Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

Pretty sure that subatomic particles can't reflect light on their own.

"Listen up, Marina, because this is SUPER important. Whatever you do, don't eat th“ “DON'T EAT WHAT?! Your text box ran out of space!”

When I was like, 11, I got nervous that thinking about "Highway to Hell" would condemn me to Hell. Yeah......thankfully, I've long since gotten over that.

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I didn't know that Dick Van Dyke was a real person, so I thought it was one of those "mash a bunch of curse words together" words.

Edited by RacattackForce on Sep 4th 2022 at 9:32:40 AM

I had the opposite problem, I knew of the name "Dick" but not the curse version, so I one day tried to make an adventurous Neopet named, uh... "Dick Raider". Again, I was a kid, had no idea the name would sound so lewd and I was floored when they deleted him

Neopets was a victim of a lot of child me's stupidity. I used to just think the report feature was a good thing because it, like, gave the account attention, so I just randomly went around reporting people since I didn't know it could get them in trouble.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 4th 2022 at 9:36:43 AM

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Since other people are talking about the word “dick”, here’s part 6 of my bizarre history with profanity (I declare my post about the word “gay” from the previous page to be part 5.5):

The first time I found out about “dick” being a curse word was when I was seeing my dad’s side of the family at a house. There, a lady mentioned the word to my mom, albeit with Censorship by Spelling, while talking about We Bought a Zoo.

Later on, when my mom was on Facebook, I happened to catch a glimpse of some kind of meme image that featured the line, “I use my dick.”

I noticed that in The Looney Tunes Show episode "The Stud, the Nerd, the Average Joe, and the Saint", an in-universe video of Yosemite Sam got cut off before the end of the sentence, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead...” That, and maybe a similar cut-off line from Plankton, plus the aforementioned meme, made me think that “dick” meant “hand”!

I thought that “dick” might also be a derogatory word for “kid”, since “kid” backwards is “dik”.

Are we human, or are we dancer?

I once had an eye infection, and was told not to touch it because my finger would (paraphrasing here) act "like a little car that drove the germs from one eye to the other." I took this a bit literally and thought that touching your eyes would prompt the germs in one eye to migrate to the other one, and found myself prodding both (closed) eyes one after the other in the hopes of confusing them. (I did have something of a tendency to ascribe more sentience to microbes than they actually possess) I don't recall if this resulted in both eyes becoming infected or not.

I thought if you drop food on the floor, the bacteria will wait 5 seconds before trying to eat it.

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wait wait wait... they doesn't actually do that?

Some call it stalking, I say walking just extremely close behind

Legend has it that during those five seconds, the bacteria fight over it. They even have little guns and knives to make sure other bacteria can't get it before they do. Whoever touches it first wins.

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When I was little, I assumed pinkeye would turn my irises pink.

Edited by StewieGriffin34 on Sep 7th 2022 at 1:02:59 PM

He/they | Mostly here on my free days

I thought if you went to prison you had to stay in your cell 24/7. And yes, I know some prisons really do work this way, but I thought they all did. Once you got sent to prison, you didn't get to see the outside of your cell until your sentence was up.

Edited by Bootlebat on Sep 7th 2022 at 1:32:29 AM

I thought that the "keep out of reach of children" label on things was a warning to the children and not the parents, and that if the cops caught a kid in possession of something with that label on it, they would take him to jail. I was really nervous when I had chicken pox and my mom gave me a bottle of lotion with a "keep out of reach of children" on it.

I also thought some swear words were so bad you go to jail if you said them (a lot of my childhood fears had something to do with going to jail for some reason.)

I have something kind of similar:

Y'know that symbol you see on things meaning that babies can't use them, that depicts a frowning baby face under a "no" sign?

Well, I thought it meant "No sad babies".

For every low there is a high.

I thought bills meant you were getting paid, not you paying a company. I was watching Caillou and when Doris was looking through the mail she said something along the lines of "Just bills..." and I was confused why she wasn't excited. I thought she must be rich because she got so many bills that they were no longer exciting and more of just nuisances to sort through.

• Another one of my mother's fantasies that I believed. She told me that whenever someone blew someone else a kiss, no matter where the other person was, they'd feel it.
• I knew from my father that water was bad for computers... so I was concerned the computer would short out when I watched an online video that featured a character crying.
• I thought leaving the fridge door open was dangerous, in part because of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Suds", and in part because my mother said to me, "Don't you ever forget to close the fridge door!".

For every low there is a high.

When I read the back of the bags of pre-sliced pepperoni, I saw the “Do Not Eat” instructions and thought they referred to the pepperoni (rather than the gel packet it was intended for), which I found weird because I knew the pepperoni was okay to eat.

It was probably their fault though for putting that in the bag instead of the gel packet, which was blank.

Edited by StewieGriffin34 on Sep 13th 2022 at 5:51:36 AM

He/they | Mostly here on my free days

I didn't realize banks had insurance, or that you could withdraw your money from more than one bank so I thought if the specific bank building your money was stored in got robbed you were screwed unless they caught the robbers before they spent all the money.

Edited by Bootlebat on Sep 16th 2022 at 7:13:49 AM

I used to think Hippos were girl Rhinos.

Inversion, I thought bulls were a separate species from cows.

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I had a tendency to categorize things weirdly. It irked me when someone referred to five as being "more than four," because five was "one more than four", and those were different concepts, damn it! Same with "neighbor" and "next-door neighbor."

i used to think people gave birth out their ass. aint that a riot

I legit thought the same thing too when I was 8.

Edited by callmeamuffin on Sep 19th 2022 at 2:49:56 AM

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So close, yet so far.

"Listen up, Marina, because this is SUPER important. Whatever you do, don't eat th“ “DON'T EAT WHAT?! Your text box ran out of space!”

Did you think men could give birth?

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no lol, i wasnt that stupid

I didn't want to eat with a fork with sign "50 Years of October" because I thought you must be 50 years old to use it (and I din't even notice the word "October" and just read it as "50 Years").