I didn’t realize radio stations were playing records. I thought the performers, Beatles for example, went from station to station singing and playing their songs. I guess I was five or six when Dad straightened me out on this.
I thought “going on a diet” meant that you eat things, rather than abstain from eating.
When I had a cataract fixed, in my early sixties, I said much the same thing to Zyada: “Trees got leaves!!!”
I’m glad to see that so many others had the same reaction. At least I was half joking.
Every kid, I don’t know if it’s got a technical name but both getting to that and getting over it are important developmental stages. The idea itself is part of the solipsistic/magic thought stage of development, a specific instance of the idea that you define the world.
More on-topic, since I was too late to add what I came in here for: I once watched an episode of Walt Disney, in which he explained doing animation by successive drawings, each with a step in whatever movement was intended. I thought to myself “They must have some great artists to draw a real person so realistically!” Apparently I hadn’t caught on to the whole movie camera thing.
Traffic lights. I was at one point utterly convinced (after noting how often the damned things would change to yellow/red right before my parent’s car would reach it) that demented leprechauns undoubtedly lived under the intersection (in the sewers to be exact) and controlled the lights so as to induce maximum mayhem-or at least wasted time and thus motorist frustration.
Based on the traffic light patterns that still exist in my current town, I’m still not fully convinced they don’t exist.
The nuns at my Catholic school were always going on about “my” needing to watch my “Behave Year”–oh, so this is the year in which I would finally be expected to behave? Except that they never made it clear when said year started, exactly, and thus when I would finally need to start monitoring how good I was So as a consequence I never really did learn to “behave” according to their strict standards (rebel that I was and am).
So did I!
I thought that the Watergate scandal had something to do with a dam, or some sort of gate that held water back somewhere., and had obviously somehow failed.
This next one, I blame my father for…
When I was a kid, in the 1970s, the Illinois Tollway had rumble strips leading up to the toll booths. I believed that these were there to warn blind drivers that they had to stop to pay the toll (because they couldn’t see the signs, obviously!)
Were you childhood friends with Elemenopy? 
Sorry for multiple posts; I just remembered this one.
I grew up Catholic; one of the tenets of Catholicism is transubstantiation – that the bread and wine in Communion don’t just symbolize Jesus’s body and blood, but that they actually become his body and blood.
When I was taking CCD classes in prep for First Communion (age 7 or 8), and the nuns would explain that the Communion hosts were the body of Christ, I had this mental image of this massive body of Jesus lying on the ground (sort of like Gulliver in Lilliput), and workers mining his body for Communion hosts.
Weird, and kind of gross, and it was the reason why I was scared to take First Communion.
Maybe you were thinking of this guy?
(Available on etsy!)
This reminds me of the time when I was a kid, and I overheard my parents talking. My father had gotten $100 in some way. I don’t remember the circumstances–maybe he’d just taken it out of the bank, maybe somebody paid back a loan, maybe it was a tax refund. I don’t know. The point is, he had a hundred dollars.
I figured we were rich. Yes sir, we would be living on easy street from now on. After all, dad had one hundred dollars! What could possibly cost that much? What could anyone possibly want, that a hundred dollars couldn’t pay for? Obviously there would be no more of my parents telling me we couldn’t afford it when I asked for the latest cool toy I saw on TV. Dad had a hundred dollars, you can afford anything when you’ve got that kind of money in your pocket!
My knowledge about sex and pregnancies went through a similar evolution. At first I thought babies just sort of happened – you prayed to God or something if you wanted one. Then I found out that adults did “something” definite to make it happen but was vague on what. I found a book in the library similar to your parents made appear (I was that kind of kid) and it mentioned the “putting his penis in her vagina” part, showing a smiling cartoon couple in the missionary position. I knew what a penis was since I had one but was a bit vague about vaginas – the only genitals shown in the book were on a pre-adolescent boy and girl standing and waving at the viewer. Also being cartoons, the boy had a three-lobed nub and the girl a groove which I’d already seen IRL on toddlers at the beach but since they weren’t… displaying the mystery still remained.
The book also skipped anything about erections or pleasure. I figured the woman could open her vagina like she could open her mouth to take in the penis and the man would sort of pee semen into her instead of urine – I hoped I would figure out or learn how to do that so I didn’t make a mistake when I wanted a baby. Naturally, they would do this mundane task only when they wanted children but I knew pregnancy wasn’t guaranteed so sometimes several efforts had to be made.
Eventually I found my way into the adult health section of the library (it sure wasn’t information from my parents) and corrected the misconceptions through parsing text and got the classic anatomical illustration of a vulva, but not anything showing genitals in use. This was way before The Joy of Sex or anything similar. There were still holes in my knowledge though. I had played with my erections a few moments at a time but was astonished at the peak in pleasure and ejaculation the first time I carried it through to an orgasm. Then everything clicked into place.
Ditto. There was one guy in my eighth-grade gym class who was intact and I thought he was the defective one.
