Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

Mind if I steal that for a dumb little farce?

Not really. What have you got in mind?

When I was around 6-8 or so I read in a geography book that when Washington DC was founded, it was in the middle of the country. I thought this meant that it was originally in Oklahoma and had slowly been shifted eastward by earthquakes over hundreds of years. The same book was a few decades old and referred to Yugoslavia which it spelled as Jugoslavia. I thought it was pronounced "djug-o-slay-via". And (I can't really remember) I think I also mixed up the Iron Curtain with the Berlin Wall to think there were mile high metal walls dividing Eastern Europe from Western Europe.

One of my friends told me that The BFG stood for The Big Friendly Guy instead of The Big Friendly Giant.

As a kid I thought there was no one else in the world expect for the village I lived in.

When I was a kid I thought all people would be nice to me by default because of my personality. Oh, how wrong I was.

Thanks to my mom, I thought "doggone it" was a minced oath of "God donnit" ("donnit" meaning something like "fuck you").

I used to think that the woman who sung with Freddie Mercury for the song "Barcelona " killed him. I hated that song for years as a result

How did you come to that conclusion?

I'm not sure. I think I thought she gave him AIDS but deliberately or something. I really don't remember.

I thought the massage area in malls was to punish misbehaving people.

I used to think gay people literally could not exist.

And that Ellen De Generes wasn't gay.

.........how did you come to think that

Because there weren't many gay people on TV that I could recall when I was younger, and I was a complete idiot who thought whales were fish and my dad was an alien.

Also, I don't know why I didn't realize Ellen De Generes was gay. I had a teacher in 5th Grade who was clearly a butch lesbian (she had the short haircut and everything), and yet I didn't even realize that she was gay until nearly a year later.

I used to think I could trust my parents.

I just remembered another one. As a little kid I used to think that when fish breathed oxygen in water, that that meant they were splitting apart the H 2 O molecules to get the oxygen, and wondered why the oceans hadn't slowly turned to pure hydrogen.

I knew there were three major December holidays, and three major monotheistic religions. I got a bit confused about who celebrated Kwanzaa, not realizing it wasn't a 1:1 thing.

Kid me's reasoning was;

• If Christmas = Christianity,
• And Hanukkah = Judaism,
• Then Kwanzaa must = Islam.

I thought that too!

I also thought that anyone who didn't follow any of the above religions was a bad person (not because of anything I was explicitly told, but because of my own misinterpretations).

I used to think the Statue of Liberty was in Sydney.

...What? How? I mean, did you not know what it looked like, or just assume it was in a different part, or...?

Speaking of misplaced locations, the school I went to in Kindergarten had a map of the US painted on the blacktop, with all the states outlined but unlabeled. I lived in West Virginia, but I insisted that West Virginia was in the spot I now know as Hawaii.

...I guess I thought Hawaii was the coolest-looking state or something, all standing out on its own.

edited 19th Dec '15 2:49:35 AM by BaffleBlend

@Murutaku: This is before I knew countries were a thing that existed. I thought Sydney was the capital of the world for some reason and this idea of the "world" four year old me had conjured up didn't stretch far beyond Australia.

Do you live in Australia?

Click the link in my location. That should answer your questions.

edited 19th Dec '15 6:01:32 AM by trashconverters

I'm on mobile, so I can't see locations. I'm assuming you're Australian, though.

edited 19th Dec '15 6:03:27 AM by Spinosegnosaurus77