When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.
I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years
I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.
That is such a funny mental image.
One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan
Russ and Oli Gark must have a hard time fitting in
That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.
English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression “search all nooks and crannies”, but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.
Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!
I now have the hilarious image in my head of a toddler giving their granny a pat down (image of one in case the term isn’t familiar to everyone), thanks! 😂
Unnecessary, I gave my grandma an ocular pat down the moment she walked in.
Love it.
I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.
So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.
What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.
I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.
I remember thinking radio stations had bands constantly coming in and playing songs and leaving
This is always my answer to this question. I thought radio stations must have been the busiest places with all those bands coming and going!
That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.
Bonus: My kid doesn’t believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.
Clarke’s third law. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Quicksand thing is fucking stupid though.
Every kid from the 80s & 90s was taught* to believe that, so I don’t blame you.
&nsbp;
*By movies & books & games and shit, not by teachers. Well, maybe some teachers…
My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.
So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.
I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.
Christmas tree as extraterrestrial cargo cult ritual. Holy shit that’s brilliant.
As a 53 year old man I’m going to START believing this. It’s awesome.
When I was a kid my dad would often pull up the NORAD Santa tracker on Christmas Eve, and that combined with seeing the film War Games at way too young of an age had me believing in Santa for much longer than I should have because “why else would the federal government devote so much money to tracking him?” I think it was specifically seeing the exact same animation of him being welcomed into a country by a pair of fighter jets for the third year in a row that finally killed that line of reasoning (because obviously the NORAD Santa tracker site is shot with television cameras or something)
Kid logic is wild
Santa Claus cargo cult
I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.
Da na da na da na da na Bat Eyes!
Thank you for sharing that. It was a lot of fun to read through. At the end I was like, wait how did I end up on this wiki?
Growing up, we had a neighbor in the Air national guard who was a boom operator on KC-135 refuelers, meaning he controlled the boom that comes out the back of the airplane and transfers fuel to other aircraft. The boom operator lays face down on a bench and looks out a window in the back of the plane to control the boom.
When I learned that they “operate on their belly”, I somehow interpreted that to mean he performed medical operations on people’s bellies.
It didn’t even make sense to me at the time but I figured there must be some special reason that the operation had to be done while airborne and I was impressed that our neighbor was not only a doctor but an airborne surgeon who specialized in this one belly surgery that couldn’t be done on the ground.
That a blowjob involved the act of physically blowing air on the penis. When I found out it actually involved sucking, I was like, “Oooh…yeah that sounds much more pleasurable.”
I was so confused, I couldn’t imagine why people would enjoy that more than a “suckjob” or “headjob”. Turns out people just say whatever they want and it can mean anything.
In my language the expression is “jemandem einen blasen” (to blow one to someone) and I remember reading a long time ago about a story where a teenage girl (?) actually injured her boyfriend when she blew into the penis. Seems not to be a very good idea.
In our language it’s to ‘pull’ someone ot better “jemandem einen ziehen” as we are civilised and have grammatical cases such as dative. So I hope nobody got it confused and ripped of someone’s penis.
I still don’t get why it’s called that.
That adults had it figured out.
That average people actually care about anything but themselves.
That there is justice in the world.
When adults said things like “In this day and age, nobody says please and thankyou any more”, I misinterpreted “this day and age” as “The Stayan Age”, which was our current age, which obviously followed on from Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.
That the Empire State Building is a restaurant named Empire Steak Building.
Me ordering the ribeye.
Wait… wait… [chewing] he’s got a point
Surely there’s a chain of restaurants or butcher shops in New York called Empire Steak, right?
When I was little, I thought that “cash back” meant that the clerk literally just handed you money out of the register if you wanted it.
I assumed that most people were honest and only took the cash if they needed it. I didn’t know that it came out of your checking account lol.
That every time people had sex, the woman became pregnant. I thought that every sex scene in a film meant the film had to be stopped for 9 months until the actress could give birth.