When I was a little kid, I assumed that grown-ups went to work because that was what you did when you were grown up. I also assumed that “They” (the government? society?) mailed us money just because families need money. I never mentally connected the two until later.
I guess I would have made a great Communist.
I thought that you could choose what kind of gravy you could serve with a meal. I got it in my head that I only liked beef gravy, so no matter what my mother was serving, I’d ask what kind of gravy it was and she would say “beef”, just so I’d eat it. I didn’t find out she was lying to me until I was in junior high. This was the source of much amusement in my family for many decades. :o
Oh god yeah, the sex thing…
Like most kids, I guess, I learned pretty early how babies are made. No one discussed sexual pleasure or the existence of an insistent appetite for sex. Like other posters on this thread, I didn’t connect it with sexiness either.
Adults did discuss things like having a girlfriend or boyfriend or falilng in love, and also (without details) having an attraction, essentially the hots for someone. From my childhood frame of reference that translated into thinking that boys tended to like girls better and think they were special and fun to be around (and nice to hug), and vice versa, but without any connection to the baby-making behavior I’d been told about, and without including any kind of visual fetish thing about the shapes and parts of people, like wanting to stare at them or wanting to see them with their clothes off.
My own prurient drooling fascination with girl shapes and girl parts obviously meant I was a pervert. The only other people who seemed somewhat obsessed in that way were boys who talked mostly about peeing and pooping and farting and bragging about having successfully seen someone’s underwear; they always seemed to delight in anything and everything filthy, so I didn’t even make that connection and realize we had the same interest.
Actual physical sexual pleasure was also a solo perversion I had no idea anyone else had ever discovered. How odd to be able to tickle yourself where you pee from when you can’t tickle yourself anywhere else, and it felt good and somehow fed into all that imagining of girls and, umm, you know, where they pee from. I had no idea this was sex, had never heard of masturbation, didn’t connect it with baby-making, missed any clue that any of this was normal. I’m amazed at how internally comfortable I was with being a perv. I figured it wasn’t hurting anyone, it was my own secret.
The most explicit sex talk I was able to pick up on seemed to centralize on breasts. Adult men seemed to find them even more interesting than nursing babies did. I got that that was part of growing up and being more interested in matching up, dating, eventually getting married and all that stuff, but yet again it didn’t seem to have a damn thing to do with my obsessions with girl parts and that secret thing I did in private. My 10-year-old equivalent of a porn stash was some advertisements and magazine illustrations of girls my age, girls modeling skirts or pants or bodysuits or swim suits. Girls that age didn’t have breasts and my interests were a lot farther down.
Utterly clueless the whole damn time.
Because shows always liked to tell you how to survive it, I had the impression that quicksand was lurking all over the place ready to suck you down if you weren’t careful. I was sure that it was something people had to deal with on a weekly basis if they went around in the woods, but since there wasn’t any locally I figured it was only other woods.
When I was a kid we lived in the suburbs and it was rare that we’d drive into Chicago during the evening since most family events started before the sun went down. So, when we would make a nighttime trip, my sister and I would sit in the back seat of the old Thunderbird and I would watch the lights along I-55 or 294 before the actual city was on the horizon go off into the distance where they’d converge in a twinkling mass of street lights, tail lights, oncoming headlights and lights from buildings and signs. My sister told me that there was a carnival up ahead and this always made sense to me since the only other place I’d see such a mass of lights was when the Ferris wheel and mini-rollercoasters were set up in some mall parking lot. So I would sit and wait in anticipation that, even if we couldn’t go to the carnival, we would at least drive past it and see it. Even after I asked my father once and was told no such carnival existed, it was a pleasant diversion to imagine it so back in the days before iPads to play with in the back seat.
I thought the Storm Troopers in Star Wars were robots, and the markings on their back spelled “oil”.
I thought our local McDonald’s was the only one in the world. I’d see their commercials and assumed they were talking about that particular place, never thought there could be more than one.
Playing with our flashlights in our bedroom at night, my brother and I would signal “SOS” out the window in Morse Code, convinced that would bring rescuers to our bedroom and we’d have pulled a prank on them.
In our village, there was a church, which played the Westminster Quarters plus the hours every 15 minutes during the day, and just the hours at night (the switch was 8 or 9). I’d been up in the tower, with Brownies (junior branch of the UK version of Girl Scouts), and I’d seen the huge church bells, and was allowed to help ring one.
So, naturally, I assumed that someone was ringing the bells, every 15 minutes. I used to lie in bed at night, listening to the bells, imagining the job; I couldn’t decide if I’d like to do it, because ringing the bells was fun, and you’d only have to do it for a matter of seconds at a time (one o’clock would be really easy!) but then, you’d have to be there every 15 minutes, so watching TV programmes would be really annoying, and your friends would probably be cross with you because you’d keep running off when you were spending time together, and doing the night bells would be horrible. I even used to watch out of the window, just before the bells were due, trying to see if I could see him running back in.
I vividly remember the night I woke up, sat bolt upright, gasped and said ‘IT’S CLOCKWORK!’