Growing up in a monolingual area, in a dubbing country, and at a time when second language requirements in school didn’t appear until secondary (i.e., old age), I was the 6-or-7yo tike explaining that to her classmates, I seem to recall the trigger was that the previous weekend’s Mass readings had involved the story of the tower of Babel. They wouldn’t believe me until they went home, asked their parents whether people in Other Places spoke Catalan and English and French and their parents said yes. I happened to have bilingual relatives and friends, both with other Spanish languages and with foreign ones; this worldliness raised my status for maybe a couple of recess periods.
We used to go on a lot of road trips when I was a kid, which involved using toll roads. Only I wasn’t familiar with the word “toll,” and thought my parents were talking about the “toad roads.” I looked out the window and saw the drainage ditches on the side of the road. It looked like the kind of place a toad would live, so I concluded that there were lots of toads living in these ditches, and the roads were named for them.
Similarly, my brother misheard “brakes” as “bricks,” and thought that cars had bricks that would press against the wheels to stop them.
When I was five, two things happened simultaneously: I took an interest in the big backyard garden that my parents were planting, and we adopted two feral kittens. I remember my mom sitting down with me and asking what we should call the kittens. For reasons that have since escaped me, I chose the “names” Tomato and Zucchini. (As it turns out, I don’t even like zucchini. Way to go, 5-year-old me!)
I used to think if you were holding a flashlight for someone, you needed to shine it into their eyes, not at whatever they wanted illuminated. After all, you see with your eyes, and you need light to see by, right? So the light goes into your eyes and you can see what you are looking at. It made sense at the time.
StG
When you go to the store, you get a much better deal out of it than the store does. After all, you give them some money, and they give you a product of some sort and some money (the change).
Similarly, a bank is a money store. You go there to buy money. You give them a little money, and they give you a larger amount of money.
And this one isn’t as bad as some of the pregnancy ones, but it was a mistaken belief I held well into my teens. By way of background, my family tends towards big babies. One of my cousins was nearly twelve pounds, most were over eight, and even when my aunt had triplets, they were all over six pounds. So the first time I heard about a family friend having a baby, at six pounds even, I exclaimed “Oh, no! What’s wrong with it?”.
Restrooms.
Never heard the term as a kid; we called them washrooms. I assumed all these gas stations and restaurants that we were stopping at on the drive to Florida had lounge chairs, and beds, and the like, and that people were going in there for a nap.
It never occurred to me till much later that people actually did believe in god. I still find it hard to credit. But the thing I believed was that babies were born through the navel. I still think it would have been a better arrangement.
I thought the word “cupboard” was actually “covered”; you know, because it’s job was to keep the clean dishes ‘covered’ so the dirt didn’t get on them! 
I thought cartoon characters were real. The actors lived on other planets and the studios filmed there and sent the cartoons back. Warner Bros filmed on one planet, Hanna Barbera on another, etc. That’s why they looked different.
Most of mine have been covered, but my daughter had a good one recently.
Driving at night in storm there were transformers “popping” fairly regularly and my wife and I were pointing them out excitedly. My daughter kept asking where they were because she couldn’t see them. We assumed she was just looking the wrong direction when they flashed.
The next day I pointed out to her the transformers on the poles and explained how they flash with electricity when they are damaged. It was almost a year later that she confessed she initially thought the transformers we saw on the stormy night were like the robots from the movies. Another one of her friends thought the same thing on the same night too.
I often spent time at the house of an elderly family friend. She had a very old, large radio, and I recall being VERY disappointed that when I turned it on, it only played the same stuff on any other radio. I was certain that it played OLD radio content, and was excited to hear what radio was like way back then.
I thought “prosecute” meant the same thing as “execute”. I was aghast that I lived in a society which killed people for littering and other petty offenses! :eek:
I thought that sex was something only animals did…I grew up around lots of animals and had seen them at it and knew all about where baby animals came from. It somehow didn’t dawn on me that PEOPLE did the same thing until I was 7 or so. I guess I just assumed HUMAN babies came from somewhere else! :o
As Amy Tan put it so well, “What a strange mind I had!”
I thought we were breaking the law when one of my parents would take a sip of coke in the car because I’d always heard it’s very bad to drink and drive.
I believed that the cartoon mascots of cereals were real and that one in particular, a chimera-like monster that was the mascot of a short-lived brand called Bigg Mixx, would come to my town on the midnight train and skulk around at night stealing milk. Because if you’re a cereal monster, what else would you crave?
This reminds me of the time young me was in the car with my mum, saw an anti-drink driving billboard, and asked “mummy, why shouldn’t you drink and drive? Is it because you might spill?”
In kindergarten there was this girl named Paula. She kinda looked like a boy, kinda like a girl. Her name was kinda like a girl’s name, kinda like a boy’s name. So I reckoned that in addition to boys and girls, there were boy-girls, of which poor Paula was one.
I used to think the dashed lines marking highway lanes were miles, and that’s how mph were measured.
If I can toss an older story in here, I’d like to tell you about Andy, who lived in my freshman dorm at college. We gals were all talking about getting our periods, etc., and Andy piped up, “Don’t those pads hurt like hell when you remove them?”
He thought the sticky side went face-up. Yo!
I used to think that when people said they didn’t drink, that it meant they didn’t drink anything. Not even water.
When I was little, I used to think that “oral sex” just meant adults who gathered in big rooms and talked dirty to each other.
Also, I used to think that each individual sports team had their own personal set of referees. As a result, I could never quite figure out how the home team would sometimes get a penalty called against them (“But how could the referees do this to their own team?!”)
I used to think oral sex meant kissing.
When I was little, I thought that the speed limit sign would automatically make your car go that speed. It didn’t occur to me that you could control the speed of your car.
I also thought that “drinking and driving” meant “drinking ANYTHING [water, coffee, tea, etc.] while driving.” A cop came to our class in first or second grade and told us that drinking and driving was wrong. WHY it did not occur to them to clarify that “drinking” meant “drinking alcohol,” I have no idea. (Or maybe they did and I just don’t remember it.)
Well, drinking anything is a distraction to the driver. I remember once on a long road trip and I was driving we had snacks in the car, I had my wife feed me my snack instead of the more traditional way of eating/drinking while driving, believing it was safer (probably was).
It does, in a way …
[QUOTE]
Ok, I have avoided this for a few weeks because I am an abject coward. Curiosity has finally gotten the better of me.
Pray tell, Quasimodem, what is your native language and what does Popo mean?
I am prepared for the worst…