# When I was little I thought... **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 4, 2010, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428 "2010-11-04T05:29:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![goldmund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a4c791/32.png) [@goldmund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/goldmund)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/61 "2010-11-05T01:52:46Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > This reminded me of something else. In school, during sex ed class when they teach you the mechanics of sex, they more or less tell you that tab A goes in slot B, and sort of left it at that. The word ‘thrust’ was never mentioned…well, no mention of any type of movement at all was brought up. Until i was old enough to watch some scrambled porn, I always thought that the man got an erection, inserted his tab into her slot and then, well, I wasn’t sure. I always imagined he just sort of parked it there. I remember being under the impression that they just went to sleep like that. I also remember thinking that the condom stayed inside the woman after sex. Heh, I wasn’t going to post this one in my last post, but… My best friend when I was little was a girl. As we got a bit older, we began to wonder about the whole “sex” thing. We weren’t old enough yet to have any interest in actually experimenting with it (and sadly, our family moved away before we reached that age and I never saw her again, heh) but we definitely talked about how we thought it worked. She was a year and a half older than me, so of course she was the expert. She told me that it worked like this: the grown-ups would each sit in their own chairs, facing each other, and both start rubbing themselves. “Like this”, she said, and demonstrated, rubbing her inner thighs, nowhere near the vicinity of her crotch. She also said that this happened while both participants were still fully clothed. Then, she said, “after a little while, white stuff called ‘come’ comes out, and goes inside the lady, and she gets pregnant and has a baby”. I had NO idea where it came out of, or how it got inside the lady. I believed that it worked this way for a long time, too. So, while I had the fundamentals down from a very young age, it would seem I was just a **bit** cloudy on the mechanics of the whole thing. ---
**Author:** ![wellanuff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/57b2e6/32.png) [@wellanuff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wellanuff)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/62 "2010-11-05T02:19:17Z")
I was raised Catholic. I went to a Catholic school, and attended a Catholic church. When I first encountered the term “Roman Catholic,” around the age of 12, I figured it must refer to some unfamiliar, little-known sub-sect of Catholicism. When I was about 8, I thought intercourse happened unknowingly while the two people were asleep in the same bed, just in the course of tossing and turning through the night. People had no more control over this than they have control over their dreams. Things must just slip together by happy accident, or so I thought. I thought that the water that came out of the faucet was free, that there was no such thing as a water bill. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/63 "2010-11-05T09:33:31Z")
I remember celebrating Martin Luther King Day in kindergarden in Manhattan (P.S. 41 4ever!), and having this vague notion that MLK was king of all the black people. ---
**Author:** ![BangTheDrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d26b3c/32.png) [@BangTheDrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BangTheDrum)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/64 "2010-11-05T09:48:38Z")
When I was a wee little girl, I thought that dogs and cats were the same animal except that cats were the girls because they were more delicate and pretty and dogs were the boys. ---
**Author:** ![Notchimine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bcef8e/32.png) [@Notchimine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Notchimine)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/65 "2010-11-05T17:33:02Z")
Until I was about five I thought pee was green. (We had a blue toilet) ---
**Author:** ![Ponch8](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponch8/32/9883_2.png) [@Ponch8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponch8)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/66 "2010-11-05T17:41:26Z")
I used to think that the race/ethnicity of a baby was determined by chance, not by the race of its parents. ---
**Author:** ![leftfield6](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leftfield6/32/18780_2.png) [@leftfield6](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leftfield6)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/67 "2010-11-05T17:48:02Z")
I thought at the end of game shows like Family Fued, Hollywood Squares, etc., the non-winners got “lovely **party** gifts”. I always wondered what kind a lame-ass parties they were having where Rice-a-Roni was such an attraction. Didn’t know it was “parting gifts” for way longer than I care to admit to. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/68 "2010-11-05T18:07:55Z")
> [@Daithi\_Lacha](#): > > I believed that grown-ups were robots that looked like [Helper from The Venture Brothers](http://basement24.deviantart.com/art/H-E-L-P-eR-64207386) (this would have been around 1970 or so, well before VB). I though that once I fell asleep, my parents would shed their skins like bananas, and then stand around beeping and booping at each other. When they held cocktail parties, I was terrified: the downstairs of our house was FILLED with robots, all waiting for me to fall asleep so they could “get comfortable.” It’s true! That’s the way it really is! I had that figured out by the time I was eight. I also knew that they were manufactured in the washing machine. I also thought that x-rays were made by someone blowing cigarette smoke in front of a black screen and someone else taking pictures of it. By pure chance the smoke would resemble the skull or whatever of the patient. I remember thinking that it was a pretty stupid way of doing it, because they’d have to smoke an awful lot of cigarettes before they’d get one just right. ---
