Funny childhood misconceptions

[quote]- I thought that all music was performed live on the radio, that every time a song was on the radio, the band was actually at the station playing the song.

I used to think this, too. Similarly, at one time I thought TV shows aired live and in real time and commercial interruptions, made me miss important segments.

I once thought that the world used to be in black and white because that's how it was depicted in old movies and TV shows.

Whenever mother would say, "That's not how we behave in polite society," I would think, "Gee, Polite Society sounds like a really boring place."

[quote]Similarly, at one time I thought TV shows aired live and in real time and commercial interruptions, made me miss important segments.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in the early days of TV, all programs were aired live, and that I LOVE LUCY was the first show to videotape the shows, thereby inventing reruns in the process.

THIS is why I hate children.

[quote] Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in the early days of TV, all programs were aired live, and that I LOVE LUCY was the first show to videotape the shows, thereby inventing reruns in the process.

There was no videotape then, only audio tape. "I Love Lucy" FILMED the show because neither Desi nor Lucy wanted to move to NY to perform live telecasts and kinescopes (filming a show off of a TV screen) was rotten quality.

Growing up I never saw an intact penis. All the males in my family and the boys at school were circumcised. I was probably 12 or 13 when I saw a guy in the locker room whose penis was "different". I was shocked that the poor guy had no head on his cock thinking he'd lost it in some terrible accident. I didn't know his head was just covered. Such was growing up in middle America during the 1970s.

I thought that the sound of jet planes flying overhead was made by clouds moving across the sky, and that the smell of gasoline was the smell of sunshine.

When I first came to New York. I wanted to live in Radio City. I thought it was a little town near New York. I'm very dumb.

R5 I was foreign-born and adopted as a young boy by American parents in the 1980s., Naturally, my adoptive father was circumcised, and I wasn't, so that's why I assumed that my foreskin would eventually fall off, like a tadpole's, when I grew up -- just as his had (or so I assumed).

I assumed all married couples have sex every night.

I thought when a character dies on screen, it meant the actor died in real life as well. I always wondered why would actors want to act if it cost them their lives 😂

My God you were a stupid little fuck, OP

I thought Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx were just some of the neighborhoods that made up NYC, like Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea. I didn't know they were boroughs or WTF boroughs were.

I grew up on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, on the prairies. When I heard the term 'elevator music' I wondered why they would play music in a grain elevator. I had never been in, as the English call it, a 'lift' or seen one in my life.

I also thought that every time a song came on the radio, the band came into the station to play it. Guess that was common.

I thought the name Penelope was pronounced Pen-Lope. Likewise, I thought the word facade was pronounced Fuck-Ade.

I thought that a sweet tooth was an actual though that some people had that was sweet. I was envious of them.

I have brown eyes, I thought that blue eyed people saw everything blue, and green eyed people saw everything green. Brown never came into my mind, I guess because to me it was the default color.

*tooth

I grew up in lily white New England in the 1970s and was never around any minorities. When I was very young (3-4 years old), all the Hispanic people on TV seemed to live in this place called The Barrio. I assumed it was an actual city where all Hispanic lived.

I thought running for president was literal and that whoever won the race became president. Led to much bewildered confusion when I told Mommy that Reagan may be too old to perform.

San Diego - Sandy Eggo

I didn't know that the people on TV shows were actors reading lines. I thought they were real people who had cameras around them all the time.

I thought bands sang live in their music videos, I didn't know about play backs.

I thought women got pregnant from getting married; you got married and after the priest said you may now kiss your bride, the woman became pregnant.

[quote]I told Mommy that Reagan may be too old to perform

He was. Thank God for Frank.

Bet you still don't know how women masturbate, do you OP?

R22 actually, I don't. Haha

I know it involves their pussy.

Um, not quite. It's about the clitoris, which is the female version of the penis. So, you see, women wack off very similarly to how men do it.

I guess you don't know how men masturbate.

R5: I grew up in a very Italian neighbourhood and had the opposite experience. I was about ten when I saw my first circumcised penis - in a porno magazine. I had no idea why his penis looked different from mine until several years later when circumcision was explained to me. But there's more: considering that I went to a predominantly Italian Catholic high school, for years, I assumed circumcision was strictly a Jewish thing.

Where was your Italian neighborhood R26? In Italy?

As a child, I was fascinated by the pre-VCR era porn stores that are now practically extinct. They always had painted windows so you couldn't see what was inside, and there was rarely any imagery, but I knew the contents were 'dirty'. The only advertisement was the descriptions: Adult Books, Magazines, Costumes and "Marital Aids". I misread "Marital Aids" as "[italic]Martial [/italic] Aids", so for years I assumed porn stores also sold ninja stars and nunchaku.

R27: Toronto

as a child, I thought everyone had a car, a home and food. I also thought seeing a doctor was free as was medication. I figured this was all free since it was important to living. I was really stunned when I learned people would suffer just because they didn't have enough money.

I thought Washington, D.C. was in the state of Washington. I guess it's not funny just stupid on my part.

I thought that you could do any job that you wanted to when you grew up and wondered why people would choose to do shitty jobs.

R29 I grew up in Kitchener in a catholic school surrounded by other Portuguese boys and in four years of HS I only saw one cut dick and it belonged to an American kid whose family moved to our area because of his fathers work.

