Wait, you mean that’s not true? 
I thought along those lines too, and even as I’ve gotten older I’ve often wondered how many people sitting in those theaters and clubs really and truly like that music. I guess it is just because I couldn’t sit through a concert like that and truly enjoy it. It all sounds like elevator music to me.
When I was nine, I didn’t just believe in Santa Claus…the notion that he wasn’t a real person had simply never crossed my mind. Those of my peers who disbelieved, and said so to me, I regarded as a Victorian churchman might regard a pantheist jungle-dweller: as benighted heathens whose intellectual follies were obviously not worth discussing. Then one day I was at my Aunt Shirley’s house hanging out with my cousins Robin and Steve, both a year or so older than me…and Robin, with the gleefully superior tone favored by preadolescent girls everywhere for talking to dumbass boys, asked me “Still believe in Santy Claus, Mickey?”
I guess the two of them were bored that day because they both started browbeating me about how erroneous and stupid and baby-fied the whole idear of Santa Claus was. Well, I decided I’d prove them wrong once and for all --by showing them his entry in the World Book Encyclopedia.
The first eleven words of that encyclopedia article are as vivid to my mind’s eye right now as they were at the moment I read them that afternoon. “A mythical old man who gives toys to children on Christmas.” I was a real smart kid who read all the time, and I knew what the word “mythical” meant. To say I was crushed would be putting it mildly. By the time I got to the part about the Santa story being “based on a real person”, I was crying over the photo illustration of the jolly ol’ elf reading kids’ xmas gimmee-letters as if my dog had been shot in front of me less than five minutes ago.
It didn’t even occur to me to be embarrassed about it until I was like 13 or 14 – at the time, I actually grieved for a week or more, like Santa was someone real who I loved dearly who’d just died…
Steve and Robin, who were both mean little bastards from the git-go, thought it was hilarious and rode my ass about it without mercy for months afterward.
You want the whole thing or just the Jerry Lewis/Jerry Lee Lewis part? Assuming lno and TPTB are ok with it, I can repost his OP here, or you can e-mail me and I’ll send you a text file.
Yeah, I liked it enough to save it. I’ve got a bunch of Wang-Ka posts, too.
As far as I can remember I knew that the difference between boys and girls was the boys had a penis and girls didn’t. So naturally a woman is just blank “down there” :smack: (Barbie dolls and the Voyager probe confirmed this). I too thought that babies came out of a woman’s anus (mainly due to an episode of Star Trek: TNG). Was was 11 before I learned otherwise.
That’s what “3 holes” means? :eek: All this time I thought it refered to a mouth, vagina, and anus!
The leafy part generally (but not always) gets cut off and planted, and it grow into a whole new plant!
They told us this on the tour of the Maui Pineapple plantation, and we took the tops of the pineapples we got there, and grew some in our backyard! It was creepy!
They can’t?
Damn.
Being male and gay I knew little to nothing about what the fairer sex has going on in that area. But I finally learned the old fashioned way, by watching Sex and the City. Samantha is a virtual treasure trove of knowledge.
I didn’t know until I bought my first box of tampons and couldn’t figure out what to do with them. :o
Also, when I asked where babies come from, my mother told me something that led me to believe that all little girls had a baby growing in them, but it took years and years to develop, and then when the woman was grown up and married, the baby would become big enough to be born. I remember a relative talking about how she knew a 13 year old that had a baby, and me indignantly saying how that was simply not possible; it wouldn’t have had enough time to grow.
In a bull session the talk got around to syphillis and one college educated guy asked, “What causes it and where do people get it?”
I answered, “It’s a disease caused by a germ and you get it from close contact with someone who has the disease.”
“Oh, I heard it was from having too much sex.”
I suspect the number of wrongs things we learned about sex and genitalia outnumber all of the other wrong things combined.
Speaking as someone who has lived in both Hawaii and Thailand, I can confirm: Pineapples do not grow on trees.
As a child, I used to believe there was a set amount of “cloud stuff” in the world and that clouds just floated around, congregating here, not congregating there. They might tear apart or group together, but the total amount available was fixed. Not sure at what age I discovered the truth, so that may not qualify as “to an embarrassingly advanced age.”
I did not know until this evening, while pursuing links off the Geographical Oddities thread, that:
a) When George Washington crossed the Delaware River, he and his troops were going eastward. For some reason, all the pictures I’ve ever seen of the even have him going right-to-feft, which I interpreted as westward; and
b) The Mason-Dixon Line is the northern boundary of Maryland, not the northern boundary of North Carolina and Tennessee.
It would be a shame if the Delta Queen steamboat were forced to rename itself the Alluvial Plain Queen.
Wasn’t there a thread a few years ago about incorrect things you learned in school? Maybe someone with better Search skills than me could link to it?
I’m another one who didn’t realize that the vagina and urethra were two separate holes until the Anatomy & Physiology class I took as a pre-requisite for nursing school at the age of 33. My excuse is that I’m a gay guy.
The hell you say! Consider ignorance fought.
I was an adult before I had ever seen the phrase beaucoup in print. I had used the expression since I was a child but never apparently saw it written because I was surprised when I first read the written form. I don’t know what I thought it should be but that wasn’t it. :smack:
I agree. I’m one of those who thought they did grow on trees till that infamous thread a while back, wherein a bunch of us said, basically, “What? They don’t grow on trees?!?”
:smack:
Until age 21, I thought that the Earth magically tilted back and forth on its axis 23 1/2 degrees. I could NOT figure out how it knew…
To this day I get out a globe and a flashlight and explain to my students EXACTLY how it works 
I thought they grew on trees until this thread, I’ve looked at the linked photos, and I STILL can’t wrap my mind around it.
Am I the only one who never gave any thought whatsoever as to how pineapples grow? This “revelation” is a big shrug to me.
You think that’s bad? You should hear me sing Alluvial Plain Dawn. Still, in the name of accuracy, I soldier on.