# Weird things you believed as a kid **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 21, 2020, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583 "2020-12-21T23:41:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/41 "2020-12-23T02:39:52Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > Somewhat later, I thought women urinated from their vaginas. Surprisingly, I later discovered that there are women who actually believe this. Perhaps for women who believe this, it’s more likely to be a misunderstanding of exactly what the word “vagina” applies to? I could imagine a misconception that it’s the word for that general external area of the body. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/42 "2020-12-23T02:42:42Z")
It kinda _is_ a general word for a woman’s crotch, along with many less polite ones. Not accurate, but definitely in use. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/43 "2020-12-23T02:44:43Z")
I spent many hours pondering the mystery of why “specific” seemed to be a fancy word for something very small, but the Specific Ocean was the hugest ocean. ---
**Author:** ![WildaBeast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wildabeast/32/6_2.png) [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/44 "2020-12-23T02:52:41Z")
> [@FairyChatMom](#): > > For the longest time I was confused when I’d hear about unwed mothers - how did they manage to confuse God and get babies??? At a young age my parents my parents taught me that women got pregnant when the father’s sperm combined with the mother’s egg (by reading me the [Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3770418-charlie-brown-s-cyclopedia-vol-1-featuring-your-body)). But they never explained how the sperm got from the man to the woman. So I assumed sperm were airborne, like pollen. You had kids after you got married because living in the same house increased the likelihood of one of your sperm landing on your wife. So I believed unwed mothers were the result of a man’s sperm accidentally landing on the wrong woman. I also believed all diseases were contagious. My uncle had diabetes, so I was a little afraid of him because I thought I could catch diabetes from him. ---
**Author:** ![Morgyn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morgyn/32/3041_2.png) [@Morgyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgyn)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/45 "2020-12-23T03:09:19Z")
I’d ask if his name is George Orr, but I think we have a user by that name already. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/46 "2020-12-23T05:58:03Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#): > > But they never explained how the sperm got from the man to the woman. In my Sex Ed class in 6th grade, I was the kid who raised his hand and asked that question. I don’t recall what the teacher said, but she didn’t answer it. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 6:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/47 "2020-12-23T06:20:33Z")
I wonder what level of ignorance kids of today have about sex, considering what they can accidentally (and deliberately) stumble upon online. If any parent manages to keep the facts from them before they’re ten years old, that’s quite an impressive achievement. ---
**Author:** ![Nobody](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/94ad74/32.png) [@Nobody](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nobody)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 7:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/48 "2020-12-23T07:45:31Z")
I, without thinking of an alternative mechanism, thought it would be better to be able to see without the aid of light. That way we could see how things actually are (I.E. being to see microscopic pores for example). I didn’t consider that it might be unpleasant to see that level of detail. > [@Chronos](#): > > Similarly, I thought that if a song ended in a fadeout, you could just keep on turning up the volume on your stereo to compensate. Do it far enough, and the song might never end! There could be entire verses hidden there! Not for the same reason, but I tried that once. Cars CD, don’t remember the song but anyway it fades so I turn it up, louder, and louder, and louder… **AND THEN THE NEXT SONG STARTS!!!** I quickly turn it down as I’m panicking about damaging the speakers because it wasn’t my stereo. Thankfully they were OK and surprisingly the very loud music didn’t hurt my ears. And nobody else was around so I didn’t get chewed out. ---
**Author:** ![Mean\_Mr.Mustard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mean_mr.mustard/32/3865_2.png) [@Mean\_Mr.Mustard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mean_Mr.Mustard)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 10:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/49 "2020-12-23T10:49:24Z")
I thought radio stations had the artist for every song there live in the studio. _DJ: “OK, Kinks, you come over and play ‘You Really Got Me’ as soon as the Beatles finish. I think they’re almost done with ‘Penny Lane’. Sonny, Cher, you guys are after the Kinks.”_ I was more than a little disappointed when I learned they were merely spinning records. mmm ---
**Author:** ![themapleleaf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/themapleleaf/32/14349_2.png) [@themapleleaf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/themapleleaf)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/50 "2020-12-23T11:16:03Z")
> [@Treppenwitz](#): > > I thought that the way you told the difference between a boy and a girl was hair length. Boys had short hair, girls had long hair. > > I must also have been aware that I got my hair cut from time to time, but I evidently didn’t see how that could impact on the foolproof method for determining sex. > > j That’s a good one. At some point in my childhood, I read that once a hair reaches a certain length, it falls out. I interpreted that to mean, potentially at least, that if you never cut your hair and let it grow to as long as it could, it would all fall off your head at once and you’d be bald. I apparently didn’t realize that hair grows from the root, not from the tip. In my early childhood, like until 5 or 6, I didn’t realize that skin color was of necessity hereditary. Because some things get darker after a while, I imagined a white person could actually turn black one day! I even once asked my grandfather: “When will you turn black?”, because for some reason I got the impression he would. His answer was something like “when I am sad”. ---
