My father’s car would sound the horn every time the odometer read something significant like 11,111 or 20,000, he said it was a feature. It took us kids years to catch him actually hitting the horn!
Heck, I wondered how you were trained to see on a phone. 
Indeed, Robyn Hitchcock empathizes.
I could have already been nine or ten (sure, too late in the game) to realise that an egg does not come already soft- or hard-boiled. Alas, in a friend’s kitchen, one time, I helped myself to an egg and promptly tapped it on the edge of the table to start removing bits of shell, when, lo and behold, to my exasperated horror, the slimy contents of the egg made a mess all over my lap and down my leg and on to the floor.
I said, “What in the hell is wrong with this fucking egg?”
Dave, meanwhile, just looked back at me, at a loss for words, before finally setting me straight, (“uuuuuhhhhhh what in the hell are YOU doing?!”) as his mom came in to the kitchen, looking at my situation, and just shaking her head.
I probably shouldnt have taken comic book ads seriously. You know - that page, often at the end of a comic book?
One of them had some smiling dude holding a dollar bill under the bromide: “MAKE YOURSELF REAL MONEY!”. I wanted to be that dude. And making money just like - poof! - that. The ensuing argument I had with mom to convince her: How on earth could she possibly pass up such an outlandishly awesome opportunity to just print free money, was going nowhere for me, frustrated that I couldn’t get across to her that it was “FREE MONEY!” “It says right there in the ad! They can’t lie like that!”, upon which I learned that advertising doesn’t always tell the truth, and finally resigning to dashing those images from my mind of (somehow) printing those FREE $100 bills.
In the basement, grade two, older cousin is taking hockey shots on me, being a whiny, snooty little goalie. Seeing by the unsure way he holds the stick (as well as winding up way, way, WAY too high for an ultimately feeble slap-shot, from not even ten feet out) I disappointingly surmise he’s never really played the game, and start whining to him how I don’t like how he’s shooting.
“Well, that last shot was legitimate, no?”
“What does legitimate mean?”
“That it was fast, accurate…”
And from that, I deduced that “legitmate” meant “fast”, thus, my mom cocking an eyebrow, when I commented, later, driving along with her, “WWWWWWOOOW! Didja see how le-git-imate that car was, back there?!”
Hamburgers used to be “hangabars”.
Learned too late in the game what a dildo was (after calling everybody that).
This idiotic friend once tried to put past me that if you arrange your fingertips around your eyeballs as evenly-spaced as possible, and then press down hard while sneezing, they’ll both pop out.
Until about the age of 13, I thought that GI Joe was a real outfit of the US military and not just an after-school cartoon. This was caused by once watching the news and seeing a report in which, as I recall, there was a UH-1 Huey or other military helicopter and I thought I heard the speaker say “GI Joe” (either I misheard what they said, or I didn’t get the context). My impression was buttressed by the fact that there was a real-life Sergeant Slaughter (the GI Joes’ drill instructor - in real life, actually a wrestler) who introduced a five-parter of the cartoon, and that in the closing credits to the cartoon, the different characters’ voice actors were credited, while Sgt. Slaughter was credited as Sgt. Slaughter.
Before “G. I. Joe” was a cartoon, he was an action figure. And before that, “G. I. Joe” referred to a generic U.S. soldier.
Not so hard to imagine, with all the stories about atrocities during WWII. For me, I knew my grandfather had fought against them.
However, my stupid idea was that Germans were somehow “Germ-mans,” somehow related to germs. Perhaps a good reason to fight them.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before during the time I’ve been here, but when I was very young, like five or six years of age, I thought if you were watching TV and needed to turn it off, you could turn it on later and continue watching the same program right where you left off.
This is embarrassing, but at around the same age I thought TV commercials were like public service announcements, because how else would we ever learn about these great new products? It’s not entirely nonsense from the perspective of a little kid, though. When you asked for specific toys around Christmastime, TV commercials were the new Sears Catalog!
Now you can actually do that if you have Roku or some other streaming service. Ain’t technology great?
I remember thinking that about radio.
Well, it seemed radios ( and TV news ) seemed to have intuitive properties in movies and TV whereby characters will turn on a TV set or radio eagerly anticipating some very specific news ( that usually involved them in some way ) and said TV or radio would broadcast that info excactly just as they turned it on.
I remember thinking that a TV commercial was an endorsement of that product by the station. I couldn’t figure out how a station could air commercials for competing products.
When I was around that same age and had just figured out that sex involved the penis going inside the vagina, but I hadn’t quite figured out that both urine and semen come out the urethra, and how ejaculation works and all that, I kind of wondered if you were supposed to urinate inside the woman’s vagina in order to deliver your sperm.
That reminds me. Back when I was a kid, it was convenient that networks only advertised their own programs, so if you were watching the Rockford Files, and saw an ad for The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, you didn’t have to note what channel it would be on - it would be on the same channel that Rockford was on. These days, it seems like every cable network has ads for programs on random other channels.
Well, if it was a soap opera, you could!
Two years later, even.
I didn’t think that but I worried I might get excited and accidentally pee in her
Hence Eddie Murphy’s delightful story of him and his brother playing with a G.I. Joe action figure in the bathtub as kids in the late 60’s.
Since we’re on the topic of toys, TV commercials from long ago, and action figures, I remember from the mid 1970’s an ad for…maybe it was G.I. Joe…boasting the doll had “con-fold grip” so the hands could grasp little toy guns or other G.I. Joe equipment.
A mini-scene from my childhood memory that helped lock this in: The big sister of a friend of mine was examining a Lone Ranger action figure, and exclaimed “hey, this one has con-fold grip too!” Yeah, semi-hard rubber can be both bendy and stiff enough to resist a force, so it’s just not a big deal. But to our little-kid minds (7 for me and friend, 10 for the sister) it was a big deal.
Does anyone else remember this? I did a web search for this, but since it was before about Y2K, the current internet servers seemed to not know about it.
it’s not con-fold. It’s kung fu
Thanks! That explains why I couldn’t find it. 
I guess none of us kids were culturally aware enough to properly hear the correct term. We were ignorant of the existence of Kung Fu apparently.
So…did you also have a G.I. Joe?
I don’t think I did, but I apparently remembered the commercials. Obviously, I haven’t thought about GI Joe’s grip for many decades, but your post brought it right up in the memory banks. I was more into Match Box and Hot Wheels cars. Speaking of stupid stuff, I don’t think I ever connected Match Box cars to the boxes matches came in.
The Kung Fu grip was actually invented for the UK adaptation of GI Joe, a largely identical mould known as Action Man.