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/69 "2010-11-05T20:00:46Z")
I thought that all radio stations had a wagon-wheel spoke and hub design. The person on air was in the middle. She / he would slowly turn as they worked, and the music played was played live by band standing in sound-proof rooms in between each “spoke” ( wall ). Essentially, say a dozen wedge shaped rooms. A band plays their song, they pack up and leave. 45 minutes later, the next band that loaded into that room gets it’s chance to play. And so on. Sure made sense at the time. Oddly, being given 45 records as a kid did not remove this image from my brain. The bands played live on radio. These records, they were for playing on the record player at home. :smack: Cartooniverse ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/70 "2010-11-05T21:25:13Z")
Out west of Toronto, they’d built a bridge in the middle of a field for a future on-ramp of a freeway. In the meantime, the finished bridge was just standing there surrounded by grass. You drove by on a regular road. My friend believed that this was the aftermath of a final exam for bridgebuilding school. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![gallows\_fodder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8c91f0/32.png) [@gallows\_fodder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gallows_fodder)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/71 "2010-11-05T22:07:36Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > When I was little, the Catholic schools taught us that you can’t get pregnant until you are married…unfortunately, they didn’t distinguish between “you shouldn’t” and “physically not possible”. Until I was embarrassingly old I thought it physically wasn’t possible to get pregnant until you were married. Around the time I started ‘losing my faith’ (somewhere in middle school) I started thinking “That doesn’t make sense, what possible biological change could you go though on your wedding day that suddenly allows you to get pregnant?” I thought this too, except not because I was taught to. I just thought that God knew when you got married, so, naturally, he would then make you pregnant. When I was little the “Baby M” surrogate mother court case was all over the news, and I must have asked my mother a dozen times who the father of the baby was, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a woman being pregnant when she wasn’t married to the father, especially in this case when the father was married to _another_ woman. How did that work??? I also thought that once you became an adult, you never got mad. In retrospect, I have no idea how I came up with this one because my parents were always getting mad, but…that’s what I thought. ---
**Author:** ![Enuma\_Elish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5e9695/32.png) [@Enuma\_Elish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enuma_Elish)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2010, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/72 "2010-11-05T22:19:27Z")
When I was 5, I was goofing off with the neighbor girl. She was an aggressive older woman;). She was 6. I was having fun and ignored the call of nature to the point that I got a piss-boner. She saw this (we were inside the shed her family stored their raft in) and her eyes got bright. She yanked my shorts and undies down and then pulled down her own while laying down and spreading her legs. She said,“I saw my parents doing it and I want to know what it feels like. Stick it in me and pee.” (OK - at this point I must say that she wasn’t a bad girl, just aggressive and very very curious and like myself - growing up in a very disfunctional environment.) Five things occured to my childs brain at this moment. 1. Huh!!!??? 2. Isn’t that how girls get pregnant? (I was the youngest and had heard my older brothers talking about sex and knew it involved the male putting his pecky into the female popo (my Mom’s terms) and sending something wet into her) The only wet thing I knew about that came out of a penis was pee. 3. The Guinness Book of World Records had come out just before this and I had overheard my brothers talking about “the youngest girl to ever get pregnant”. I wasn’t sure what age they were talking about, but thought it might be 7 - which scared me. 4. I gotta pee really bad, what if I fill her up too far and she pops??? 5)Ewwwwww! I yanked my pants up and ran, of course. I don’t remember where I peed - somewhere outside where I didn’t have to bend myself half-over, I suspect. The next day she called me a coward and said she would never play with me again, which she didn’t, for a whole week. ---
**Author:** ![Quasimodem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/e274bd/32.png) [@Quasimodem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quasimodem)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/73 "2010-11-06T01:46:43Z")
:):):D:)🙂 “Popo” in my native language means something altogether different, **Enuma**! **Cartooniverse** , I thought the same thing, only without the wagon wheel spokes. Obviously, you were more into the technical aspect than I was. I thought they just went in and out of the studio and were able to play the same songs over and over _perfectly_!:rolleyes:😃 This is a great thread! Thanks Q ---
