• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

Things I Learned from My Mother

My mother had me convinced that "Untouched by Human Hands" used in advertizements for food products meant that there were entire factories staffed entirely by monkeys.

That "red skies at evening" meant that Santa Claus was cooking Christmas candy.

That thunder was the sound of the angels bowling.
 
I was always slightly disappointed when I went in planes that I never saw any angels on top of the clouds.
 
Re: Things I Learned from My Mother

OldTimeRadio said:
My mother had me convinced that "Untouched by Human Hands" used in advertizements for food products meant that there were entire factories staffed entirely by monkeys
That's an old MAD Magazine cartoon.

Maybe that's where your mother got it from.
 
That cats were, in fact, female dogs.

That if there was a nuclear war at night, and you had your windows closed, the evil radiation couldn't get in and kill you.

That when we went on holiday, someone else came and stayed in our house AND PLAYED WITH MY TOYS!

That when babies came out of their mummy's tummies, they would fly out of their mother's mouths - arms outstretched like Superman

That I could see colour on our black and white telly - something which my friends also backed up.

That if you had three microchips you could build a robot and take over the world.

That if you could manage to lay down horizontally in mid air you could float through mirrors and meet ghosts. (odd one, that)

That the thing that sperated children from grown ups was that Adults had commited adultery.
 
DagadaDagada said:
That if you could manage to lay down horizontally in mid air you could float through mirrors and meet ghosts. (odd one, that)

That's a perfect description of a very vivid dream I had last night! Yup, very odd indeed!
 
That reality, prior to 1950 or so, was in black and white!
 
H_James said:
That reality, prior to 1950 or so, was in black and white!
Not sure which post you're responding to here, but if it was about colour/B&W TV, then colour TV in Britain began in 1967, when David Attenborough was head of BBC2.
 
No, that was just what I believed as a child.
 
Re: Things I Learned from My Mother

OldTimeRadio said:
My mother had me convinced that "Untouched by Human Hands" used in advertizements for food products meant that there were entire factories staffed entirely by monkeys.

That "red skies at evening" meant that Santa Claus was cooking Christmas candy.

That thunder was the sound of the angels bowling.


When I hear thunder I still think about my grandma bowling with the angels.
That's what my dad told me when I was a kid.

Also I used to tell my siblings when we we're kids that moving cars wouldn't actually hurt them if they walked out into the street. I know, I know that was evil. I was a little shit.
 
When I was about 10, a younger neighbour confessed to me that she'd heard that people shed their dead skin continually and she was worried that she'd end up a skeleton. I was able to point out that there were some very old (to us, anyway) people on our street who had so far eluded this fate.
 
Re: Things I Learned from My Mother

Anome_ said:
"That's an old MAD Magazine cartoon. Maybe that's where your mother got it from."

No, I heard this from Mom before the 1940s were out. Even the comic book version of Mad didn't start until around 1955.

Mad obviously stole this from my Mother and as her heir I want the money! <g>
 
H_James said:
"That reality, prior to 1950 or so, was in black and white!"

I remember how amazed I was, in my late thirties, when I first saw COLOR photographs taken in pre-1917 Czarist Russia.
 
DagadaDagada said:
"That I could see colour on our black and white telly - something which my friends also backed up."

The phenomenon of perceiving flecks of color in black-and-white television "snow" is well-known, and in the earlier 1950s there was serious (if abortive) research to see if this effect could be used to create actual color broadcasts.

I remember when Cincinnati black-and-white television station WKRC (the call comes from "Kentucky-Radio Cincinnati") ran a fluctuating grid for a minute or so every evening and requested viewers to write in describing any color patterns they might have seen. I never wrote, but the colors were unmistakeable.
 
Fire and Ice

I believed that if you stuck one hand into very hot water and the other into very cold water, at the same time, you would immediately drop dead.
 
Re: Fire and Ice

OldTimeRadio said:
I believed that if you stuck one hand into very hot water and the other into very cold water, at the same time, you would immediately drop dead.
There's a simple experiment to demonstrate the 'relativism' of our senses.
Put one hand in hot water, and one in cold water for a time, and then put both hands into tepid water: the hot hand will sense the water as cold, while the cold hand senses it as hot.

The experiment is the 'death' of any idea that our senses are absolute, like a thermometer.

I wonder if your idea, OTR, was some garbled memory of reading about this experiment?
 
OldTimeRadio said:
DagadaDagada said:
"That I could see colour on our black and white telly - something which my friends also backed up."

The phenomenon of perceiving flecks of color in black-and-white television "snow" is well-known, and in the earlier 1950s there was serious (if abortive) research to see if this effect could be used to create actual color broadcasts.

.

I remember Tomorrow's World doing an experiment like that in what must have been the late 60s. There were flickering lights and colours could be seen.
 
