When I was but a tot I thought that ALL itches were caused by mosquitoes. Hence, when I sat in a very hot bath and my skin itched, I thought that there was a variety of mosquito that could live only in very hot water, since it stopped once it cooled off.
My dad teaches at a junior college, and my mom worked at a university. Until junior high school, I thought everybody’s parents got the whole summer off.
As God is my witness, until I was like 8 or so I thought that all those westerns on TV were set in the 1950s or so, MAYBE the 40s for the early ones.
Try asking your dad if he ever rode a horse to school someday, it confuses the heck out of him.
I also believed that when anyone moved they just swapped houses. So when we moved to LA into a house owned by the Bigelow family and I heard they had like, 6 kids, I asked my mom how they were going to fit into out teeny little apartment in Chicago.
Yeah, but I thought the purpose of airplane contrails was to make clouds. It was their job to fly around making clouds.
I didn’t believe Disney Land was a real place. I had a little plastic playset of the park, with rides and little plastic people and Mickey and Minnie Mouse figures and everything (I still have it, it’s in my grandmother’s attic somewhere), and I’d see the park on TV when they did Wonderful World of Disney, but I thought it was all make-believe like the other TV shows. The preview-commercials they’d show before Disney home videos would show happy children wanting to go to Disney Land, and I would sit on the couch thinking they were stupid because everybody knows there’s no such place. I didn’t realize it actually existed and could be visited until I was at least ten years old, and my best friend went and brought me back a pair of mouse ears. “Where did you get those?!” I asked in amazement. “There’s no such place as Disney Land!” He was greatly amused. In fact the last time I saw him before he died, he still remembered that incident…
I used to think that all restaurants had their food pre-made, and they just served it when you ordered. I must have been about ten or twelve before I realised that the reason we had to wait so long after ordering was that they had to make the food after we ordered. I still remember how amazed I was at that.
As a kid typically will, I used to squirt too much hand lotion on my hands, leaving them wet and goopy. My mother told me to wipe the excess on a kleenex.
For years, I thought “excess” was a word that meant “too much lotion on your hands.”
Ah, I see.
(although there are people out there on the net who do believe something like this - search on google for ‘chemtrails’)
Besides that?
i know there are some.
Can’t think tho.
sorry. Wish i was more funny.
I remembered one.
I used to think that all cousins were boys, no girl cousins. All the cousins I have are male. It never occured to me that I was their cousin. Then someone said in an offhand way that I was their cousin and I thought, “But that can’t be. I’m a girl.”
I had a real phobia about being arrested. Some of the offenses I thought would get me thrown in the slammer:
-bumping into someone in NYC (I’d end up a block behind my parents, edging around people)
-dropping ice cream on the edge of someone’s lawn
-stepping on a yard with a “Keep off the Grass” sign (my grandpa danced around on one and I was petrified, thinking he’d be arrested and I’d be stranded there on the street)
I too had some misunderstandings about movies–I thought the actors were behind the screen saying the lines. (SPOILER) I also asked how much Ryan O’Neal got paid to have his leg amputated for “Barry Lyndon”.
I didn’t know much about insurance when I was young and had the usual worry about fire. I would put all my books in paper bags by my window so I could rescue them. I kept two dollars standing by so that in case our house burned down I would be able to buy us a loaf of bread. (I didn’t know much about the prices of things either; bread probably wasn’t much 30-odd years ago.)
I thought my parents were twins because their birthdays are a month apart and they are the same age most of the year.
My jerk of a best friend told me that if you put clean clothes in the washing machine, it would explode. I believed that one for WAY too long.
My jerk of a best friend told me that if you put clean clothes in the washing machine, it would explode. I believed that one for WAY too long.
My sister told me that if you called a policeman “the Fuzz” you wouldn’t get arrested the first time, but if you did it again, you would be arrested for sure.
My birthday was the first one by date in my family even though I was the youngest. I thought that meant I was the oldest. I figured it out pretty quickly, but when I saw how much it frustrated my older siblings, I kept it up for years. Even now, 30 years later, they don’t think it’s very funny.
Oops. Thought I stopped that first one in time.
I thought that all dogs were male and cats were female.
My Mom gave me the sex talk when I was about 8 or 9. She was too embarrassed to name the body parts so when I asked how the baby got inside the mother, she said it happened where the mommy and daddy went to the bathroom. I took it literally and inspected the bathroom for months looking for seeds on a saucer…
I used to think that the stations on the radio were built into the car. So, when my family drove to New York from Chicago and none of the stations worked, I was shocked to learn that they change from state to state. No WGN in New York? What the…
jarbaby
I thought “drugs” was some evil man terrorizing the children of society and who could only be stopped by kids saying no to him. When the “this is your brain on drugs” PA came on, I asked my mother if the man talking was the REAL “drugs”. Of course she said yes, not paying attention to me, and so when he asked “any questions?”, I yelled “NO” as loud as I could.
Also, a friend told me that pine cones caused wringworms and I avoided them for years.
Until I was 9 or 10 I believed the Underground Railroad was an actual train that ran on tracks below the ground to bring escaped slaves from the South to the North…
I used to think Cornish game hens were little turkeys just for single people on Thanksgiving. I still picture a shabby studio apartment with a hot plate in the corner whenever I see game hens at the supermarket.
I used to believe hookers were people who flew around in helicopters with giant hooks dangling down from the bottom. I beleived that they would try catch people with the hooks.