When I heard news of Vietcong guerilla fighters in the Sixties, I imagined that the North Vietnamese were using gorillas instead. Johnson and the Pentagon did not how to fight the large primate armies in Southeast Asia.

Similarly, I thought the New York Stock Exchange was a large auditorium on Wall Street. When the market had a good day, there were more chairs brought in the auditorium. A bad day meant that those who worked in the market broke the chairs. When Huntley/Brinkley talked of "shares", I heard chairs.

My father had a sign stating "No Minors" on the door leading to his workshop in the basement. I thought it was talking about coalminers or some other miners and not me. So I kept going into his workshop to explore!

Guerrilla is actually the Spanish diminutive word for "little war." Guerra meaning "war" and the suffix -illa meaning "little."

R33: And it was very strange finding out my foreskin was either a fetish or a deal-breaker to circumcised men. I was nearly 25 when I figured out it guys were talking about it behind my back.

You're a moron OP

The first uncircumcised penis I saw was Tom Cruise's in All The Right Moves, and I thought he had pulled the skin back but didn't know why.

R39 Tom Cruise is circumcised and he looks clearly cut in that scene.

Growing up in the early 60s, there was so much talk about the space age and things being "in the future" etc. I used to ask my dad "When is it going to be the future?" I wanted an exact date.

I also thought dishwashers were like they one the Jetsons had, with robot arms that came out and did the dishes over a sink.

I used to believe you could change the contents of videotapes by writing on the labels.

I thought that Spain and Mexico were the same thing because they both spoke Spanish. I couldn't understand why the early Spanish explorers came all the way to the Americas from Europe when they could have just walked over to the US from Mexico or ridden horses lots more easily than sailing thousands of miles.

Conversely, my childhood cynicism saved me from the childhood trauma of believing in Santa Claus. Even at the age of 3 or 4, I completely understood that there was no way in hell that Santa could even make it to all the houses on my street, let alone my town, let alone the whole world. It just wasn't possible. So I humored my parents and pretended to buy into the whole Santa thing, realizing that to confront my parents with my beliefs might mean a cutoff of presents.

In preschool when we were being taught the alphabet song, I thought L-M-N-O were all one letter.

I also thought pregnancy only occurred when a couple kissed naked for a really long time.

I thought the star of a movie couldn't die in the film. Then I saw Pride and the Passion where everyone pretty much croaks. Major melt down after that. Thought it was impossible for LSU to lose a football game. The first time that happened was awful. Childhood is brutal.

I thought school teachers were celebrities

The Catholic film office used to put out a list of films with suitability for viewing based on content. The worst were "condemned" and since they were listed in alphabetical order the first was always "And God Created Woman" (the one with Brigitte Bardot not the remake!) There was a category called "adults with reservations." I thought it meant you had to have a reservation to get into the theater!

I didn't know how well we had it. It was the late 70s and I'd had the usual white teen liberal angst, but I'd been almost cloistered in private schools. Someone at one of the schools had figured out my father only made 100,000 a year and that my mother had gone back to school and later, work, as a shrink. It was an all boys school.

Then I was expelled from that school for cheating, giving answers to one of the guys, an athlete, who was putting me down for being lower class. Such a doormat and more class conscious than I ever would have admitted. All these years later I get friend requests on Facebook from people I knew at that school, many of whom were caught cheating but never expelled.

The tipping point that led to my expulsion was my eldest sister's marriage to a black man. It was all very "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" adapted to real life, about ten years later. Late 20s black male intern doctor knocks up 22 year old M Ed student.

My first day at a public high school was sensory overload. Then I ran into kid I'd known from the private school but he'd disappeared years ago. His parents had divorced. He lived in an apartment with his mother and two sisters.

I have to see these movies:

[quote]The tipping point that led to my expulsion was my eldest sister's marriage to a black man. It was all very "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" adapted to real life, about ten years later. Late 20s black male intern doctor knocks up 22 year old M Ed student.

Are they still married to this day?

I thought sheep were killed to produce wool, lol. Seriously, I just figured it was like using a cow's hide for leather - couldn't be done until it was dead (I know, hair grows back, but I was a young kid). I thought that's why they have so many sheep because if you can only get one use out of each sheep, you're gonna need a lot of sheep to make all the wool needed.

[quote]Similarly, I thought the New York Stock Exchange was a large auditorium on Wall Street. When the market had a good day, there were more chairs brought in the auditorium. A bad day meant that those who worked in the market broke the chairs. When Huntley/Brinkley talked of "shares", I heard chairs.

Gives a whole new meaning to "buying a seat on the Exchange."

[quote]In preschool when we were being taught the alphabet song, I thought L-M-N-O were all one letter.

The old Mervyn's department store had a store brand for women's clothing called ELLEMENNO.

I thought Arsenio Hall's name was City Hall.

Like OP, I thought only guys masturbate. Similarly, I though oral sex can only be performed on men.

R12, there are literally billions of adults who think that.

I thought the President and God were basically the same concept. We weren't religious, but I knew that God was supposed to be all powerful, and so was the President, so I must have conflated them. To this day, even though I am an atheist, if I try to picture "God" in my mind, He looks exactly like Jimmy Carter.

