Yeah, I had something like that. As I recall, my parents had heard that I was discussing my dad’s salary with other kids on the block. I guess they were upset that I had been going through their financial records. Plus, money was just one of those things that WAS NOT DISCUSSED. Well, turned out I had no idea how much the old man made, and had just made up some unimaginably huge sum like “one THOUSAND dollars!”
Of course, at that time our weekly allowance was our age + a dime. So at age 12, I got a whopping 22 cents! Whoo baby - don’t spend all that in one place. And don’t pass up the opportunity to get 3% on that in your passbook!
At age 12, my best friend and I found an unused condom along the road. We knew it was something that went on a man’s penis, but we couldn’t figure out why it didn’t have a hole to let the guy stuff out.
When I was around 5 (in kindergarten), I witnessed my mother breast feeding my sister, and I deduced that breasts got big and filled with milk when women had babies. That is why girls at school and men did not have large breasts, because they didn’t have babies. And the larger the breasts, the more babies that woman had.
I have a small TV related one. As a kid watching Battle of the Planets, the team were told something about if they screwed up again, they would be grounded. I thought the superior meant that they would be tossed in a grinder.
The theme song for the TV program Maverickhas the line in it, “Livin on jacks and queens”.
Watching the program as a kid, I wondered, “Who is Jackson Queens, and why is Maverick living off of him? Maybe he finances Maverick’s gambling. Queens is a place in New York, maybe this Jackson guy lives in Queens.”
As a kid, I had a distinct memory of seeing five full moons, all lined up, when I was in the car at the Sears store. This confused me, since I KNEW there was only one moon, but I remembered it clearly.
Years later, Sears moved to the new mall. As they were clearing out the old store, there in the dumpster was the lighted sign for their five cent sale. :smack:
In adolescence, I had more knowledge about sex than some of the guys, although I had no experience in it; I read a lot. Once, in a gym locker room, I discovered some guys who believed babies came into the world through a woman’s anus. I told 'em they were wrong, and one of them wanted to fight me over it.
When I was a younger kid, I had some misconceptions about property ownership. I thought an “abandoned building” was a closed business that no longer belonged to anyone. That got me into trouble a couple times. The first time was when a friend and I wriggled through a broken window and looted the coin-op candy machine, taking a lot of rather stale candy. My co-conspirator blabbed to his brothers, who told his parents, who told my parents, and we were in trouble. My evil dad railed at me for being stupid, but he still didn’t explain the property concept.
I had kind of an obsession with symmetry, so since both the school year and the summer seemed interminably long, and I knew a year was 12 months, I assumed we had school for 6 months then 6 months off for the summer. I remember feeling cheated when I realized we only had 2.5 months off for the summer and went to school the entire rest of the year.
Not my misconception, but my classmates’. I grew up in a rural community, and a lot of my classmates lived on farms. I remember in the second grade almost getting into a fistfight with some of them because they insisted that when mare ‘got’ a foal she went out in the pasture and dig it up. I didn’t know where she did get it, but I was pretty darned sure that wasn’t the right answer.
I long believed that touching the prongs of an unplugged electrical device, like a toaster or vacuum cleaner, could be dangerous, as there might remain some electicity stored in said device.
A couple more of mine, that other posts reminded me of:
First, sometimes when we went on trips, I’d notice signs towards the start or end of the trip that said “Cleveland corporation limit”. Well, I knew that factories were the same thing as corporations, so I figured that that was like a zoning thing: You weren’t allowed to have factories past that line (past on which side, I wasn’t sure).
Second, you know how a lot of songs, instead of ending abruptly, just fade out? Well, I figured that, while the song was fading out, you could just keep turning the volume knob up on the radio to balance out the fade, and keep listening to the song indefinitely. Why, there could be entire verses after there, that were just too quiet to hear.
Oh, and on the glasses thing: My vision was never bad enough that there were things I’d failed to learn about the world, but I was astonished at how three-dimensional everything looked once I got my glasses. Depth seemed so exaggerated, like the world was a scene in a View-Master.
My dad was a firefighter when I was growing up, so he’d be gone for an entire 24 hours, but then have 48 hours off. Over the summer we would do various day trips on weekdays, or even routine stuff like going to the store, since anything you could want to do would be less busy. Why would you do X on a Saturday when it’s so crowded?
I honestly didn’t get it until I started working a 9-5 job that sometimes you don’t really have the option of doing grocery shopping at 11 am on a Thursday
