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Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

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BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2876: Nov 20th 2020 at 12:54:41 PM

I used to believe that Slade and Deathstroke were two different people who happened to wear the same outfit as opposed to the same person with two different names.

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MadameButterflyKnife Semain Calm from the Holocene Since: Mar, 2019 Relationship Status: She's holding a very large knife
Semain Calm
#2877: Nov 23rd 2020 at 8:22:17 PM

me and a surprising amount of my friends believed that 911 came from 9/11 as kids

granted, we were all born post-2001, so that might explain it

and the public won't dwell on my transmission cause it wasn't televised.
antenna_ears from California Since: Apr, 2020 Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
#2878: Nov 23rd 2020 at 10:08:41 PM

The "cows and bulls are different species thing" reminds me of when I believed there were two types of cows: the white-and-black milk cows and the white-and-brown chocolate milk cows. I literally thought there was a species of cow that lactated chocolate milk lmfao.

BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2879: Nov 24th 2020 at 5:43:31 AM

There was a survey a while back and apparently a sizeable chunk (like 7%) of Americans actually do think that chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows. These are adults, btw.

I hate my country.

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MisterToodleoo Since: Jul, 2018 Relationship Status: Waiting for you *wink*
#2880: Nov 24th 2020 at 10:27:57 AM

My bizarre history with profanity, part 3:

The first time I saw the Arthur episode “Bleep”, I misunderstood the meaning of bleeps, as you can read here. I remember that the commercial for Knorr frozen dinners that is described on the Censored for Comedy page helped me realize what bleeps are for, but that time, I actually missed the reveal that the censored word is “frozen”.

I misremembered the mouth movements of the censored word that D.W. heard so that I thought it had three syllables instead of two. When I was imagining what the word could be (I think), I somehow came to the conclusion that “fudgelover” could be an actual curse word. I think this mindset came from hearing teachers refer to “fudge” in the context of “Oh, fudge,” as a bad word. (And by the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with something that Tom Cruise was doing literally in South Park, as I had absolutely no knowledge of that term.) I even thought that I had heard my made-up curse word in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, but I found out much later that the word in the movie is actually “flashlight”.

I also thought that “booby” was a curse word because of some bizarre uses of the word by a younger cousin of mine, as well as overhearing a show where it sounded like a man said that someone had “booby-sneezed”.

One night, when I was lying down in my parents’ bed (since I used to sleep there after waking up in the middle of the night in my own bedroom), I was using my imagination to spice up some dialogue from Adventures in Odyssey by having Whit say that Eugene would be giving “a fudgelover brief yet booby simple definition of ‘parable’”. As I was thinking, I was tapping on myself to the rhythm of the dialogue, but I stopped after the word “brief” because young me actually felt guilty for tapping the word “fudgelover”!

Young me also thought that a part between the two verses of the (instrumental) closing credits music from Seasons 38 and 39 of Sesame Street sounded like “It ain’t booby great.” After I thought that up, poor young me couldn’t un-hear it.

Here’s another made-up curse word of mine:

I rented a DVD of The Cat in the Hat after seeing YouTube videos of the opening logos of the movie. After I watched it, my young self falsely remembered the censor bleep as being much longer as well as normal-sounding. Also, because of the British accent that the Cat was using for a character, I misheard “bi-” as “boo-”. One time, when I was practising the piano (I think), I used my false memory of the Cat’s mouth moving during the bleep (which doesn’t actually happen in the movie) to decide that the Cat was saying “boo-pee-oh”. And yes, I felt guilty after thinking that!

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Nov 26th 2020 at 4:15:29 AM

BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2881: Nov 26th 2020 at 5:37:36 AM

I used to think the line "I throw my hands up in the air sometimes" from the song Dynamite was actually "I throw my pants up in the air sometimes."

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antenna_ears from California Since: Apr, 2020 Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
#2882: Nov 29th 2020 at 8:51:28 PM

[up] Actually, “throw your pants in the air” is just a stylish way of saying “take off your clothes”.

I was literally the slowest kid ever to learn about sex. Even after sex ed and brief discussion with my parents (we didn’t really have The Talk) I only had vague ideas, like that when a man and a woman hold hands, the woman magically gets pregnant.

BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2883: Nov 30th 2020 at 5:01:57 AM

I was the inverse. My parents and I barely had the talk at all and I just completely comprehended, and was disgusted, by it.

I'm still disgusted by it but that's a tale for a different thread.

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antenna_ears from California Since: Apr, 2020 Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters
#2884: Dec 1st 2020 at 12:04:08 AM

When I was really little I didn’t know kids grew into adults so I just thought my parents were grown-ups for there entire existence and that kids and adults were two different species that had a symbiotic relationship or something.

MisterToodleoo Since: Jul, 2018 Relationship Status: Waiting for you *wink*
#2885: Dec 8th 2020 at 6:37:49 AM

One time, my dad jokingly told me that his favorite part of Shrek 1 was when it said, "The End". Being young, I didn't understand the Take That! nature of his comment. At the time, I didn't remember that the movie actually showed a "The End" at the end, and I was thinking something along the lines of "Why would it say that at the end if there's a sequel?"

When I saw the "The End" in the movie after that, I thought it was a pretty cool way of showing it and that that was why my dad liked it. When I later mentioned it to him as his favorite scene, he told me he was just joking.