When I was somewhere in my elementary school years, I learned about "reproduction" from some PBS documentary about sperm and ova, all internal stuff, before I learned anything about how sex actually worked. So while I knew that penis had to go in vagina for pregnancy to happen, I knew little to nothing about the mechanics of this, and being oblivious and sheltered and basically friendless, I did not know about the erection and ejaculation part. So I thought that sex involved somehow threading a floppy penis into a woman's vagina, then I guessed the unlucky couple had to lie that way all night or some other unknown length of time, and at some point sperm might come out and reach an egg to achieve pregnancy. What fun!

I'm a Boomer; thus, old. I loved "Lassie". I thought the dog playing Lassie did all the running in real time. My mother had to pleasantly point out it was editing. (boy, was my face red!)

I was told Chinese girls had their slits horizontally. Down there.

It makes it easier for them to pee in your Coke, R59.

[quote]To this day, even though I am an atheist, if I try to picture "God" in my mind, He looks exactly like Jimmy Carter.

That's one of the best cases for atheism there is.

Once during my childhood we lived somewhat close to a Coast Guard station/base.

For several years, I believed there were huge, bank-like vaults on base, filled with the nation's reserve supply of Coast brand bar soap, and guarded by soldiers with guns.

I was the first-born child, and prone to bizarre flights of fancy.

When i was young there were only 3 boys in my neighborhood so we would hang out. There were a lot of hidden places to play so we did some of the things boys that age do like watch each other pee, and show each other our "dinks" as we called them while looking at stolen Playboys. One day the oldest told us that his dink would be longer except they cut some off when he was a baby. I thought that was strange, but that was about it at the time. Years later I remembered that encounter and it occurred to me that he had heard something about circumcision but didn't get it quite right.

I though it was possible for a girl to get pregnant if a boy ejaculated near her in a swimming pool.

No r50, They divorced when their three kids were in their teens. It wasn't acrimonious in the long run. Both remarried, several times.

I thought everything was in black and white up until my parents were teenagers.

Union and onion were the same work in my mind.

I used to think TV stars had to sing their own theme songs.

Still, none of this is as bad as my brother. He thought weathercasters controlled the weather. He also used to tape The Weather Channel and watch it weeks later. Yes, now he's a meteorologist, not on TV though.

R56 why Jimmy Carter?

At 11, I found my dad's stash of Playboys and Penthouse and, being the horny babygay I was, I read some of the Penthouse Forums and read a number of tales about someone "shooting their load" into some gal's twat. I took this to mean piss, because, well, what else came out of a guy's penis? So for quite some time I thought a woman got pregnant by having a guy piss in her vagina.

[quote]I used to think TV stars had to sing their own theme songs.

Damn straight!

I actually believed all of the Catholic doctrine we learned in Catechism class.

To me it felt like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for adults, r70. At least the Jesuits were well educated and intellectual, unlike the American based Christian sects.

I thought 1980s Michael Jackson was actually Asian. And I thought in the 'old days' that life was actually in 'black and white'.

[quote]I thought 1980s Michael Jackson was actually Asian.

Well, now that you mention it, he did kind of look like a geisha by the time he died.

True. It looked lie a Kabuki character.

Re: all the albums of black and white photos, I just assumed my folks grew up where the sun rarely shone - like it was ALWAYS overcast.

[quote] [R12], there are literally billions of adults who think that.

And several million of them are Americans living outside of New York State.

[quote] I thought the President and God were basically the same concept.

So did I. I went to catholic school and JFK was president. The nuns who taught us were all from Boston, with those Bah-stin accents.

In our classroom, the crucifix was in the middle of the wall, the highest thing in the room. To the left and down about 6 inches was a photo of the bishop, to the right a photo of Kennedy. There was a papal flag next to the American flag. It all got jumbled up in my head.

When I came home from school on Nov 23 and heard JFK had been assassinated, I asked why superman didn't fly to Dallas and stop the bullet. I knew there were time zones, and I thought superman could fly from a time zone where the assassination hadn't taken place yet, and flown back to Dallas from there. Like the president/God thing, I was obviously mixed up about the whole time zone thing.

There was a years-long debate between my siblings. Did our parents have to have sex just once, or four times to create us four children? We were divided into two camps over this hot topic. It never occurred to us that they did it many, many more times than that, and gasp, probably enjoyed it!

I thought everyone moved really fast and jerkily during the early part of the 20th century, due to film technogy back then. I thought the soldiers in WWI had to be retarded the way they ran around in historical footage. They moved like flappers of the 1920s

I was given detention for telling two other kids that the faces on Mount Rushmore were not a natural phenomenon.

Talk of the Kennedy assassination reminded me of something -- The First Famy comedy album. It made Vaughn Meader an overnight star. I remember listening to the album at my aunt's house with everyone laughing (except my parents, who were stupid).

After the assassination, Vaughn Meader's career was a thing if the past, never to be revisited. That Was The Week That Was, which had been really popular, seemed to suffer as well and was soon cancelkrd, as it was unseemly to make political jokes once the president was killed. It almost seemed as if everything really funny got cancelled or silenced and everything on TV turned into retarded crap like I a dream of Jeannie, F Troop and Gilligan's Island.

Nothing was funny for years and years.

I thought it was impossible for more than one person to speak at a time. I thought there 100 mins in an hour.

