Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

I used to think "simpleton" was spelled "symbolton", my logic being that the person in question was a "symbol" of common sense not being so common. I felt like an idiot when I found out how it was really supposed to be spelled lol.

I thought that "peon" was an insult like "moron" when I heard it in a bonus feature of A Bug's Life. Since it sounds like "pee on", I thought that the first syllable of "moron" might mean something like "poop".

I also used to wonder if dogs knew when people were using swear words. One reason I thought this was that I overheard a Cluster Bleep-Bomb on TV where a dog could be heard barking over one of the long bleeps. The other reason was that I overheard a scene from Mercury Rising where a dog barked after a man yelled.

I used to think Antarctica was this gargantuan frozen world larger than anything else because of maps like this.◊ While it is huge, yes, it's nowhere near as big as I thought it was

First I thought the moon was a lot smaller than it really is, then when I learnt it was bigger than that, I thought it was a lot bigger than it really is.

When Big Hero 6 first came out, I didn't realize at first that the title referred to the 6 members of the team. I thought that I had somehow missed 5 other Big Hero movies. (Still can't believe that movie turns 10 this year...)

I thought Mount Everest was in New Zealand because a New Zealander was the first person to climb it. I didn't realise that was what my brain had decided until I was reading something about it back in primary school that mentioned Mt Everest being in China/Nepal, to which I went "Oh yeah I guess it's not in NZ, it's too big for that huh" and felt rather silly.

I also thought the thyroid gland was in the thigh since they're pronounced the same, which was another one of those "placeholder solutions" my brain came up with. I don't remember how I found out I was wrong about that one.

I used to think that dogs had hooves because they made noise when they walked. I also thought that the U.S. Supreme Court was in Washington State, not Washington, D.C.

Edited by Kahran042 on Feb 20th 2024 at 1:13:11 PM

You know how in military time they say stuff like "meet me at 1100 hours" to mean "meet me at 11:00 am"? I thought that it literally meant "meet me after 1100 hours have passed", and didn't get why they made it so complicated (1100 hours is about 46 days, so I didn't get why they didn't just say "meet me at (insert date and time here)".

Up until 2020-2022, I believed Sadie Hawkins, who the dances where name for, was some sort of feminist and a real person. Then, when I was reading the Other Wiki page for the shmoo from Li'l Abner, I learned she was a fictional character from said comic. I was actually shocked.

Edited by datadoggieein on Feb 27th 2024 at 5:47:30 AM

Do you mean because of how a dog's nails make a clicking noise?

Edited by Bootlebat on Feb 27th 2024 at 5:47:55 AM

The first time I heard about the Dali Lama as a kid I thought he was an actual llama.

Exactly!

Even though my cousins had a copy of the 1996 VHS of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh just like I did, when I watched part of their copy at the age of 3 (I think), I wondered if it was different from my copy, since I thought I heard Rabbit say, "Today is the day!" clearer than I remembered.

Even though there is only one feed of Treehouse TV, I used to wonder if it was different at certain people's houses. I wondered this because I usually watched the channel at my grandparents' house, but the only time I saw them airing Percy the Park Keeper was at a great-aunt's house. According to Wikipedia, Treehouse aired that show "sporadically".

I basically had a Percy the Park Keeper flashback when I was at another house and I saw Charley & Mimmo for the first time. (Treehouse actually aired this show years before as part of It's Itsy Bitsy Time, but I didn't know about that anthology series.) Unlike Percy, I did get to watch Charley & Mimmo at my grandparents' house later.

I always thought the symbol seen on biometric passports was a rectangular Pokéball.

I used to believe "Hide Your Power Level" meant "don't use your forum rank to influence discussions" as opposed to "hide you nerdy interests/racism".

Once, when I was extremely young, it was snowing, but I thought the snow was little animals flying around, since it was a very light snow and it was blowing in the wind.

I thought that the drain of my kitchen sink was "ant heaven" for some amount of time.

@Kahran 042 I'm assuming you didn't have any dogs as a kid then? (as otherwise you could just look at their feet up close to see if they really had hooves on them)

Edited by Bootlebat on Mar 8th 2024 at 4:00:46 AM

I didn't know Even Evil Has Standards was a thing yet, so I was surprised to find out the news about a woman who killed her infant child wouldn't be well-received in prison. I thought that in prison, the worst someone's crime, the bigger the Villain Cred.

I misheard "behind the scenes" as "behind the seas" and thought movies were all filmed over in Europe or something and were shipped here. Going "behind the seas" meant going across the ocean to where the movies were made.

i thought the Blarney Stone was related to Barney Rubble in some way??

i also confused Ebaum's World and Beakman's World somehow, so now i will always associate that website with a wild-black-haired scientist

Since easter is coming up, first year in school I was so elated when we had easter break, because I thought it was four weeks. Turns out it was only four days (good friday to easter monday, which also I just learned, is not a part of the Holy Week for all denominations.)

When I first heard of Naked and Afraid, I thought it was porn because of the title and basic premise. It didn't really register to me at the time that if they're trying to survive in the wilderness, they'd be a lot more focused on... well, surviving (something that the Fan Disservice and It's Not Porn, It's Art entries on the show's page point out).

I was remembering this in part because the series recently got brought up in my driving class.

Yeah. Not all nudity is sexual.

I was part of the Animation Age Ghetto crowd at one point, I didn't even see The Little Mermaid (1989) until 2006 (as I'd beaten the Atlantica story in Kingdom Hearts II and wanted to see the REAL story out of curiosity), as I thought it was a girly-movie slog. Oh, boy how wrong I was.