Did it take you seven minutes to come up with that? :dubious:
Look at his handle, and you tell me…
My childhood misconception: After seeing an illustration in a book depicting what might happen if gravity failed, I thought it was natural disaster that happened from time to time like an earthquake or tornado. For weeks after that whenever I was outside I would keep an eye out for something to grab onto so I wouldn’t fly off into space.
Oh, I thought of another one. when I was about 5 or 6, we got a full World Book encyclopedia set (remember when encyclopedias were heavy?) Included with it was a set of Childcraft books, with encyclopedic stuff geared more for kids. the “World and Space” volume had a section describing what would eventually happen when the Sun was- for lack of a better term- used up. In it was an illustration of a barren, scorched Earth with a giant red Sun cresting the horizon.
I’m told I thought it meant it was going to happen sometime soon, and I was a total wreck for a while after reading it… Hey, I was 5, how was I supposed to know 4 billion years is a long, long time away?
My parents bought those!
I used to randomly read them, but I don’t recall anything about the sun burning up.
I did get in trouble in grade school for finding an article on sweat bees that live in the ground and running over in class to tell my friend what we had found on the baseball field.
The Truth is Out There.
Yeah, I thought that one for a while, too. Imagine my surprise when I eventually learned that women actually have more nether holes than men. And imagine my further surprise when, even later than that, I learned that there are an awful lot of animals who do in fact have a single all-purpose nether hole.
For some reason I thought condoms were pills (maybe I was conflating it with THE PILL that I kept hearing about), and you had to take them. But then I heard you put a condom on. Well that didn’t make sense; how could you balance a pill on your thingy for that long??
** nods **
There were two breeds of dog that had similar characteristics: a dash hound and a doxen. A dash hound wasn’t as fast as a greyhound but it must be faster than a doxen, which it looked so much like, since why else would it be named that way?
I think that’s actually an advanced notion of language for a five-year-old child. I’m not sure most even understand what foreign languages really are at that age, despite the fact that they are generally much more able to learn foreign languages by simple immersion.
I knew the difference between states and cities, but I wasn’t always sure which was which. There was a time when I though Las Vegas was another state, on its own. I also thought San Diego was Sandy Ego, with the last part pronounced like the frozen waffle.
I thought if you turned off the TV in the middle of a program you could come back later and finish watching it, just like today when you record something on TiVo (or used to? Does anyone even use TiVo any more?
You and my grandma both. I had also been surprised but she was quicker on the question. She was disappointed to find out that no, there is no such thing as forests where fancy chocolate grows in the ground. “That’s a forest I would’a gone to!” The woman wasn’t fond of leaving the house much less of forest trails, but chocolate is chocolate.
I recall visualizing it as akin to some of the children’s games we’d play where we’d agree that we’d use (for instance) “turkle” to mean “teacher” and so on and be able to communicate with each other (giggling) while people around us wouldn’t know what we were talking about. It seemed rather silly for them to be doing this, if there really were such people and they really did talk that way all the time.
I wonder whether people would find it difficult to wrap their heads around the idea of speaking different languages if we ever get to the point that the planet is monolingual, so that no one encounters anyone in modern life who doesn’t speak The Language.
I’m sure slang and cant will be around forever.
When I was young my dad sold industrial batteries, for fork lifts, mine locomotives, and such. One of his big customers was the copper mine in San Manuel, Arizona. I kept poring over roadmaps looking for Sandman Well.
I started piano lessons when I was around six and before very long was given “Old Black Joe” to learn. This was years before the word black became the generally preferred term for African-Americans, so I just assumed that Old Black Joe was a guy who went around in black clothing or something.
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ah so cute kinda reminds me of lmnop part of the alphabet!
When my brother was little, he told Mom he wanted to be a black fireman when he grew up. She gently broke the news to him that he was a honky, but it turned out he was just referring to the black jackets the firemen were wearing in his picture book. 
This notion comes up in the Foundation series, somewhere along the story arc in which characters speculate about, search for, and ultimately find Earth. Asimov’s Galactic Empire is apparently monolingual and at one point somebody brings up Gaia as another possible name for Earth. To paraphrase the ensuing discussion:
I was 14 when I had this revelation… but it was the bark on the trees that broke my brain! Prior to this, I wondered why school put so many rows of chairs when OBVIOUSLY from my empirical study, it was clearly impossible for anyone to see from such a vast distance from the board. Then I would argue to the death that “Bird spotting” was a pastime filled with bullshiters who would just randomly point to the upper part of trees and claim (falsely) to have witnessed a specific bird. The US Highway system had committed a huge blunder in making the lettering of the signs on highways so small so as to be impossible to see. Hitting a baseball was an exercise in pure luck, and all aircraft were of the “stealth” variety to me. Flash forward to 7th grade, and as a joke, I steal the glasses off the cute girl in class, plunk them on my face, and HOLY GUACAMOLE I CAN SEE! for 14 years, the joke was on me.
Having been the engineer on a few recordings, I can attest that often, the singer doesn’t know the words, and sings from a sheet of lyrics.