**Author:** ![Rachellelogram](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rachellelogram/32/8689_2.png) [@Rachellelogram](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rachellelogram)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/74 "2010-11-06T03:09:50Z")
I used to think there were small red, yellow, and green men inside every stoplight, and that the lights changed colors based on whether or not they had their tv turned on or off. --One of the most bizarre things I can imagine a kid thinking. I have no idea where it came from. For several years, until I was about 15, I used to think that “galvanized” meant a bucket that was wider on the bottom than on the top. Because I read an Agatha Christie novel where someone was drowned in a galvanized bucket and had tried to tip it over before death, but couldn’t because the bottom of the bucket was wider than the top. (My mom actually used this story to embarrass me in front of my beloved AP English teacher at our Senior Honors dinner… bitch). ---
**Author:** ![dhkendall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a9adbd/32.png) [@dhkendall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dhkendall)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/75 "2010-11-06T04:45:22Z")
> [@teletype](#): > > Next up: being a guy, I naturally have “man parts”. Always being the inquisitive type, one day when I was very young, I asked my grandmother what those parts were called. She was an RN, after all, and worked in the hospital (or, as I called it at the time, the “hopital”), and she would know such obscure medical terms! Now, she may have been an RN, but she was also a stereotypical “50s housewife” type, and couldn’t possibly bring herself to say “penis” to her grandson. Being an RN, though, she also couldn’t bring herself to stray TOO far from the proper terminology. It was probably almost a full year before I found out that the thing in my undies was not actually called a “peanut”. I thought it really was, because part of it was all wrinkly, with round things inside. So I thought that was how it got its name. When my daughter (now 8) was first introduced to her little brother (turning 6 on Monday), she asked what his thing was. I didn’t believe in using cutesy names for it, so I called it what it was, his “penis”. Of course, being 2, she called it his “peanut”. For the longest time; I think it may have been around her 7th birthday she started using the proper term (she probably learned the proper term from my still using it, although I do admit “peanut” is cute) > [@Dung\_Beetle](#): > > I thought Bingo was a religion because there was a church near us with a big “BINGO” sign. You obviously have never played, or never known someone who does. It _is_ a religion. ---
**Author:** ![Waffle\_Decider](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/77aa72/32.png) [@Waffle\_Decider](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waffle_Decider)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/76 "2010-11-06T05:14:50Z")
I thought sex was a chore and couples only did that when they wanted to have a baby. The mechanics of “insert tab A into slot B” just sounded so gross. Why would anyone want to do that? ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/77 "2010-11-06T06:01:38Z")
My parents are hippies and atheists, and so are their friends. I grew up in a very lefty place with a pretty low rate of religious participation, so I really didn’t know anything, or think at all, about religion. My mom was raised Catholic, and she told me about going to church as a kid. From this I extrapolated that church was something people did in Olden Times. Since the only people I knew who went to church were my grandparents, that made sense, as they were from Olden Times, too. I was very surprised to eventually learn that some of my classmates actually went to church sometimes. Kids, even! ---
**Author:** ![Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harvey_The_Heavy)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/78 "2010-11-06T13:03:03Z")
I thought that in the olden days, everything was actually in black and white, and colors were invented sometime in the fifties. I was also fascinated by “gorilla fighting”, but always pictured them fist-fighting. ---
**Author:** ![kapri](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4491bb/32.png) [@kapri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kapri)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2010, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/79 "2010-11-06T13:24:33Z")
I’m loving this thread. I woke up somewhat down but have just read this whole thing and have been laughing and laughing–thanks! I used to think that when you turned off the TV, the show stopped, and that when you turned it back on, it would start up again. I also used to believe that when you grew up, you got a house, and you could pick which house it was. It had nothing to do with how much money you had, or where you lived–you could just pick the house of your choosing and it would be yours. I knew you had to pay some money to live in it, but I grew up in the 60s and in my neighborhood all dads had jobs and went to work all day and all moms but one, who worked part-time in a store, stayed home all day and did laundry, watch soap operas, etc. My neighborhood was filled with all sorts of dad-jobs, but no one really made all that much money, and yet they still had nice houses, so I figured that’s how it was–you grew up and got a job and a house. I wanted one that was big and old with a big front porch and on a tree-lined street. Imagine my disappointment. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2010, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428/80 "2010-11-07T17:43:35Z")
> [@wellanuff](#): > > I thought that the water that came out of the faucet was free, that there was no such thing as a water bill. In rural areas, this is quite true. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-i-was-little-i-thought/559428.md?page=5)