[quote]Nothing was funny for years and years.

That explains the obsession with sci-fi and fantasy the year after his assassination.

I thought when a person broke their leg it came off totally. When a neighborhood girl came back from the hospital and we were taken to visit I broke away and ran like a thief before seeing her.

I thought teachers lived at the school.

You start making breast milk, once your breasts hurt and grow.

Santa Claus really exists, as long as Mom'n'Dad say so.

When I was quite small, I believed my parents when they told me they could tell when I was lying, becuse it was written all over my face. When I was a bit older, I learned that was not at all true.

I didn't understand the word Newcomers" and thought they were from a country called Newcome. I searched for over a week trying to find that country.

R37 I found big city queens tended to have an issue with my being uncut while smaller city guys didn't care, even if they were cut themselves.

Was a child in the 80s, around the AIDS crisis. I remember watching a report on tv and being very concerned that AIDS was something that spontaneously happened when people slept together.

R90 I was confused when we had sex ed, and they told us that one way to get HIV/AIDS was by having sex. I thought that meant if you had sex, even in a monogamous relationship, that you were at risk of contracting the virus. It didn't occur to me that one of the people had to be infected.

We had the Vaughn Meader album, R81. Also, Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman.

I thought having a "sweet tooth" meant you actually had a special tooth in your head that made you crave sweets. My great-aunt told me she had one, and I asked her to open her mouth so I could see it.

I was a precocious reader. I didn't know where babies came from when I found my parents' (hidden) copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover and read it. I didn't connect what Connie and Mellors did together with her eventually getting pregnant. I just assumed that a woman could somehow decide to have a baby.

"Nothing was funny for years and years"

That is so sad.

R95 which post was that?

I thought the audience laughter/laugh tracks on TV shows were other people in their homes reacting to the program I was watching. I tried to laugh extra loud so those people could hear me.

[quote]I thought having a "sweet tooth" meant you actually had a special tooth in your head that made you crave sweets.

Me too R93.

I used to think that when a girl's breasts started to grow her nipples fell off and that's why they had to always wear a shirt. I thought women's breasts looked like Barbie's. The first time I saw a fully developed female breast was in Playboy and I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. Kind of still am.

Not quite R81. Cary Grant as president, 1968

R96: About the Kennedy assassination at R81

R99 I thought that a woman's nipples got hard when she was horny, just like men get erections on their penii.

R97 Adorable

I nearly cried when informed that supermarket "baby carrots" were broken regular carrots ground down into a more pleasant shape.

R102 - you know that's true, right?

R104 I didn't know that!

R104 - There are 'baby carrots', which as the name implies, not fully grown carrots. And then there are, 'baby-cut carrots', which are also known as 'cocktail carrots', the familiar 2 inch peeled carrots made from carrots that are not acceptable as long carrots.

R105 a girl friend of mine told me that that only happens when it's cold, not when she's horny.

I thought Alzheimer's disease was called "old-timers' disease."

I was 5 or 6 and we'd just watched It's a Wonderful Life on TV. Afterward, my uncle told me that just like when an angel gets its wings every time a bell is rung, every time someone farts a devil gets its horns. I believed him and went mad with power. I farted all over the place, loudly and often. When I told my mom the reason I was doing it, she wasn't as upset about the farting as the fact that I was taking such delight in believing I was "helping the devil." Of course, this just strengthened my belief that what my uncle had told me was true. I shared this knowledge with my friends, and every time one of us farted from that time on, we'd say something like, "yay, another devil just got his horns!" Now that I'm an atheist and know that there is no devil to blame things on, every time I fart I'll write it off as "another electoral vote for trump."

I thought soap operas were "soap boppers".

I thought girls didn't fart. Boy was I wrong.

R112 I thought that celebrities and historical people didn't fart or poop. I thought they were a more advanced species who didn't do anything as base as that.

That Obama was black or that he was an African American. Or that his father actually had any part of raising him, yet he constantly plays up the black part of his life which was non-existent in making him who he is.

R114 because that's how the world sees him. As a black man. It's like what Halle Berry's mother told her as young girl -- to identify as a black woman, not biracial or mixed, because the world will see her as such. I wouldn't be surprised if Obama's mother or grandparents didn't tell him the same thing. Obama and Berry may be light-skinned but they still look black, not like Rashida Jones who could pass or Mariah Carey, who can 'pass.'

Add me to the list of people who thought bands or singers were performing live at radio stations. I also thought we were fighting gorillas in Vietnam.

I thought "gazebo" was pronounced gaze-bo.

R116 I worked with a woman who pronounced it ga-zay-bo. Then again, she also said Home Deh-po.

When I was little, I used to think someone or something was listening to my prayers.

R118 God.

[quote]I thought "gazebo" was pronounced gaze-bo.

Have you seen the movie "The Gazebo," with Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds? One of the characters (a very drunk John McGiver) pronounces it that way.

I thought my parents grew up together and were a couple from the time they were toddlers.

I asked my mother once, "When you and daddy were growing up together, did you two do the same things you do now, like go to church together? Did you go to the movies together back then? (My parents never went to the movies. My father was cheap)

When my mother told me they didn't grow up together or live in the same house as children, I was dumbfounded

R121 you must have been a beautiful baby.

