Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

I labored under the delusion for a longer time then I want to admit that books that got published HAD to be good because why would they publish BAD books?

edited 21st Dec '16 5:32:22 AM by fredhot16

There is the old joke about how Jesus drove a Honda, but didn't like to discuss it:

"For I did not speak of my own Accord" - John 12:49.

I don't know if I talked about how as a kid, I heard the title of Indecent Proposal and assumed it was about nudists ^note not sure if I actually knew what nudism was, but I was picturing something like it getting married: I knew "proposal" was when you asked someone to marry you, and when I was taking too long getting dressed my mom would knock on the door and ask "are you decent?", so...

edited 12th Dec '16 8:19:14 PM by MikeK

I once thought hippies and Woodstock were synonymous.

I used to think that Craig was short for "Craigory."

Duck Hunt has that mode where you're shooting clay pigeons instead of ducks. Limited 8-bit graphics (and also maybe the sound effects) and my complete lack of knowledge about target practice led me to believe you were actually shooting down UFO's. Yes, even though the select screen referred to it as "clay shooting". Looking at the comments to the video I linked to, I guess I'm at least not alone though.

edited 6th Jan '17 9:49:11 AM by MikeK

Whenever I saw cartoon pictures of easels (like this◊), I used to think that the canvas was actually part of the easel.

I thought the same thing.

Two things!

1. I used to think that those "Employees Only" doors in public businesses had cool stuff like ball pits and roller coasters behind them, so the employees could have fun after work.

2. I used to be convinced that my computer would one day become self-aware, then send electrical impulses through the house's wiring to burn it down and kill me. This fear stuck with me for an embarrassingly long time. I wouldn't sleep in the same room as a computer until I was in my 20s. Now I know that a computer becoming sentient and killing me is unrealistic...but for how much longer?

edited 23rd Jan '17 3:44:29 AM by RaspyMink

Judging by your avatar, you should be more worried of dogs then sentient computers.

I once made a habit of spreading glue on my hands so I could peel off the sticky remains off my hands later. It was fun back then.

And the feeling for it should have been included in the emotional roster for Inside Out.

Used to think bass was what distorted the guitars in rock music.

Boy, do I have a few:

-In kindergarten, I used to think the pizza in our cafeteria was Pizza Hut.

-Nanny from Muppet Babies was my mother's face (due to my older sister trolling me, claiming she saw her "real" face in an episode, something that she STILL contends to this very day, the damn liar.)

-"Jack" was a bad word (from watching the '87 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Don't ask.)

-That swinging over the bars of a swing set would turn you inside out (you can thank Nickelodeon for that one!)

-That milk does a body good.

-That cats turn into dogs.

-That letters, numbers and colors had genders (again, my sister.)

-That merely touching a condom would give you an STD.

-Alaska was a part of Canada and that Greenland was bigger than Australia.

-Since I had never heard of the word "farce" as a child, in the "Bart vs. Thanksgiving" episode of The Simpsons when Homer was telling Bart why more "recognizable" characters weren't balloons, I thought he said "You'll turn this parade into a Bart".

-I initially thought Vegeta's name was "Fageta". Similarly, a friend of mine thought his name was "Vacheeta".

I was taught that 88 (the number) was a bad word.

The second one reminded me of something

When my twin sister and I were two, we were at story time at the library, and the librarian was reading the classic piece of the literary canon, Brown Bear, Brown Bear. And on one of the last pages, there was an illustration of this woman that looked just like our mom. So the two of us identically dressed toddlers pointed and screamed out in unison, "MAMA!!" All the adults in the vicinity just lost it. We have it on video xD

edited 19th Jan '17 6:12:49 PM by Cailleach

I can relate. My older sister steered me wrong several times, too. One time she told she told me that the word "dude" was actually a slang term for an elephant's butt, and I actually believed her.

She also told me on other occasions that "thirsty" was a bad word and that my other sister's best friend had some amazing Mario-themed Great Big Book of Everything that the friend was interested in letting me borrow...and I believed her both times. I was a really gullible kid.

edited 19th Jan '17 6:11:27 PM by kablammin45

re: 88: actually I am pretty sure that is a number used by neo nazis. Along with a bunch of other random codes.

H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. So 88 is HH, which stood for Heil Hitler. It's only a bad word around conspiracy theorists.

My dad isn't close to being a conspiracy theorist, so I don't think he got it from there.

Cailleach, your story is Too. Freaking. Cute.

Believe it or not, I got a few more:

-Tearing the tag off of a mattress would send you to jail.

-At the end of a Bugs Bunny cartoon (I forget which one) that had him give a bomb to Elmer that was about to explode, when it did go off over the "That's All Folks!" title card, my sister and I used to hide from the "explosion". Usually behind the couch.

-That an observatory deck located inside of a science museum in our town was the White House.

-Like someone else mentioned earlier, I did use to think that sex was just rolling around on a bed and kissing, as well as that "making out" and "making love" were the same thing.

-Since we grew up in a house without a chimney/fireplace, I thought that whenever Santa came to our house, our parents would let him in through the front door.

-There was a commercial for a Playskool Sesame Street board game that featured the Cookie Monster teaching letters and since the family in the commercial was eating chocolate chip cookies, I thought the game came with actual cookies.

-That I could couch-dive like the Eds did in that one episode.

The Santa thing reminds me of a story! Growing up, we didn't have a chimney either. Mom told us that Santa had a key. My twin brother thought that sounded sketchy, and was a bad idea. Because bad guys. I was cool with it. I figured Santa wasn't a bad guy, and nobody's bad enough to steal apartment keys from Santa, so it wasn't a big deal.

I told my daughter that he uses magic. She knows that when the door opens, the dog barks. So, obviously Santa must use magic to get in, and dog treats to mellow the dog out.

edited 23rd Jan '17 3:43:49 AM by RaspyMink

When I was a kid, my parents convinced me that Beetlejuice kidnapped bad little boys who didn't brush their teeth. (It's because his teeth were green in the animated series.)

For a short while, when I was a kid, for some reason, I just didn't like the idea of chocolate having caffeine in it.

I thought people only died when they got to a certain age, like seventy.

• Used to think that my heart was in my stomach. Weird.
• When I was something like 10 (6-7 years ago), my dad bought a Vodafone modem (like this◊). When the network had problems, the LED on the device turned green. I figured this out and thought that there were tiny worker gnomes inside the device, and they were lazing around and causing the network error.
• My school had a weird balcony thing with railings on the even floors (2nd, 4th, etc.), and they had nets attached on them (so stuff that fell, like water bottles, can be caught). My friend used to say you could play on them, but if a teacher caught you doing it you'd get kicked out.
• Used to think the Renaissance (the time period) was in the 1960s.
• Growing up Indonesian and watchkng dubbed TV shows, I heard the word "pecat" (fire, like from a job). I asked my babysitter what it meant. She said it meant "hug", believed that for the next few years.

I noticed how the edges of everything got all blurry in the dark. I thought this was from a heatless fire that's only visible at night.