What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

[synchronicity]

You're probably right, Peni--on both counts! I think I am definitely prone to my "senior moments" (which I have been having for a very long time, come to think of it!! :shock: :lol: ).

And yes, I think adults probably did tell me that tale about pregnant women--God forbid we should be prepared for sex on our (presumed) wedding night!!! (Everything I learned--accurately--about sex, I learned from my friends at school!)

I do remember that I hated being an only child, so when I was still too young to understand the actual process of begetting children I kept begging my mom to have another baby. When she seemed uninterested, I asked her just how one goes about having a baby, and she replied that you pray to God for one, and then you get pregnant. :shock: :shock: (No, I'm not making that one up! What can I say--I grew up in the Bible Belt!).

Anyway--thanks both to my ignorance of sex and my fervent desire to have another child in the house--I started praying very earnestly to God to let me have a baby. I was still years short of my teens, plus there was (obviously!!) no man involved, but then I remembered that, after all, the Baby Jesus was born without a human daddy, so I guess it seemed like a reasonable request at the time! :?

I was extremely disappointed when it didn't work, so I finally went to my mom and complained that God wasn't listening to my prayers. You should have seen my mom's face, lol! She hastily said, "Oh--you have to be married first!"

Well! Why didn't she tell me that to begin with?!

I had remembered another childhood belief but now it's gone straight out of my head!

I do recall something from early childhood--when I was about four years old, I guess. There was a big old brown chair in the edge of our den, just off the hall and near the entrance to the kitchen. I fully understood that it was just a comfy old piece of furniture and totally harmless--during the day, that is.

At night, I was convinced that it was somehow transformed into a huge and menacing brown bear, and I was petrified to go past it into the kitchen for a glass of water. If I did dare to go past it, I went at a dead run, certain that I was going to be mauled to death at any moment.

And of course when my parents found my lifeless remains in the morning, that horrible beastly bear would once again look like an innocent chair, and nobody would ever know what had "got" me during the night!!

 

[gl5211]

Well when i was a little girl my grandfather lived a few counties away. We had to cross a large saltwaterbay across a long bridge. I thought we were crossing the ocean. For a long time i told everyone that my grandfather lived "overseas".

 

[Anonymous]

When I was a child I used to believe...

....that the artists would come into the studio and sing the songs during radio programmes.

....that the Citizens Advice Bureau was where I'd be taken if Ididn't stop being naughty while out shopping.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

When I was a child I used to believe...

....that the artists would come into the studio and sing the songs during radio programmes.

That's the way it WAS done, in the main, during the decades before radio became a portable jukebox.

 

[Anonymous]

That's the way it WAS done, in the main, during the decades before radio became a portable jukebox.

Yes but not when I were a lad (early 70s)

 

[Summercat]

I have really enjoyed reading this entire thread in one go! Some very amusing and cute stuff kids believe....

I thought I didn't have any of my own, as I couldn't remember any, but then a few came to mind:

1. I believed that cursive (e.g., writing in script as opposed to printing) was a distinct and separate language by and for adults, and that at some point, upon reaching adulthood, one was taught that language.

2. Oddly, at the same time I believed that I could create cursive by just printing something out -- my name, for example -- and then linking the letters together with extra lines. I thought that's how it was done.

I suppose a child's mind (mine, anyway!) was/is capable of holding two (or more) such opposite views at once!

3. Similarly to #1, I believed that "pig latin" was a real language, not just a fun bit of twisting English around. I thought my Mom was bilingual, when she taught it to me!

4. My Dad used to say, when my sister and I were little and when our rooms had gotten very messy, that each messy bedroom "looked like a cyclone hit it". Except my sister and I thought he said "acyclonehiddit", and we had no idea what that was, lol!

5. My Dad also used to say, when we wanted something but weren't allowed to have it, "In Russia, they call that 'tough shitski'". I SWEAR, for years I thought that was actually Russian!

6. I used to believe that when a woman was pregnant, there was a cord from the outside of her baby's belly button which connected to the inside of the mother's belly button. Not sure where I got that idea; I suppose I must have seen a program about pregnancy which showed an umbilical cord, and just misunderstood where the non-baby-attached end was attached to, though in thinking about it now I wonder what I thought it was for, as clearly the baby would not get any nutrients that way....I also wasn't sure how they detached the mother's end of the cord, I kind of thought that when the baby was born and they snipped it, whatever was left just sort of coiled back up inside the mother like a tape measure or something.... :shock:

That's all I can think of at the moment....