**Author:** ![themapleleaf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/themapleleaf/32/14349_2.png) [@themapleleaf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/themapleleaf)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/51 "2020-12-23T11:30:49Z")
Another one: sometimes, I formed my own impression of how something worked before I learned how it actually worked. In early childhood, before I knew what a bullet was, I imagined that guns killed people/animals by letting out a flame that burned them to death. In this way, I had re-invented the flamethrower. Later, I learned of something called a bomb - an object designed to explode. But I didn’t know exactly how it looked. My parents, trying to teach me not to take gifts from strangers, or else not to take things others had left on the ground, told me that some ill-meaning people put bombs into ordinary household objects like pencils and leave them for others to take. Maybe it was this, or maybe it was just my imagination, but I ended up visualizing a bomb as a tennis ball or similar object. I then drew a picture of a hunter preparing to put the ball-shaped bomb into the muzzle of his gun. I had thus re-invented the grenade launcher. My father then explained to me that what you put in guns is a “bullet”. IIRC I was kind of surprised later to learn that bullet heads did not contain explosives. ---
**Author:** ![Treppenwitz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treppenwitz/32/3445_2.png) [@Treppenwitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Treppenwitz)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/52 "2020-12-23T13:48:39Z")
You just reminded me of something. I was barely school age when Winston Churchill died. After suffering a stroke he hung on for a couple of weeks before actually dying. Every evening there would be an update on his condition on the news; routinely these would be described as “another bulletin”. Evidently by this age I was aware that if, say, an animal was severely injured, the kind thing to do was to put it down. Shoot it, for example. What I couldn’t understand was how the people trying to put Churchill down could be so shockingly incompetent - _another_ bullet in? How many is that now? And they still haven’t put him out of his misery? I became quite upset about it before my parents clarified things for me. j ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/53 "2020-12-23T13:51:18Z")
I was convinced for a while that my father never slept because whenever I went into his room, he’d just open his eyes and talk to me (Dad’s side of the bed was closer to the door). Of course, this had nothing to do with how noisy a five-year-old coming into the room was. ---
**Author:** ![needscoffee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/needscoffee/32/1076_2.png) [@needscoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/needscoffee)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/54 "2020-12-23T13:56:04Z")
> [@Treppenwitz](#): > > What I couldn’t understand was how the people trying to put Churchill down could be so shockingly incompetent - _another_ bullet in? How many is that now? And they still haven’t put him out of his misery? Lol! This is great! ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/55 "2020-12-23T14:01:51Z")
> [@themapleleaf](#): > > Another one: sometimes, I formed my own impression of how something worked before I learned how it actually worked. In early childhood, before I knew what a bullet was, I imagined that guns killed people/animals by letting out a flame that burned them to death. Looney Tunes shorts likely didn’t help, tho there was one gag where the bullet could be seen (the “One Buwwet Weft!” gag from one of the Elmer/Bugs/Daffy ones). ---
**Author:** ![FloatyGimpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/floatygimpy/32/7750_2.png) [@FloatyGimpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FloatyGimpy)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/56 "2020-12-23T14:25:35Z")
I believed in cabbits until I was about 10. Some older kids told me their cat mated with a rabbit and had baby cabbits. I thought they must be so cute with their front cat legs and little hoppity back legs. ---
**Author:** ![ZonexandScout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zonexandscout/32/544_2.png) [@ZonexandScout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZonexandScout)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/57 "2020-12-23T15:23:24Z")
This more a weird misunderstanding than a belief: My mother complained for years about how difficult it was to teach me to tell time when I was a young boy. I finally learned how, but it was only recently that I explained to her what the problem was. She would use the clock on the wall in the kitchen to teach me. She would go on and on about where the “big hand” and the “little hand” were. (“The big hand is between 6 and 7.”) Problem was, the hour hand on this clock was shorter but much fatter than the minute hand. To me, the hour hand was bigger. I would almost cry because she would keep telling me where the “big hand” was…and it was obvious to me that the “big(ger) hand” was NOT where she said it was. If she had just said “the long hand,” everything would have been fine. ---
**Author:** ![slalexan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47c2d/32.png) [@slalexan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slalexan)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/58 "2020-12-23T15:48:38Z")
When I was little, we had a mean pomeranian dog named Fuzzy. He was the meanest dog I have ever met. One day, my parents decided that it was time for Fuzzy to go to a new home (probably because he was a mean dog) and sent him to live on the farm. As I was a child, I accepted this explanation and when on when my life. About a year later, I guess the guilt of it got to my mother and she told me that Fuzzy, having lived so wonderfully at the farm, had a tragic accident. He was playing by some cows, one of which kicked him, and he died from his injuries. I was sad, but I accepted it and moved on with my life. Years later, I was in college and we were talking about family pets for some reason or another. And I brought up Fuzzy, the mean pomeranian. And as I was telling the story to my college friends about Fuzzy going to the farm then getting kicked by a cow, I came to the startling realization that my mother may have lied to me about Fuzzy’s fate. So I called her the next day. She kept to her story. So, to this day, I am not sure what happened to Fuzzy. Maybe he really did go to a farm, like so many other childhood pets. ---
**Author:** ![motu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/motu/32/259_2.png) [@motu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/motu)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/59 "2020-12-23T16:00:12Z")
On TV, the adults watched the News, which was always talking about a WaterGate, which I pictured as a vine covered arbor by/with a waterfall. Never understood why they kept talking about that Water Gate but never showed it. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583/60 "2020-12-23T16:13:42Z")
When I was very young, like 5 or younger, I had the cause-and-effect of traffic lights backwards: I thought people were taking turns voluntarily stopping to let opposing traffic through, and that it was amazing that the lights ‘knew’ to turn red when people stopped and green when people would go. I didn’t pause to think why, in a scenario which is basically a 4-way stop, a traffic light would even be necessary. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/928583.md?page=4)