My dad was watching a Formula One race on TV. I announced that if I were a race car driver, I would simply press the pedal down all the way the whole time, therefore attaining the maximum possible speed.
Race car drivers must be pretty dumb.
Until just recently, I thought a woman’s ovaries manufacture a new egg every month.
…and the prize for “Today’s most heartwarming post” goes to quadgop 
My mother was in her fifties before I was finally able to explain “Keep Right” signs to her. She kept thinking it meant you had to take a right turn there. (We had some adventures while travelling.)
“The hell with it, I’m not going to shoot Santa!”
I thought foreign languages were based on letter-substitution ciphers of English - so all you needed to learn was 26 things to be able to speak any particular language.
I don’t remember stuff that I thought I had figured out; I remember stuff that confused me. Maybe it’s just another way of expressing the same idea.
I remember my dad watering the lawn, and he told me to go over to the faucet where the hose was connected and turn off the water. I got there and then shouted “which way is off?” He shouted back “to the right”. I looked at the knob on the faucet and figured that if the top of the knob went to the right, then the bottom would be going to the left, and so I was no closer to a solution than before I asked. And dad was not a patient man.
The other one that confused me was the phrase “every other” to mean alternating. Someone would say something like (describing a string of Christmas lights) “every other light is green.” That meant that there was one red light (or whatever) and every other one in the world was green, but I could see that wasn’t the case. Took a while to get that sorted out.
Yeah, that one had me going for a while, too.
We had a slot car set when I was a kid. I knew it ran on electricity that ran through the track, was picked up by brushes under the front of each car, and powered a motor that turned the rear wheels. When I found out that an electric generator works because something turns it, I thought we could just put a small generator in each car, connect it to the front wheels, use that to power the motor, and it would run forever.
re Robot Arm’s slot car with a generator – the first time I ever saw someone plug an extension cord into itself, I freaked. I thought a huge scary electrical accident was going to result.
I was born in 1961, so the space age wasn’t that old when I was a kid. Around the age of four or five or so I thought that each satellite was unique enough that you could memorize a list of every single one that had ever been launched. :o
Don’t be silly. They’re there so the cooties have a place to live!
As a very young child I believed that boys have brown eyes and girls have blue eyes. This despite having a close blue-eyed male cousin and a green-eyed sister.
I think it was because doll manufacturers at the time followed that model.
When I was very young:
George Washington isn’t smiling on the one dollar bill because he has wooden teeth.
I remember feeling sorry for black kids because I thought their parents never laughed or played with them. Or hugged them or showed any sort of love what so ever. I also thought black parents where prone to doling out ass whippings at the drop of the hat.
:o. Have NO idea why I thought that as my parents didn’t have a racist bone in their body.
There may be something to that.
I’ll bet it was hard to eat ribs.
Oh goodness, I thought that, too. Compounded by the fact that I had seen illustrations of the John Henry story where he was digging through rock for the purpose of making a railroad tunnel. Nevermind that steam hammers or whatever he was competing against significantly post-date the slavery in the United States.
Hell, this one still has me flummoxed. :dubious:
Well, one still can, right? It just takes a lot of effort, but people have certainly memorized even longer things.
I thought that “a couple” used as an indeterminate number meant four or five. I remember I worked out a whole system for what “a few” or “several” or various other indeterminate terms meant. It took me years to realize that “a couple” is the same as the word describing two people in a relationship.
Interestingly, if you use the other meaning of “satellite” – a moon of a planet – Lumpy’s post still makes sense. In the 1960s, we were aware of something like 25 moons in our solar system, not too hard to memorize – but now we’re up to more like 70, so forget it. (These numbers are estimates without looking it up, but you get the idea.)
If you are looking down on a four-handled faucet knob that is horizontal in a rotational axis, then imagine turning it clockwise, the “top” north-pointing handle moves “right”, to the east then south etc. But the “bottom” south-facing handle moves “left” to the west then the north etc.
That’s why his dad should have said “Clockwise!”