R79. I used to think people in those films were Russians because they were always rushin' around.

I adore OP.

I was maybe 25 before I learned how to pronounce "Yosemite".

I was probably 40 before I learned what "booty" was.

Another sweet tooth comment...I thought if you had a sweet tooth (I don't) that it was a particular tooth in your mouth that you could lick whenever you wanted candy.

Absolutely thought that two men having sex = AIDS. Thought I had AIDS for a while because I used to fool around with some neighborhood boys. This was around 6 - 7 yrs old.

I also used to think that everyone was born with penises and that girls' fell off after they were toddlers.

I thought it was "strange dog" instead of stray dog. Thank God the next generation took care of business and it became a rare sight. The greatest generation, Brokaw? TV addicted lamest generation, try.

As a kid I thought that marriage ceremonies were God's signal to make women have children, then I heard my mother talking about someone who was not married but pregnant. I was like how could that be, I asked my mother, but she just changed the subject.

A friend of mine thought that babies came out of woman's asses, because he had always heard that having a baby was like trying to shit a watermelon.

I thought deaf mute was deaf "mutt" and proclaimed loudly about how awful that was to call someone that who was deaf.

The other kind who enjoy proselytizing.

R110 wins!

What r5 said. I had never seen an uncut cock until one day when I went swimming at a friend’s house, and three of us changed into our swimsuits in the same room. One of the kids had a dick that looked like a broken cigar, which I took to be defective. As a result, I was nicer to him over the years than I might otherwise have been, because of what I took to be his deformity. Many years later, I realized he was uncircumcised.

I initially thought cum would come out through the roots of my pubic hair, since puberty signaled the ability to have an orgasm.

I thought cum came out like a soapy froth from under your foreskin after you vigorously worked your cock. Yeah I started wanking before I could ejaculate.

I also thought it was light green in color.

[quote]- I thought that the theater district in NYC was like the Vegas Strip, with billboards, lights, and playhouses lining up either side of Broadway, and that off-Broadway was a street over with much lesser fanfare. Turns out not all Broadway houses are on Broadway, and the difference between Broadway and off-Broadway is seat capacity, not location..

I believed that the Broadway stage was the size of a football field. I figured it must be bigger than your average high school auditorium or community theater. I was so disappointed when I saw my first Broadway show (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST) as a teen in the late '90s. The stage was much smaller than I had imagined.

I found my father's condoms rummaging through his office drawers when I was 7. I was certain they were balloons for my upcoming birthday. I will never forget the sheepish look on his face when I questioned him some weeks later on a drive home from school about the mysterious plastic balloons. Perhaps they were for a surprise party for Mother I wondered out loud

I also thought store clerks were always happy because they were rich from getting to keep the money they get in the cash register

Fifty years ago, as a six year-old growing up in the Bronx, I used to wonder why anybody would name a bridge after a frog's neck.

Whenever someone mentioned the Throgs Neck Bridge, for some reason I heard it as 'Frog's Neck Bridge'.

No, that was smegma, fromagier R134.

I thought people in the old days (up to the 1960's) never used profanity.

I am a gay man, when I first realized that I was attracted to guys I thought that I was the only person in the world like this. I thought God had truly blessed me with the ability to love everyone, because I was still expecting that attraction to females would still happen since I had always been told I would fall in love with a girl, get married and have children. I had never even heard about homosexuals, I had heard my mother talk about queers, but I just though she was talking about people who were unusual, nothing sexual.

Not really a misconception, just me being naive. As a young kid I was standing at a urinal taking a piss with my father pissing next to me. I remember saying "taking a piss when you really have to go is the best feeling in the world, I can't imagine anything feeling better" I wonder what he was thinking when I said that.

R162 he didn't respond?

R162 why don't you ask him?

My dad used to tease me when we would eat watermelon and say "don't eat the seeds or a watermelon will grow in your belly". For years, I would pick out every seed and panic if I accidentally swallowed one.

I thought my mom only had sex one time in her life before ahe had me and then stopped altogther.

When we took the big Station Wagon Vacation to the West Coast, when we hit Nevada I started seeing all these fancy restaurants with signs that said "No Minors." I worked it out in my head, and it made perfect sense that nice places like that wouldn't want a bunch of nasty old miners coming in and getting everything filthy.

Imagine my horror when my Mother explained that they were talking about ME!

[quote]the difference between Broadway and off-Broadway is seat capacity, not location.

Whaaaaaaa? I never knew that, holy shit!

I'm from Brazil. When I was four, I thought our capital, Brasília, was Brazil's girlfriend. I even told that to a classmate very authoritatively, sending the teacher giggling.

Most of these are even funnier if you imagine them being read by Betty White. With Bea standing by, rolling her eyes.

When I was very very little I thought both men and women had babies. I believed men had boys and women had girls . Anytime I saw a fat man or woman I assumed they were pregnant .

I thought people on TV were fake.

I thought the Hamburger Helper hand from the commercial actually came in the box and helped you cook dinner. I was forever trying to get my mom to buy the stuf.

I saw my moms maxi pads in the bathroom and assumed she was wetting the bed.

Ugh I meant "stuff" obviously

[quote]I thought the Hamburger Helper hand from the commercial actually came in the box and helped you cook dinner. I was forever trying to get my mom to buy the stuf.