Re: Fire and Ice

rynner said:
OldTimeRadio said:
"I wonder if your idea, OTR, was some garbled memory of reading about this experiment?"

Probably not, because at the time I held this erroneous idea I was still too young to read. I'd "learned" this "fact" from a slightly older playmate, who was also pre-school herself. (In those days you learned to read IN the First Grade.)

There is an adult joke version of my childhood hypothesis - "if you stick one hand into liquid nitrogen and the other into fire, on the average you should feel pretty good."
 
My brother used to believe that babies came from Asda - when out shopping, he'd seen women carting babies around on the trollies, and just assumed that a family could buy themselves a baby with their weeks' shopping if they wanted to.

Which reminds me...

When I was very young, I knew that babies came from mummies tummies. But I also knew that the reason why it happened was due to the fact that when a man and a woman kissed on their wedding day, little sparkly things wound go from the man's mouth into the womans', and then all the way down into her stomach - and then, by some magical means, a woman would get a baby growing in her tummy.
 
barfing_pumpkin said:
When I was very young, I knew that babies came from mummies tummies. But I also knew that the reason why it happened was due to the fact that when a man and a woman kissed on their wedding day, little sparkly things wound go from the man's mouth into the womans', and then all the way down into her stomach - and then, by some magical means, a woman would get a baby growing in her tummy.
Close, but no coconut! :D
 
When I asked my mum how you 'get a baby' she said, 'You get married.' Seemed pretty basic to me: get married and, presto, a baby shows up. Therefore, I was very confused when I watched the episode of the I Love Lucy show when Lucy tries to tell Ricky she's pregnant. I thought, 'Why wouldn't he know already? They're MARRIED. You get married, you get a baby.'

Took a while for reality to set in.
 
Most of my sex education came from the Body Book (by Clare Raynor maybe?)

There was a picture of a naked mad and woman - the man was lying on top of a woman and she was lying on a blue towel on the beach. For years I believed that was how couples had sex
 
What a lot of memories this is bringing back! :oops:

In addition to the Sunday School "fact" that men have one fewer rib than women (so that was a lie, was it?), I offer the following:

I'd worked out that the "peep peep peep" noise made by pedestrian crossings when the lights changed and the green man appeared was for the benefit of blind people. I just couldn't understand why they were allowed to drive around in the first place. :shock:

I remember a day at school, aged five or six, when we were all looking through the fence at one of those yellow plaques which carry information about the location of the nearest fire hydrants. Everybody else knew it was the tombstone of a woman that the headmaster had murdered, and they all laughed at me when I said that I thought it was something to do with telling the fire brigade where the water was.
1.gif


My broother told me (and himself believed) that humans have seven layers of skin, and that if you peel them all off, you get down to the skeleton. Peeling off our own blisters and calluses, we only ever managed to get a maximum of five layers of skin removed before the pain became too much.

I also asked my mother "what noise does a baked bean make" and "how does a wheelbarrow go to the toilet?". I was obviously a little confused as regards basic biology.
 
barfing_pumpkin said:
"My brother used to believe that babies came from Asda - when out shopping, he'd seen women carting babies around on the trollies, and just assumed that a family could buy themselves a baby with their weeks' shopping if they wanted to."

I know I've mentioned this here before, but I believed that babies were "delivered" in white panel trucks. The babies were all neatly wrapped in white paper, like loaves of bread, stacked on four or five shelves on each side of the van, and labelled with their "expecting" parents' names and addresses.
 
New Jersey, the PURPLE State

I had supper Tuesday evening with Nancy Dibble, the author of PLOT (Writer's Digest Books). She also published several science fiction novels under the DAW books imprint, using the pseudonym Ansen DiBell.

Upon my mention of this thread Nancy told me how disappointed she'd been when she made her first childhood visit to New Jersey and discovered that the landscape wasn't PURPLE.

That was the color promised by her United States map, you see.
 
A not quite so childhood belief but I have only just found out what a spinning class really involves.....
I was under the impression it involved twisting and spinning around. I'm sure someone told me this!!! Anyway needless to say my work colleagues have found every opportunity to mock me.
 
Go on, enlighten me. What is a spinning class? It's a new one on me.

Someone had to ask!
 
It's where they teach you to form threads from natural fibres.
 
Spinning class = exercise bikes and a lot of sweat
 
My Mum told one of my brothers that the famous painting of The Laughing Cavalier was actually her Dad. My brother went to one of his friend's houses who's parents had happened to have the aforementioned painting hung on their wall and promptly as why they had a picture of his Grandad above their telly!

I always believed that when the sun gave off rays of light from behind clouds it was God looking at that part of the world.

A friend of ours was told by her Mum you bought babies from the doctor and she could only afford her and not the one she wanted. No wonder the poor girl was demented.
 
Back
Top