After reading this thread, I got to wondering…what other useless stuff did your momma threaten you with?
I lost all patience with this business, and have assured my kid that his face will not stick that way, swallowed gum is digested, stepping on cracks does me no harm, etc. He is a beacon of truth in the deluded mass of fourth-graders who expect to keep swallowed gum in their guts for seven years.
I was also not permitted to open umbrellas in the house, for fear of “bad luck.” GIVE me a BREAK.
So, fess up, what stupid consequences did your parents warn you about? And which ones did you really believe for a while?
Never, ever, ever touch the thermostat, because it’ll break. Even to this day, I treat them with a hand as if they’re treasured holy objects.
Otherwise, my parents didn’t fill my skull full of mush with bullshit.
Lots of girls in heavily old-school Catholic Buffalo were told that if they whistled, lost their temper, or fell in love with a boy who wasn’t Catholic, the Virgin Mary would cry.
My mother remembered the rule about “not swimming for an hour after you’ve eaten, because you’ll get a cramp and drown.” We spent many hot summers at my grandmother’s place on a lake, and we couldn’t go in the water because we had just eaten lunch. Or breakfast. Or dinner. Or a snack. Or…well, you get the idea.
Thankfully, by the time my sister and I were in our teens, Mom gave up on this one. She must have seen all the other kids, very much alive, who ran from the table straight into the lake without suffering any consequences.
Oddly enough, with this exception, Mom was pretty down-to-earth. No worries about your face freezing that way (she could make some pretty good faces, too), swallowing gum, stepping on cracks, and so on.
More in the category of “weird things Mom said” than an actual threat…
“Don’t put your mouth on the train!”
This was shouted at me repeatedly (by Mom) while I was riding on the kiddie train at a park near my school during a kindergarden outing. She was afraid I would lick the handrests or something and pick up all kinds of germs.
My evil dad used to tell me if I didn’t stop acting crazy, he was going to take me to the “insane doctor.” :eek:
He also was fond of telling me I’d never amount to a hill of beans (now, there’s a career goal for you!) My room, he said, looked like a pigsty. What kind of tie does a pig wear?
My dad was fond of saying, “Well, how do you like THEM apples?” whenever I smarted off to him and got punished as a result. I never did figure out what apples he was referring to or what they had to do with me getting grounded.
My mom had the classic line though. She’d always say “I HOPE YOU HAVE 10 KIDS JUST LIKE YOU!!!” whenever I annoyed her enough.
But HA! The jokes on her…I didn’t have 10 kids just like me.
I only had two.
Cable television stations in the United States are filled with police camera shows from the UK. You’ve probably seen them … “'Ere we’ve got a lorry on the motorway … there it goes over the central reservation, into the opposing carriageway, onto the slip ramp, and over the verge. Fortunately, the local constabulatory were following. God Save the Queen.”
US police camera programs usually show police chases, with the occasional bad driver thrown in. The UK police camera programs – I mean programmes – show mostly bad drivers, doing idiotic things that I’ve seldom seen in my 250,000 miles of driving history. Of special note is “white van man,” or very aggressive van drivers. Van drivers don’t have a reputation as being particularly aggressive in the US, but in the UK they are known as notorious motoring maniacs.
So, UK dopers, and US dopers that have spent some time in the UK … are UK drivers really that bad? Why is the UK “white van man” so aggressive, while they’re not so bad in the US and Canada?
My mom’s most vivid threat: “I’m going to rip your arm off and beat you with the bloody stump!” She’s a great woman, but not so much with the warm and fuzzy, y’know?
