When I was around 10 years old, in '75 or '76, my parents had some anti drug pamplet lying around the house. The pictures of the high people were always photographed in a colored light, so their faces appeared green, red, etc… For years, I thought that different drugs turned people different colors. I also thought that all the TV shows were brodcast live from the local TV stations studio.
Jon
Why did adults do this kind of stuff to kids? I remember all kinds of warnings like this from grandmothers, teachers nuns.
Lie and your tongue will turn black. Fart and your ass will fall off. Geez. What warped people.
No Clue Boy, the great masters were painted in varying shades of gray, which became colorful in the “Technicolor” days of the '50s and '60s. Simple!
I never understood what “Vacancy” meant in regards to a hotel. I thought if it said “No Vacancy” then you couldn’t have sex, but if it said “Vacancy” then you could. Of course, I was not sure what sex was, but I was convinced it had something to do with vacancy.
Some things I used to think as a kid (I have mentioned some of these in previous similar threads):
[ul]
[li]All the rocks in the world were manufactured at some rock factory. People then went around and just deposited them wherever.[/li][li]Lighting occurred when God struck a match and waved it through the sky.[/li][li]Whenever it thundered really loud the sky was going to collapse. I feared that large chunks of “sky” would come falling down on me.[/li][li]If you turned the radio off and then back on it would resume playing the song where you “left off.” I remember hearing a song I liked, but my Dad turned the radio off. By the time I got to the radio to turn it back on the song was over.[/li][li]Like nitroglycerine mentioned, I also thought a lot of TV shows were done live.[/li][li]A “Do not pass” sign on the road meant you couldn’t drive past it. Every time I saw one of these signs I’d yell, “Mom! That sign said ‘do not pass’! Why did you pass it?”[/li][li]Traffic signals were controlled by some guy in some unknown remote location who just flipped switches to make them turn red and green.[/li][/ul]
I used to think that people who smoked cigarettes were impervious to ANY inhaled smoke. I thought that fire departments could use smokers to walk into burning, smoke-filled buildings – without gear – and save non-smokers who were choking on the smoke!
This was addressed in Calvin and Hobbes, I think. The black and white paintings changed into colour paintings when colours were invented. Photographs and movies changed too, so they are colour records of a black and white world.
I always thought black kids got chocolate breastmilk.
When I was 4, I saw my grandmother brushing her teeth.
Well she started off by brushing her toothbrush against her hand. I asked her why and she told me it was so the toothpaste got mixed into the brush before starting. I was 25 before it hit me that she was really brushing her false teeth and didn’t want me to know it. I still do it but now I know why.
I thought cars had some sort of device which kept them on the road, sort of like the little kid rides at the fairs. I thought there were magnets under the road to keep you from driving off of it.
My dad had me convinced when I was about 4 that there was a little man, maybe 3 feet tall, who sat in this tower thingy near the university, and that was where all the traffic lights were controlled from, because the tower was high enough to see the whole city. (though in truth, it was only about 2 storeys high!)
I used to get mad when I had homework because “Daddy gets paid to go to work. If the teacher wants me to do her work for her she should pay me for it.”
I would think the TV show was starting all over again when the end credits were rolling up the screen.
After I heard the parable about the pharisees/sadusees (the ones where they look down on someone for not being an Upstanding Citizen[sub]TM[/sub]), every time I went to confession, I would look back at the line of people who hadn’t gone yet and think ‘Look they’re all sinners, and I just confessed so I’m not. But [sub]doh![/sub] now I have to go all over again just for thinking that.’
Oh I forgot one more thing. Where I’m from the co-gen plant can be clearly seen from just about anywhere in the county on the mountain. It billows out a great deal of smoke and since it was up high in the mountain i used to think that’s what made clouds.
I can’t believe I’m admitting these things! What is it about SDMB?
Ok, FIRST, somehow I must have misinterpreted what my mother told me. When a little friend of mine said that babies were picked in a cabbage patch, I said, “Na-ahhh, they come from mommies. [Ok so far…] They grow in their bellies and come out their armpits.” Armpits? I truly believed this. To this day I don’t know how I could have gotten such a bizarre idea.
SECOND. In first grade or so, we were at lunch having a discussion about whether Santa was real. A girl in my class said he wasn’t. I said, hey, I saw him on TV news on the weather radar. They couldn’t show it on the news if it wasn’t true! :rolleyes:
THIRD. Feminine hygiene commercials. When I was really young, I just thought that for some reason, adult women peed themselves a lot. When I got a little older and began to get the hint, I thought that menstruation would be blue. Dammit, it’s always blue in the commercials!
Haha, this is a great post btw–
I used to think that:
All bees were “Killer” bees and if I got stung I would die
You got a girl pregnant by peeing inside of her
That the world curved at the horizon
All of the animals I saw on TV lived somewhere by my house
Storm sewers were a huge subterrainian maze that connected the entire country.
I also thought that people in other countries translated their languages into English inside of their heads.
When I was little, my sister told me that whenever we drove past a graveyard, I had to hold my breath or all of the ghosts would get into my body through my mouth and I’d be possessed.
My sister - yes, she was evil as a child - also used to sneak into my bedroom at night when she had friends sleeping over, pour water over my hips while I was sleeping, then wake me up and tell me I had wet the bed. It was awful! When we got older, she told me that I never actually wet the bed - it was her every time pouring water on me!
splutters This, I like.
It was dark and we were going to play outside. I must have been around 5. I remember my [older] sister asking mom, " Mom, it’s dark outside, do you have a donzerly we can use?" My mother, puzzled, ask her what on earth that was. My sis says to her, "You know, a donzerly, like in our National Anthem, “Oh say, can you see? By the donzerly light!”. Whether she was joking, I’ll never know, I just thought she was so wise…till mom exploded in raucous laughter.
And for the longest time, I couldn’t understand why my British friend was so behind the times, he’d always ask for a torch when it was dark. I’d get him a flashlight telling him, “This is much safer.” He would look at me like I had two heads…wait… :smack:
Finally, I never grasped the concept of legal tender until I was in my teens. I thought it was just paper, and they should just keep printing out endless amounts of money and distribute it, like a hand-out or a brochure or something. That would solve all the, “I can’t afford it” excuses. It made sense to me at the time.
My father’s an english teacher at a junior college, and my mother worked at a university. I was in the 4th grade before I found out that other kids’ parents didn’t get the summer off.
Akin to the black&white past thing, I kept seeing black people rioting on TV, and then we’d go driving around and I never saw any black ones like on TV. Just dark brown… besides, the dark brown ones weren’t rioting, so it mustn’t have been them.
i moved to southern alabama when i was in second grade. i was convinced that the principle spoke a different language than i did. he had one of those deep southern accents that i had never heard before and couldn’t understand at all.
i also thought that the asia kid in my class was blind because he had such narrow eyes.
My parents had one of those “Where did I come from?” books that explained human sexuality & reproduction in terms a child could understand. The little sperms were sort of pink colored and looked like little fish with eyes (and top hats!). They also looked a bit like a mass of stawberry jam. So I always thought ejaculate would be pink and gooey, and was quite surprised when it wasn’t. 