Also, I have an update on my first post in this forum: the show that "traumatized" me was John Hagee Today. And I think the "they want us dead" line was probably referring to Islamists, but I was too young to know that. To recap, because he claimed that World War III had begun, and because of my own misunderstandings about war, I was worried that the USA, including Disneyland, could be a war zone. Also, when he referred to "kill[ing a] baby", I thought that meant that some soldiers had shot some kind of fireball (or something) at a plane to target a specific baby, but I think I thought that everyone else on the plane survived.

Edit: Not only did I fix a green link, but I also updated other things including quotation marks.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Jan 22nd 2025 at 9:08:12 AM

KingofNightmares Since: Aug, 2016 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#2886: Dec 8th 2020 at 9:44:51 AM

Time for another Body Horror misconception I had about biology as a kid. For some reason, I thought that if your eyes were lost (and by that I mean removed from the sockets), you could still see with those eyes. Before you ask though, I never thought that you could control limbs that you lost.

"It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times?"
BlackFaithStar [Hiatus til March] from 🇲🇾 (UTC plus 8) (Less Newbie) Relationship Status: Longing for my OTP
[Hiatus til March]
#2887: Dec 8th 2020 at 9:50:39 AM

When the promo for a movie or when it was advertised as "never the same movie each time you watch it" or something among those words, I wondered if that literally meant I'd be watching an entirely different movie each time, and though the thought lingered in my head for a while back then, I always reasoned that to be an impossibility anyway.

So in the sense of how I perceived it compared to reality, it's half-true really. There are values, moments or details you sometimes miss or forget that you take in again when you rewatch a movie, so the experience is always different.

When you're alone I'm reaching out to let you know that you're far from strangers, like the savior
Demetrios Lucky Seven from Des Plaines, Illinois (unfortunately) Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
Demetrios Lucky Seven from Des Plaines, Illinois (unfortunately) Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
Lucky Seven
#2889: Dec 23rd 2020 at 1:00:05 PM

Thanks to the computer game Dinosaur Adventure (and its later, and more fun, 3D spinoff), I thought the Universe was an even 15 billion years old rather than the 13.8 we now know it to be.

Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!
LaraUsername The Best Jedi Droid Since Skippy from Earth, Probably Since: Sep, 2020 Relationship Status: Tsundere'ing
The Best Jedi Droid Since Skippy
#2890: Dec 23rd 2020 at 3:12:34 PM

When I was younger, I used to think that if you put your hand up so that you couldn't see the sun, everything would go dark.

jandn2014 SMILE! from somewhere in Connecticut Since: Aug, 2017 Relationship Status: Hiding
SMILE!
#2891: Dec 28th 2020 at 1:08:07 PM

I used to think several weird things when I was young:

  • I thought childbirth took place at weddings. I also used to think all babies were born via C-sections, since that’s how I was born.

  • I was afraid of eating Airheads, since I thought my head would explode like in the commercials.

  • I thought that people continued to grow larger no matter how old they were, and since I had no definite concept of death back then, I thought it was common for people to be in their 100s.

  • I was only able to think back to 2000 in terms of years; I had no idea how to count the years before that.

Edited by jandn2014 on Dec 28th 2020 at 4:10:22 AM

BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2892: Dec 28th 2020 at 1:23:47 PM

I also thought my head would explode if I ate airheads.

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MenaceofMysterio Pan left! from The Emerald City Since: Jul, 2014 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Pan left!
#2893: Dec 29th 2020 at 7:14:51 PM

As a kid I was (correctly) told not to take medicine when I wasn't sick. I somehow got it into my head that doing so would give you the ailment the medicine was supposed to cure. (So taking aspirin when you didn't need it would give you a headache.)

PurpleEyedGuma Since: Apr, 2020
#2894: Dec 29th 2020 at 7:55:56 PM

We had a switch outside our house that would turn the outside lights on and off. I thought it would literally turn the world from day to night and vice versa.

Demetrios Lucky Seven from Des Plaines, Illinois (unfortunately) Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
Lucky Seven
#2895: Dec 29th 2020 at 8:53:17 PM

For a while, I thought that pill millipedes were living trilobites.

Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!
Bootlebat Since: Dec, 2012
#2896: Jan 2nd 2021 at 1:27:17 PM

I have one that was Nightmare Fuel at the time but is Hilarious in Hindsight:

  • I remember seeing some kind of PSA (which I'm now sure I must have completely misunderstood, given my interpretation makes no sense) that said something like "if a kid doesn't know what he wants to do for a job by the time he's 14, he's screwed" (not in those exact words, obviously). As I was 12 or 13 at the time, and had no idea what I wanted to do, I was rather scared.

BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
BackSet1 I <3 Zinnia from I'm sure you'd love to know that, wouldn't you? (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
I <3 Zinnia
#2898: Jan 9th 2021 at 7:38:17 AM

Apologies for the double post but... I used to think that The Cake Is a Lie was actually The Cake is Alive.

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Mara999 International Man of Mystery from Grim Up North Since: Sep, 2020 Relationship Status: Crazy Cat Lady
International Man of Mystery
#2899: Jan 9th 2021 at 10:23:48 AM

For some reason, when I was very young I thought that cows and horses were the females and males of the same species. I also thought that dogs are related to rabbits due to the similarity in ear-shape.

Demetrios Lucky Seven from Des Plaines, Illinois (unfortunately) Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
Lucky Seven
#2900: Jan 13th 2021 at 12:51:52 PM

For a while, I thought Sideshow Bob was called "Psycho Bob." And at the same time, I pronounced the "ch" in "psycho" the same way as the end of words like "catch." ^_^;;

Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!

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