I thought that people were “assigned” churches the way we we assigned schools - by district. I figured that the reason why I didn’t see all of my school friends at church on Sundays is that the districting for churches was somewhat different than the districting for schools, but that some governmental agency was still in charge of tell you where to go to church on Sundays.
I thought that people wore hat in the winter because you lose the most heat through your head. Which makes perfect sense, because there are all those holes in your scalp where the hair comes out.
I thought euthanasia was actually “youth in Asia” and I didn’t understand why people would get so upset about kids over there.
Based on my experience, there are apparently a lot of adults driving around out there who believe this.
A sign that read “No Pedestrians” was thought to mean no trains that are pedal driven allowed.
I always wondered if those big trains were propelled by a bunch of guys pedaling their asses off.
When I was a kid there were two kinds of trains: Passenger and Afraid. I didn’t like Afraid trains. They scared me. One night we were at a train station waiting for grandma to arrive on a passenger train. When we saw another train pulling in, my parents mentioned that it was an Afraid train. I started crying. I was scared shitless!
My parents then explained the word “freight” to me.
When we were kids we always called reverse somersaults “winter peppers”. I’m still not entirely convinced that they aren’t.
She can’t picture non-Catholics in the US, or the world? If the latter, does she not have all the facts straight about September 11?
I hope that you didn’t see pictures of Lenin’s tomb …
Up until age 15, I thought that once you got a girl pregnant, you’d better keep “doing it” or she’d only deliver an arm or leg.
No shit.
Quasi
This reminds me of a time when I was little when we visited a grandmother. I went to the kitchen and brought out a table knife. When asked why, I said that I was told we were going to ‘spin the knife’ (spend the night).
I thought Bingo was a religion because there was a church near us with a big “BINGO” sign.
She knows that there are non-Catholics, but she doesn’t know very much about them. Apparently she was never really encouraged to get curious, and she travels in pretty exclusively Catholic circles. She does appear to be very open to learning, though.
Maybe you should suggest she become a Doper. Fighting ignorance, and all that.
When I was writing that post, I was thinking that Jesus’s Display Case was a lot like Lenin’s Tomb.
When I was a little girl I believed that people who fell in love immediately got married, that was the natural order of things. People who were dating liked each other (even like liked each other) but were not in love and would not get married.
I was shocked when my brother’s college girlfriend casually mentioned falling in love with him; he was only her boyfriend! :rolleyes:
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.
When I was small (1st grade, maybe younger), I thought that the black women who worked in the school kitchen were cannibals. Oddly, I never thought that about the (black) janitor.
. . .that the eyeblack that (American) football players wore under their eyes to block the sun were actual black eyes, and that part of the game involved punching each other in the face.
That “Uncle Sam” was an actual relative of ours since I heard my dad say once after doing his taxes that he “owed Uncle Sam”. I always wondered why this uncle never came by the house.
That the guerilla warfare that they talked about on the nightly news was a bunch of gorillas running around with AK47s.
That being pregnant meant you had a skin condition.
That when I first got my period, my mother told me that I couldn’t “mess around” with any boys, and I thought that if I talked to any boys I would get pregnant by osmosis! (Later learned that the right kind of talk can lead to the activity that makes you pregnant! :D)
I believed that grown-ups were robots that looked like Helper from The Venture Brothers (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.”
We would be driving on the beltway, and pass exit signs that said “Future”; of course, what that really is, is that a new exit is being built, and the sign will be properly labeled in the future. But when I was little, I honestly believed that if you took that exit, you’d travel into the future. I mean, hey, the Potee St. exit took you to Potee St., the Aberdeen exit took you to Aberdeen, so. . .
I also thought ‘ginger ale’ was all one word. We’d be at my aunt’s house and she’d offer me some “jinjerail”, and it was clearly all one word. One day, in the store, I saw a bottle of soda labeled “ginger ale”, and I promptly read the word “ginger” with the middle ‘g’ being ‘hard’, so it would rhyme with linger. I had to ask my mom what it was. :o
Let’s see, here…
When I was around six or so, a friend of my Mom’s was pregnant. She was also a serious ballbuster type. I was asking her about her baby, and she told me some day, I would grow up and have a baby, too. My eyes must have been like saucers, when I realized I would have a baby in my belly some day! I said to her something along the lines of “I’m going to get all fat like that some day and have a baby inside me too?” Being the ballbuster type, she went with it, and told me all about how yes, that would happen some day, and how much it would HURT when the baby was born. It was probably several months before I found out that wouldn’t happen. I’m a guy. It sure terrified me, though.
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.
I was a child of the 80s. The Sandinistas were in the news alot then. I grew up in New England, where we occasionally got those lovely snowstorms known as a “Noreaster”. Being from proper New England stock, though, my family of course referred to them as “Noreastas”. I thought Sandinistas were a form of sand storm.
And finally… My Grandfather, may he rest in peace, served as town council president for his small northern Rhode Island town when I was a young lad. He also, while not extremely rich, was fairly well off. Dad, on the other hand, was a single parent, who would occasionally made reference to the fact that he did not have the kind of money my grandfather did. Dad would also watch the news, and read the newspaper, and keep up on politics. He also went to work every day when I was at school, because he wanted to earn money. Obviously he had some reason he needed all this money. After much consideration, I finally figured it all out. Once you become an adult, you didn’t have time to go to school any more, so instead you read the newspaper and watched the news to keep learning. Why? Well, you needed to train for your future career. When you become an adult, you need to go to work every day so you can earn a ton of money. Then, you use this money to buy your way into politics, and become a politician, which is why you have to study politics while you’re working. All humans had the following career path: grade school, junior high, high school, college, work, then when you save up enough money, you can become a politician, and only after being a politician for a number of years, can you then retire.