LOL! I thought labels like this meant that there was actual ready-to-serve chicken (or whatever) inside the box.

There was a movie about pregnant men with Charlie David in it.

As a 6 yo in the early 70s, I thought all Americans were black, had afros, and were trying to make their own language.

I think I must have seen something on TV about separatist black groups in the US.

And my brother, mishearing the lyrics of the Daniel Boone song, believed that Boone "phoned" to America, rather than fought, to make all Americans free.

We had a school wide assembly when I was in first grade, where they told us the US was a "melting pot" which was good, but there was an "Iron Curtain" behind which bad countries existed, and we would not need to know anything about them on the test.

R12, Recall the 1st time I heard the word "boroughs" and couldn't understand why NY areas were called by the name of an animal.

r154 Chris Salvatore is the other guy.

[quote]every time I fart I'll write it off as "another electoral vote for trump."

So who was the moron who kept feeding this guy bean burritos before the election?

[quote]When I came home from school on Nov 23 and heard JFK had been assassinated, I asked why superman didn't fly to Dallas and stop the bullet. I knew there were time zones, and I thought superman could fly from a time zone where the assassination hadn't taken place yet, and flown back to Dallas from there. Like the president/God thing, I was obviously mixed up about the whole time zone thing.

He was assassinated on the 22nd. It took you a whole day to learn about it? Did they communicate by smoke signals where you lived?

Can't we get Chris S. a husbear? He needs a man to be the wind beneath his wings.

Rodiney is available I hear.

Even though everybody around me went to school every day, I somehow thought I was done after my first day and told my parents that I had now “finished school”. Imagine my surprise when they both laughed and told me that I had a few more years and schools ahead of me.

I thought men with mustaches were good and men without mustaches were evil. I think it's because my father and the few other men 4 year old me saw had mustaches, and I perceived them as being "good", so a man without a mustache deviated from that and so that meant he had something wrong with him haha!

I also thought all men spoke Arabic and all women spoke English, because those were the languages my father and mother spoke to me in, as they wanted me to learn both.

I thought there was a state called Lowa because on a map I had I thought the I in IOWA was a lower case L.

I thought Penelope was pronounced Pen-lope. I thought facade was pronounced Fuck-ade. I thought cupola was pronounced Cup-OLA. That was as a child. But when I went to college on the west coast, I still mispronounced because of my NY accent, driving my Portland roommate crazy by calling his state AR-a-gone.

I also though that when a new song came on the radio, the entire band came into the station to perform it. I envisioned all these people coming in and out of the place, all the time.

The first time I went to get drunk, I ordered "bergin and water." All my classmates laughed about it all night. My wife teased me about it for years.

[quote]The first time I went to get drunk, I ordered "bergin and water."

What did they bring you?

I thought my grandmother's hand knitted afghan was an "African". "Cover me with the African".

I thought Carly's boyfriend's scarf, "Apricot," was "Africa."

[quote]I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee [quote]Clouds in my coffee, and...

In the early 1970s when my siblings and I listened to the local radio station and Carly Simon's song "You're So Vain" was played regularly, my two older brother used to fight (sometimes physically) over whether Carly was singing "Clouds in my coffee" or "Grounds in my coffee".

I was actually on the side of "Grounds in my coffee".

We used to fight a lot when my parents weren't around, come to think of it.

I thought the National Monument was a natural formation.

I used to think “Orph” and “Annie” were two separate characters. I also thought Liberace, in print, was pronounced with an “S”.

My parents never talked to me about sex. When I started puberty, I thought I was dying. I believed I had syphillis because I looked it up in a medical book and it said one of the symptoms was discharge from the penis. I had no idea what ejaculation was, or that it was normal. When I was 12, I finally got a sex ed lesson in PE class and I finally understood.

[quote]I also thought Liberace, in print, was pronounced with an “S”.

R175 you mean it's not?!

A neighbor had a new Pontiac Grand Prix. I thought he had won it as a grand prize. I thought Manila folders were vanilla folders.

When I was probably about 8, a couple of friends and I would piss outside and show each other our "dinks" . One time one of them told us that his dink would be much longer except they cut it off when he was a baby. Looking back, he probably heard something about circumcision, which we all were, and didn't get it quite correct.

I believed that the USA was the only "free" country in the world. England was ruled by the Queen, and they worshiped her instead of Jesus.

I was confused by people who spoke other languages. I couldn't figure out how they understood each other since everything sounded like gibberish.

Until I was about 20, I believed that all men were attracted to other men. I believed they all thought, as I did, that sex with women was pretty gross, but it was just something you had to do.

I used to think all English people were royals.

[quote]Until I was about 20, I believed that all men were attracted to other men. I believed they all thought, as I did, that sex with women was pretty gross, but it was just something you had to do.

How did you maintain that until 20? Were you extraordinarily sheltered? No movies or TV? I couldn't get away from the unbearable mewlings of teenage boys about pussy.

I read the OP and I think "My god, I was NEVER that stupid"... and then my dad tells the story of when I was four and we went to the State Fair, and I saw the cows, and pointed at the cow's udder, and I said in a loud clear voice to my mom, "LOOK MOM! FOUR PENISES!!!"

My dad loves telling everyone that story. God I hate it.

