they knew I’d speeded.
After my father took my brother and I to see " 2001: A Space Odyssey", I spent a LOT of time looking at the moon, hoping to see a little black rectangle against all of that shining white. I kind of went for that story hook, line and sinker.
Cartooniverse
I didn’t know the nipple thing and I still don’t believe it. You guys can’t fool me all that easily.
I used to think “municipal” was pronounced munsi-pal. The first time I attempted to use it in conversation was met with hilarity so I fell back on my alternate pronunciation: moony-sip-al. I was a teenager at the time.
I don’t know if this counts, especially since it didn’t happen to me, but… I honestly managed to convince a friend of mine that gullible isn’t in the dictionary. Twice. In the same month.
The first time I saw a ski-mask described as a balaklava was in an Ed McBain mystery I read as a teenager. I thought the word was baklava, like the pastry, so when the book described the criminal pulling a balaklava over his head my thought was “wouldn’t that be sticky?”
Similarly, I thought coup-de-tete (or how ever the hell it’s spelled) was prounounced “Coupe (like a car) day titty.”
In my youth, I:
-Was deeply confused by the “Don’t Drink and Drive” commercials, and sincerely believed my father was doing something terribly dangerous by driving with a cup of coffee.
-Enjoyed singing along to “My baby is a centipede” on the radio."
-Knew what the printed word ‘lingerie’ meant, but had heard the word ‘lin-jerry’ and didn’t know what it meant.
-Believed that communion was a snack to keep the congregation from getting hungry during the sermon, much like the little baggie of cereal Mom kept in her bag for my baby sister.
Today?
Well, I didn’t know about the nipple thing.
Mispronunciation:
Emeritus was Em-er-I-tus
Lascivious was Lash-vicious
Novel was No-vuhl
When I was in college, my roommate once asked me what the heck “seeg” meant, because I said it all the time. I explained to her that it was a transition from one thing to another. Whereupon she burst out laughing that I’d been mispronouncing “segue” on a daily basis for years.
Misunderstanding:
Before the internet, I thought that the sex term “going down” referred to ordinary male-female intercourse.
For years, I confused Paul McCartney and Paul Simon. Also Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis.
My personal favorite: as a child, I thought that Shirley Temple Black was some kind of African-American version of Shirley Temple.
Ohh…I did the gullible isn’t in the dictionary thing, too. I was at my “not so bright” neighbor’s house, and she was talking about somebody else’s gullibility, and so I figured it would be obvious enough. Uh…nope, she fell for it, no convincing needed. I felt so bad about it, that I never did tell her that it was a joke.
Bad me.
~V
But how many people get a chance to have their stupidity televised?
In high school, I participated in a local quiz show. One of the questions asked was “what is the largest state east of the Mississippi?” I’ll admit that at the time I probably would have gotten it wrong even if I had stopped to think about it (the correct answer, now indelibly etched on my mind, is Georgia). But for some reason I hit the buzzer and blurted out the first thing that came to mind which was “Texas”.
I can’t recall what I was thinking. I knew which side of the Mississippi Texas was on. I guess I should just be happy I didn’t say something even dumber like Hawaii or Pakistan or Chimpanzee.
I won’t even go in to how when I was a kid, I figured Adolf Hitler had a brother Hal. You know, the one whose name the Germans said everytime they saluted. Fortunately I never shared this fact with anyone before figuring it out on my own. For that matter, I found out years later that Hitler had a brother named Al so maybe I was on to something the whole time.
Whoa. I’ve been carrying around a pair of sprinkler heads on my chest for 26 years and didn’t know it?
This is kinda mean cuz he doesn’t even know about this board to defend himself, but my brother had some priceless moments as a kid.
I believe I posted about his essay about making mud pies, where he consistently misspelled mud pies as “mad piss”. The essay started off with: “My sister makes a good mad piss.”
When he was about 7, and South Africa was in the news often, and the news made mention of aparthied, he said, “That means they can use their tails to grab things” or something. He, for some bizarre reason, thought that aparthied meant prehenshile.
And on a family vacation to Disney, we were behind a Winnebago. We were pretending to race the cars around us, and my brother yelled “Hey Dad! Catch up to that Windbag!”
Heehee… he cracks me up. To think, the boy is now in his second year of law school.
Ana, I don’t think that the milks come from holes that are “all around the areola”. It comes from multiple holes on the surface of the nipple. The areola is the part surrounding the nipple that is similar in coloration but not the nipple. Of course in some nipples the distinction is not so clear. Just so’s people don’t think that a lactating woman is shooting out milk like a shower massage head. YNMV.
As for Pandas, also bear in mind (I kill myself with the puns) that red or “lesser”* pandas are not bears at all. They are from the family Ailuropodidae, which are still not marsupials. Of course the whole panda thing is apparently quite controversial.
*A cruel nomenclature if ever there were one. The Giant Pandas already get all of the press, and then they’re referred to as “lesser”. How humiliating!
I always thought the same thing too, lno! When I was little and heard that one of my parent’s friends was fired from his job, I felt so bad. Then I saw the guy again perfectly fine (except jobless) and was confused.
That’s okay, when I was a kid, I thought that when someone got sacked, it involved a blow to the testicles. Which I guess it kinda does.
As for comic mispronunciations, when I was about 14, I’d read enough Carl Jung to think he was the cat’s ass, but he hadn’t come up in conversation enough for me to avoid embarrassing myself around my college-aged friends by mangling his name the first time I tried to show of my erudition.
And I used to read ennui as “enn-you-I”, up until I was twenty-three or so. Which was kind of “gwatch,” I guess. 