I used to think that when you picked your nose, you were actually making your nose cave permanently larger. I was worried about the limits to the size of that cave and how you would know to stop.
When we lived in our co-op in Chicago, we were stripping all the old paint off the beautiful oak woodwork. At our son’s preschool he told his classmates that Daddy was a professor and Mommy was a stripper.
The wife of my grandmother’s brother was named Katherine or Kitty. She was referred to as Auntie Kitty. At a young age I pronounced it more like Antiquity and thought that her actual (appropriate) name.
We were getting ready for Sunday dinner and company would be joining us. So mom sent dad to get napkins at the store. I was six, tagged along and silly me, I thought napkins were napkins. “Dad, here’s a box of them…see, it says ‘Feminine Napkins.’ I bet mom would like them, too, since they’re feminine!”
Another time I found a big maxi pad (?) on the floor somehow. The ? is because my sister had just had a baby and this probably came home from the hospital with her. It seemed enormous but I was 10 and had no ide what it was. I thought it was some sort of towel, maybe. For some reason I picked it up and started performing, twirling it while “singing” the theme to “The Saint.” Mom was immediately, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” etc.
When I was 6, I thought everyone changed names every few years or so. I figured I was overdue for a new name and was trying to think of what my new name should be. One day a flight attendant asked me aboard a plane, “What’s your name?” and I replied something to the effect of, “I haven’t decided yet.” She gave me a quizzical look, as did my father who was sitting next to me.
Later on in life, I thought “going on a diet” meant eating a lot of food, so when I was really hungry I told my mom I wanted to go on a diet.
It can mean that, so that’s not too silly. Though we have shortened it to “diet” it really ought to be “change in diet” but we’re probably well past that distinction now.
When I was a young kid, I didn’t even realize there were underground tanks at gas stations. I was always so amazed at how a gas pump 5 or 6 feet tall, 2 feet wide and maybe a foot and a half thick could hold so much gasoline to fuel so many vehicles.
That notion was reinforced by all the movies and tv shows where a vehicle hits the pumps, and BOOM! Or a fire follows a line of gas back to the pumps, and BOOM! The BOOM! being a gigantic gaseous ball of fire.
One fine afternoon as I was walking home, I noticed a box on the light pole at 15th and Multnomah that was ajar, so I went over to investigate. Therein I saw the mechanical clockwork for the intersection. I found that I could trip the relays to change the lights, so I stood there for a few minutes cycling the lights erratically. It was low traffic at the time, so I did not cause any accidents, and I became bored with it quickly.
I also thought this, but about gorillas in Latin America.
TimfromNapa, For the majority of my life I’ve live in a state that doesn’t do bottle deposit. And when I lived in a state that did as a kid, you just brought the bottles to the grocery store. The very first time I saw a stand-alone redemption center in Maine, it was next to a Salvation Army church. I assume that the redemption center was part of their religion… I was also an adult.
When I was quite young and learning the alphabet, I was convinced it went:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G, H-I-J-K-ellementoe-pee. Q-R-S, T-U-V, W, X, Y and Z.
Also, in the 80’s, that Tina Turner (the singer) went to my school and was in either grade 3 or 4… because some kid named Tina Turner did actually go there. I believed that because there was only one person on the planet with any given name; so it had to be the famous singer! Couldn’t figure out why my mom and older sister laughed and rolled their eyes at me.
One I just remembered: my mother’s middle name is Darlene, which, when I was a little kid, I thought was actually “Darling.” By extension, for a while, I thought that every woman had the middle name of “Darling.”
Apparently, I said “entow-entow” P. Don’t know if I did the L or not (and I’m not opening myself up to renewed ridicule by asking any of the siblings who might remember).
My friend’s kid thought it was “little minnow” P.
Another one from when I was a bit older (grade 7-8). There was a kid with the first name “Adil” (not sure of his ethnicity). To make fun of him everyone called him Adildo. I didn’t get it at the time (not knowing what a dildo was), and didn’t see why he hated the name so much.
I thought it was just some version of “bozo” or something, and I couldn’t figure out why he’d care about such a weak juvenile insult. I thought he ought to laugh at everyone who used it and thought people at the time all had 6-year-old senses of humor… until I expanded my vocabulary.
Maybe you just had been exposed at an impressionable age to the song “You call everybody darling”, as sung by the Andrews Sisters et al.
(Archive.org has several versions.)
I too had a through-air misconception about conception. There was a wire screen separating the male and female guinea pig and I was concerned the holes were too big to stop the sperm, but I was told boy and girl pigs needed to get very close so it wasn’t a problem.
I don’t think I sorted this out until I read the Reproduction entry in our encyclopedia a year or two later.
I was also baffled by how a baby could possibly fit through a woman’s vagina. “It’s stretchy, like a balloon.” I was skeptical. Although as an adult who is now somewhat more familiar with vaginas, that still seems an odd design.
You know how in an old Simpsons Lionel Hutz said “I rest my case” at an inappropriate time during a trial, because he believed it was just a figure of speech? Similarly, when I was in around first of second grade, I thought “wanna bet?” was merely a figure of speech. I was not aware it meant “Let’s wager money on the outcome of this event.”
So one day in class when I said something to another boy along the lines of “My favorite sports team is going to beat your favorite sports team tonight” and he said “Wanna bet?” and I said “yeah” not really understanding what I was agreeing to, and then he was like “Ok, let’s bet $1” and I just want along with it even though I didn’t know what he meant. And then when my team lost, I was very confused when he demanded I give him a dollar the next day. I learned an important lesson that day.
An old boyfriend of mine who went to Catholic school from kindergarten through college thought the word virgin meant exactly that - perfect and good - when he was in second grade. Which led to getting sent to the principal’s office when he got upset about being punished for talking in class one day and yelled at his teacher: “That’s not fair! You nuns, you all think you’re virgins, but you’re not!”
When I was about the same age, I thought the reason why expectant parents went to the hospital was to pick up the kid they’d ordered, kind of like takeout.
I also thought that all cats were female and all dogs were male.
I had a similar idea, though I called the hospital “the baby store.” I thought it was like shopping for furniture or something. 