(even at 4 I was obsessed with dick!)

I thought Raymond Burr was really confined to a wheelchair. When I saw him walking on the Sonny and Cher Show, I was stunned.

[quote]How did you maintain that until 20? Were you extraordinarily sheltered? No movies or TV? I couldn't get away from the unbearable mewlings of teenage boys about pussy.

Yes, very sheltered. No one ever talked about sex. Like another poster, my parents never discussed it with me and I learned about sex from school when I was 12 or 13.

I had a LOT of misconceptions. About many things. I was very sheltered and grew up in an extremely homogeneous community. We did not see many black or brown people, nor did we really talk about them. I think I had a vague idea, as a very young child, that they just didn't bathe so they were dirty. Black people were obviously dirtier than brown people. I think I had some idea that people were prejudiced against them because they didn't bathe or take showers. By a certain age, I came to understand, but I don't know how.

I assumed girls had penises until I accidentally glimpsed my female cousin naked in the bathroom. I thought she was deformed. I'm not sure when or how I realized that all girls were that way and that it was normal.

The thought of getting married and having to have sex with my future wife filled me with dread. It kept me up at night. This was when I was a teenager. It seemed inevitable and it made me anxious and depressed. I eventually decided that it would be okay to kill myself before the wedding night so I wouldn't have to go through with it.

My baby brother thought that black women produced chocolate milk and wished that our mom was black. He was breastfed until age 3 or so.

I thought Catholics couldn't lie.

After my grandmother pointed at a neighborhood house and said “colored people live there” I thought “colored people” came in a rainbow array of colors like blue, green and red and I really wanted to see this family. I later found out colored just meant black people, and was disappointed.

I really thought i could dig a hole to China. Just a few feet of digging and then I'd life up a manhole cover and I'd be in China.

[quote]I thought the National Monument was a natural formation.

What the hell is "the National Monument?"

My biggest one was the common one... I thought when you put money in the bank, was your money, and you'd get it back when you made a withdrawal. I got a silver dollar, and I wanted to put it in the bank to keep it safe. It really took a lot of effort for my parents to get me to understand that's not how it worked.

I thought vegetables were only from a can or frozen things to eat. I had no idea that they were food that had be grown in the ground.

I thought cats really had 9 lives and they would bounce back to life like in cartoons. I found out that wasn't true.

I thought lighter fluid was a diet drink. My fat baby sister didn't like it.

I thought that TV newscasters must have needed to do some other jobs in the mornings, because how could you make a living by working for only 30 minutes at night?

I thought wall to wall carpeting was on the walls.

In 1960s Catholic grade school the Nun would ask the class "Who is God?" and entire class would respond in unison "God is the Supreme Being." But what I hearing was "God is a string bean." One day Parish Priest came into class and started randomly asking individual kids questions and he asked me "Who is God?" to which 6 yr old me stood up and answered "God is a string bean". Needless to say the Nun came over and slapped me so hard I fell back into my seat.

[quote]Needless to say the Nun came over and slapped me so hard I fell back into my seat.

You gotta love them wacky nuns!

I used to believe that puppies were male and kitties were female and came in the same litter. Like the radio people, I thought the whole band was miniaturized and compressed in the record and played just for you. I distinctly remember when I found out what the difference was between states and countries and felt so special that I could now tell which was which, Iowa is a state! Canada is a country!

I believed that puppies were male and kitties were female and came in the same litter. Like the radio people, I thought the band was miniaturized and compressed down into the record and played just for me. I distinctly remember at a late elementary age finding out that there was a difference between states and countries and would proudly proclaim things like Iowa is a state! France is a country! - like I was in the know about something special not everyone else knew.

My 2nd grade teacher told me that you can always find water, especially if you did deep enough. She also said that if you lose a legal case you can always take it to the Supreme Court.

I went home and told my intellectually brilliant (her hobby was reading encyclopedias cover-to-cover) much older sister what I had learned in grade school. She explained the financial realities of my teacher's statements. Sis also told me that she was usually more knowledgeable than all of her teachers. She was usually correct.

Mexico City was frequently on the local news, growing up in San Diego. I wanted to visit, and initially couldn't understand why we couldn't drive to it. After all we had frequently crossed the border to Tijuana and Tecati, Mexico.

I had only seen snow on TV. I really, really wanted to live in a place where it snowed so that I could build snowmen and go sledding. I had graduated from UCLA before I went on a weekend camping trip to the mountains and really got to see it come down. I also then learned what it meant when so many said snow was very cold and wet, and that it got really dirty fast once it hit the ground.

[quote](her hobby was reading encyclopedias cover-to-cover)

Your sister was the best friend I never had! I too read encyclopedias and perused dictionaries to learn new words.

R201, I used to call my stuffed animal, "Panda Bear" as I thought she needed a last name. Every single time I did so my pre-teen older sister used to badger my mother, "Make her stop calling her stuffed toy by that name. A panda is a marsupial and not a bear."

Of course I'd already been told and therefore knew that pandas live in Eucalyptus trees, eating the leaves, unlike bears who walked on all fours on the ground. Still I was stubborn and wanted to make an exception for my stuffed panda.

