Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

Just beginning school, I expected that real soon, in gym class, we’ll be getting flying lessons.

No, not as in flying an airplane…

I used to think the phrase "a close shave" was "a close shove" because I read it wrong the first time I saw it.

Bump.

When I was a kid, I was really scared of the black screens of computers, TV's, etc. that were turned off. For some reason, I believed that if you walked past them, especially at night, they would suddenly turn on and Jump Scare you. And not an accidental jump scare, I thought they would actually flash a scary image or something.

I used to think that all penguins looked like Opus from Bloom County.

Before I started watching wrestling, I thought you'd win a match by giving the other guy a bodyslam. Speaking of wrestling, I thought Jimmy Hart was Canadian since most of the guys he managed were Canadian (The Rougeaus, Earthquake, the Hart Foundation, Dino Bravo).

2578 I still worry about that a little.

When I was little, I was scared if I stayed in the dark too long a monster would appear.

When I was a little kid, my father used to say he was short because, during his military service, he got cut in half by a machinegun, and when they sew him back together they had to throw away all the bits that were too damaged.

It took me a looooooong time to stop believeing this.

I have a dairy allergy, so as a kid I always drank soy milk. One time I asked my dad how it was made (because it sure didn't come from a cow, so where did it come from?) and he jokingly told me it was made using lasers. I believed it for years because the idea of liquefying beans with lasers just made perfect sense.

I thought pointing in general was bad because my aunts taught me that pointing at people is bad. So when I had to point at something, I had to bend my fingers so I wouldn't be really "pointing" at it.

When I was a kid, I used to think fictional characters were real.

I thought a "growler" was when someone took a shit in your laundry as a particularly mean-spirited prank, like I heard this dude broke into his ex's apartment and dropped a massive log in her fresh laundry. It was only years later that I found out it's actually a reusable 32oz glass jug for craft beers.

The first time I saw the word "muzzle" was in a Dr. Seuss book, so I thought it wasn't a real word. I assumed it was either a weird way of saying muscle or was just something completely made up.

Because I used to phrase things the same way every time as a kid, I used to think that "justify" meant to explain something with the phrase "I was just..." because my mom would say I was trying to justify bad actions that way. That could've just been her making a pun though.

Makes sense!

I thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was some kind of accident or natural disaster, probably because saying "the wall fell" makes it sound like it just happened one day.

edited 5th Jun '18 1:17:54 PM by CrownofDawn

Growing up as a New Englander, when I first heard someone talk about going to Martha's Vineyard, I thought they just knew someone named Martha and were going to visit her in her yard. Even when I found out it was an island, I kind of held onto this idea that it was owned by one woman named Martha - she was able to afford keeping up her own island because she was nice enough to let people go there on vacation. Also, I pictured everything being covered in ivy there.

edited 20th Jun '18 8:15:54 PM by MikeK

I thought that sex was something a man and woman did only to reproduce, that it was done standing up and not unlike putting gas into a car, and that it didn't feel any more special than any other bodily function.

I thought dragons and Pokemon were real, but knew cartoon characters weren't real. Specifically, I thought Dragonology was true and you never saw dragons because they were very rare and elusive, and that most Pokemon lived in remote environments. Legendary Pokemon wandered the earth or hid deep underground, and Com Mons hid from humans, except in Japan, where their existence was common knowledge.

That all animals, including humans, were capable of parthenogenesis, and that I was pregnant by that process when I just had a stomach ache.

That Egypt was still like Ancient Egypt, that the Middle East was still a land of camels, sultans, and silks, that Greece was still a land of columns, philosophers, and Olympian gods, that China was still a land of dragons, emperors, and kung fu, that the Roman civilization still existed as a small European country... you get the idea.

That people could only be straight, gay, or asexual, and that I was the latter because I had never had a crush until I was 13

When I was a preteen and new to This Very Wiki, I thought JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was a Surreal Humor Widget Series about a schoolgirl named JoJo who kept finding herself in bizarre situations while trying to live a normal life.

Edited by Katdo on Jun 27th 2018 at 6:23:12 AM

I had an irrational hatred for going to China because I thought that all the toilets there were... unsanitary. This was all because of a headline saying that they needed to be improved in time for the Beijing Olympics.

I remember being disappointed that the Well of Wishes didn't do what I thought it would.

Reading Peanuts comics and playing Snoopy vs. the Red Baron as a kid, I thought they would eventually show what the Red Baron looked like, and that he would turn out to be a cat (because, you know, Animal Jingoism.)

Oh my god lol the thing about JJBA though I also thought something like that because of people saying stuff like "Jojo's adventure just got more bizarre"

Come to think of it, does anyone know any shows that would fit that description?

In The Oregon Trail, when I would get the word of caution that "If you continue to hunt in this area, game will become scarce," I thought it meant that the game itself might not work correctly.

I thought that if someone lived in an apartment then they owned the entire building.

Both my younger brother and I believed this one. We thought the name "Hades" was used exclusively to refer the god of the underworld, rather than also being a name for the underworld itself.

New one for today: seeing the bees that Hunters can have for pets thanks to Battle for Azeroth made me remember one. In a collectable sticker book about insects and arachnids I had when I was a kid, thanks to the perspective, I thought that carpenter bees were the size of a fist.

Edited by Demetrios on Sep 29th 2018 at 11:07:08 AM

When I first saw the Chalk Outline trope, I misinterpreted it as dead bodies turning to chalk if you leave them too long. I therefore found it pretty disturbing.

• Pittsburgh was a state between Georgia and Florida.
• Sharks were not fish, but their own group of animal. I reasoned "dolphins aren't fish, and sharks are kind of similar to dolphins, so sharks must not be fish either." I didn't think sharks were mammals; they were just... their own thing.
• I took "Gotta catch 'em all" literally and proceeded to waste all my Poke Balls trying to catch every Whismur in Rusturf Tunnel.
• (I went to a Catholic elementary school when I was very young) The purpose of a crucifix is to store all the prayers said or thought where it is. At night, when nobody is around, an angel descends from heaven, empties the prayers into a mailbag, and flies them back up to heaven for the Celestial Bureaucracy to sort and deal with. I had the vague idea that "stock" prayers like Our Father and Hail Mary give the deities in question power, while personal prayers are read and may or may not be answered.
• I went to a day care that had an old Nintendo 64. Playing Super Smash Bros. 64 on it when I barely knew anything about video games gave me some very odd misconceptions.
  • The resolution somehow caused me to read "Jigglypuff" as "Jigglyfruit". I then declared "Jigglyfruit" to be my favorite Pokemon and named a small pink toy dog after "her." And tell my grandma about it.
  • I thought Ness and Ash were the same person...? I thought the Earthbound symbol was some kind of weird Poke Ball, and he was saying "Pika Fire! Pika Thunder!" Eat that, Mr. Sans is Ness.
  • Older kids convinced me that Crazy Hand was an unlockable player character.