When I was about 5 or 6 years old (early 1970s), my mom was in a ladies’ bowling league, which met on some weekday, during the day. She’d bring my sister and me along – the bowling alley actually had a daycare room set up for the bowling moms.
Anyway, the bowling alley had a bar (natch) – it was a separate room within the building. Above the door to the bar, there was a sign: “No Minors”. I asked my mom, “Why don’t they let miners in there? Is there something wrong with working in a mine?”
In the same manner of Famous Cash, when living as a tot in Arizona, I would often hear of my Dad taking a business trip to San Manuel (there was a mine there, one of his biggest clients). I’d look and look on the map and never could figure out where Sandman Well was.
How the title sequence for a TV show could include clips from episodes that hadn’t aired yet. I assumed that they only started producing the next episode after the previous one had aired – that each episode was written, shot & edited in the space of a week. So how come the opening for the first episode could have clips from the whole season in it? I mostly watched TV shows on video as a kid, so for a while I hypothesized that the title sequence on the video was different from the one it had when it first aired on TV.
I was a nerdy little kid and I asked my Mom how to spell “isbroughtoyouby”.
I kept watching TV and the announcer would say that Gilligan’s Island “is brought to you by” Winston Cigarettes. (or whatever)
I actually thought it was one word because it was said so quickly and most TV shows had an “isbroughttoyouby”.
My pronounciation was not the best, even for a 6 yr old, and Mom could never figure out what I was asking.
I remember thinking while being driven at night on a very rural road how cars avoided accidents with each other because it was dark and we couldn’t see the other cars in the dark.
For daylight saving time I thought that when we lost/gained an hour that it was for every day until it was time to change the clocks again. I wondered why we didn’t just keep the extra hour.
It could, actually. It wouldn’t be very efficient at it unless the batteries were designed that way, but you’d effectively be running the motors as generators, producing a voltage which could recharge the batteries.
I was a geography nerd as a kid. Loved atlases, loved globes, loved maps. Could name the states in alphabetical order, the state capitals, knew where the borders were, had a really good mental image of the relative positions of the states–
Then I learned about the secession of the Confederacy, and this made no sense to me at all. Okay, they took giant saws and sawed the 11 states off of the rest of north America (and because I had a really good mental image I knew exactly what this looked like), and floated it down to the South Pacific where there was plenty of room (and then after the war they floated it back), but how did they get it through the Panama Canal, HUH???
Also, where, o where, was the town of Plywood, Minnesota?
I thought there was something in the sky between me and the moon causing the moon to change shapes and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought it was maybe California.
I remember in first grade when we practiced penmanship, the teacher would write letters on an overhead projector and we were supposed to copy them. Because she wanted everyone to keep up, she sometimes would tell a student “Don’t erase.” In other words, ignore any mistakes you make and just keep practicing. I know from helping teach my own kids to write how agonizingly slow the process becomes if they stop, turn around their pencil and vigorously erase every single slight mistake that they make.
To my first-grade self, though, the instruction “Don’t erase” had the force of one of The Rules (I went to a Catholic school, and we had a lot of rules), that we were under no circumstances to ever, ever use the pencil eraser when writing our alphabet. I sometimes would sneak in a quick erase of the end of a pencil line that went too far, or some such mistake, and I was secretly worried that the teacher had a machine (probably the overhead projector) that could detect erasure marks and that after school she might put all of our papers through that machine and I would get in trouble for erasing, just the same as if I chewed gum or talked in class or wore gym shoes to school.
I also remember that when one of my friends in third grade announced that his mom was going to have a baby, I “knew” that it was because his dad and mom slept in the same bed and sometime during night while they were rolling over (while still asleep) that the dad’s penis slipped into the mom’s vagina, because I knew that’s how babies were made.
I thought “brought to you by” was “brocked to you by”. I also thought the word “audience” was spelled “odients” and was a plural, with one member of an audience being an “odient”.
As a 4-year-old I had no understanding of economics. I thought a bank was a place that just gave people money out of the goodness of their heart, and then you spend the money elsewhere to buy things. I wondered why you couldn’t just take what you wanted from stores and cut out the middleman.
Then I got more confused when I asked my dad why he went to work, and he said “to make money”. Since I knew that banks give out infinite supplies of money, I figured my dad drew the pictures on dollar bills.
Our local equivalent to TV Guide contained a page with a preview of next week’s TV Guide. Of course, if next week’s TV Guide was already ready, then surely it contained a preview of the following week’s TV Guide, right? Where did it end? And why couldn’t we get them ahead of time?
I had similar thinking when I was growing up. Basically, I thought that when movies were being filmed, the actors memorized the entire script all at once and the whole movie was filmed without any breaks.
Some other ones:
Whenever I heard the term “money laundering,” I always thought that meant people were washing their dollar bills in washing machines. I could never figure out why money laundering was so bad, if it resulted in nice-smelling, clean money afterwards.
When I got a little older, I was watching a Geraldo Rivera daytime talk show episode, and they were talking about masturbation. But I heard it as “mansculation.” This being before the age of the internet and search engines were available, I instead ran to my room and tried to look up that word in the dictionary and could never find it. This one left me really puzzled for a long time.
Whenever I heard the term “oral sex,” I thought that meant people basically just sitting around in a room and just talking about sex, you know, orally.
Similarly, I thought that there were a few people who actually believed that church stuff was important, like the pastor, and the rest of us didn’t really think it was true, but we just played along because we were supposed to, sort of like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
We were told in Sunday School about the poor unfortunate people who had never heard of God and Jesus, so we needed to spread the word, and I thought that was ridiculous–God was everywhere, so why didn’t he just show himself to those people, or create people who automatically believed? (And that’s when I realized that I only believed that stuff because other people told me about it…a baby skeptic was born.)