I thought brown eggs would hatch to become roosters and white ones were going to be hens. My mom corrected me. Then she went on to explain about how the hens would be fertilized by the rooster. (I was about age 7 or 8 at the time.) I got confused because I knew that fertilizer was used to make plants grow faster. As a result, my mom gave up explaining and my first lesson in sex education ended there.

R202 pandas=/=koalas

R204, My stuffed animal was definitely a black and white panda. Didn't look like the koalas I saw at the San Diego Zoo.

The closest big cities to us were Los Angeles and some place called Ellay, which we drove through to see my grandmother.

When I was about six I asked if we ever would drive to Los Angeles, and my mother was puzzled -- "you've been there plenty of times to see Grandma."

"But Grandma lives outside Ellay, not Los Angeles!"

When I was old enough to read, I also thought the Crocker Bank was owned by Betty Crocker.

R205 I think R204's point is that it's koalas that reside in trees and eat eucalyptus leaves and are marsupials; pandas stay on the ground and eat bamboo and don't have a pouch.

Panda on left; koala on right.

I got a table tennis game for Christmas called "nuttsy tennis".

I thought it was Nazi tennis.

Even at that age I thought it was a bad marketing ploy.

Also I grew up far from any black people and I met a black man and was convinced he was Flip Wilson. I went around telling everybody I met Flip Wilson.

I thought "nostalgia" was some disease of the nose.

R207, Are pandas considered to be bears? I cannot believe that my older sister lied to me all of these years. I guess that's the problem of being the youngest child with 4 older sisters. No one ever thought that I knew anything about the world, even when I was right all along.

R210 pandas (aka giant panda) were thought for many decades to be part of the raccoon family (like red pandas) but now they're considered true bears.

R211, So I was really correct all along in calling her a bear. Thank you.

Aren't raccoons considered to be rodents?

I thought the rain in Spain fell mainly on the planes.

I lived in “My Lanta and my Uncle Jack lived in Jack’s Ami.” (Atlanta and Miami)”

As a child I always wanted to take a ride in a kangaroo's pouch. When I finally realized that I was too big to fit into a pouch, I wanted to know why I couldn't substitute my stuffed bear.

I rarely was allowed to watch cartoons as a child (too violent said my mother.) I always wanted to know why the animals were wearing clothes yet real animals didn't. Yes my older sister explained the concept of "fur" and that animals were warm enough without needing clothes. Then I wanted to know what animals did with their heavy coats of fur when it got too hot, and there wasn't a lake nearby where they could go swimming.

When I was little I asked every happily married adult how they met their spouse. I believed if I were in the exact same situation when I grew up then I'd meet my perfect mate and live happily every after. Of course if the adult was divorced, I knew to remember that situation and to avoid it as an adult.

[quote]I lived in “My Lanta and my Uncle Jack lived in Jack’s Ami.” (Atlanta and Miami)”

When my nephew was 3 or 4 he told me of a trip he and his family made to "Mysemity." (And I thought it was YOsemite.)

My friend Paula and I were convinced that babies came out of the ass.

It makes sense if you don't have any information except that "there's a baby in her belly"

I asked my 4th grade teacher, "How much do you make?" She just smiled and said, "You don't ask that of people." After that I thought it was a law; you could not legally ask someone how much they make.

I thought women's breasts were called "double pots."

I heard Linda Ronstadt singing “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me,” and asked my older brother what “pitiful” meant. “Hard to explain,” he said. So for a while, I thought the definition of “pitiful” was “hard to explain”.

R219 and nowadays, if it’s a public school, you can just look it up on the internet.

[quote] - I thought that the 'black market' was an actual, clandestine marketplace, painted black, where you could buy stolen or forbidden goods.

That would be awesome.

[quote]When I first came to New York. I wanted to live in Radio City. I thought it was a little town near New York. I'm very dumb.

When I first came to London I wanted to live on Carnaby Street.

[quote] [R56] why Jimmy Carter?

Because r56 has a particular fondness for peanuts, Rose.

I thought I lived in a city called Mini-Apple-Juice. (Minneapolis)

By coincidence, years later the city tried to brand itself as "The Mini-Apple."

I thought that when people went through a marriage ceremony in the movies, they were really married. It never occurred to me that the person marrying them was an actor.

I thought people who went to boarding school slept on boards.

For the longest time I thought pilates is pronounced pie lates.

I did not come from a religious family, we never went to church but as a kid I thought that God made women pregnant after they got married not their husbands. After all that is what God did to Mary, I guess I never really thought through the whole virgin birth thing. Soooooo you can imagine my shock one day when I over heard my mother talking about some girl who was pregnant but not married. I though OH-OH God fucked this one up.

For years I thought "miniseries" was minizeries.

One of the cars we had when I was little had the console in the middle. I think it was a 1971 Rivera. I asked my Mom who was "PRDNLL," (I pronounced at P. Rondell). She said WHAT?? I showed her what I meant. She explained the letters stood for Park, Reverse, Drive, Neutral, Low 1, and Low 2. It might have been the first time I'd ever seen someone cry from laughing so hard.

My sister thought the music on the radio was being played by actual musicians IN THE RADIO! She was confused on 2 fronts; (1) she never saw them leave the radio which meant that sucker was full and, (2) when she saw the bands on TV, she was confused as to why they were so big.

I was flabbergasted to learn you paid for electricity.