 

[LaurenChurchill]

I thought the exact same thing about bellybuttons, Summercat, lol.

And I also thought cursive was adult-language. Actually, just looking at this note the neighbour wrote to me, I'm thinking it's still possible.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I thought that schoolteachers who printed everything had somehow never learned to write script.

As a pre-schooler I believed that all squiggleswith loops and crosses must somehow automatically become intelligible messages. I used to drive my Mother crazy by demanding that she read aloud what I'd "written."

 

[Peripart]

I remember, when I first went to secondary school, being very excited about learning a foreign language (French, in this case) for the first time. All the same, I was utterly stunned to find they had their own words for numbers, too.

I was quite aware that different people around the world spoke different languages, but I had somehow felt certain up until then that counting was a "universal" language, and that everyone had the same words for one, two, three. By the time I moved on to German, Latin and then Spanish, I was prepared for most things, but un, deux, trois caught me well and truly by surprise!

 

[Summercat]

peripart, I had a similar experience with Spanish, when I was little. I remember watching Sesame Street, always a multi-cultural show, and there were a couple of kids on, saying what different things were called in English and in Spanish.

Specifically, I remember them saying that "milk" was "leche". My Mom was in the room with me, and I said to her something like "Why are they calling the milk 'leche'?", and she told me it was Spanish. I guess I didn't have a real concept of other languages at that point, because I said "Well, they know it's milk, right?", to which my Mom said yes, so I said "Well then why don't they CALL it milk?". :?

A bit off topic, but similar: when I first learned to write numbers, I tended to write my twos and threes backwards. My Mom was gently trying to teach me the right way, so she wrote a proper "3" and said something like "See how that three you wrote is backwards?" I said "Did you know it was a three?", she said "Yes", and I said "Well then what's the problem?" LOL! I actually REMEMBER that happening, and I must have only been about three years old myself at the time.

Hm. I've always been interested in language, and many of my childhood misconceptions seem to be language related, and now I'm a poet with degrees in literature and writing. I wonder if there's a connection there? And I'm also still crap at math, lol!

 

[glamour_dust]

As a pre-schooler I believed that all squiggleswith loops and crosses must somehow automatically become intelligible messages. I used to drive my Mother crazy by demanding that she read aloud what I'd "written."

Awww. That is so adorable. I love this thread.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

As a pre-schooler I believed that all squiggleswith loops and crosses must somehow automatically become intelligible messages. I used to drive my Mother crazy by demanding that she read aloud what I'd "written."

Awww. That is so adorable. I love this thread.

* blush *

 

[OldTimeRadio]

When I was in the first and second grades I was constantly chastised for not knowing the difference between a "1" and a "7."

But I DID know the difference.

It was just that type-set "1s" have those little "roofs" at the top and I was determined that my hand-printed "1s" should have them too!

Bull-Headed OTR (George Wagner)

 

[Peripart]

When I was in the first and second grades I was constantly chastised for not knowing the difference between a "1" and a "7."

But I DID know the difference.

It was just that type-set "1s" have those little "roofs" at the top and I was determined that my hand-printed "1s" should have them too!

Bull-Headed OTR (George Wagner)

Continental Europeans always write their 1s in that way, but even more exagerrated, so that to English eyes they look exactly like a flamboyant 7 tilted slightly to the left. It's so prevalent that French 7s are almost always written with a horizontal strike-through to distinguish them from a 1.

 

[myf13]

I used to write my 7s the French way, and was forever getting told off at school for doing so. I just thought they looked nicer.

 

[rjmrjmrjm]

I always add the dash through the seven. Just stops a lot of confusion.

 

[Peripart]

Surely just writing your "1" as a vertical line does the same thing? Less is more!

 

[ElishevaBarsabe]

Surely just writing your "1" as a vertical line does the same thing? Less is more!

Depends on what you are doing. In a bunch of code a vertical line could be "L" or "1." I always put the dash through my 7s, too.

 

[LaurenChurchill]

Yeah, me too, but then I write like an illiterate person with parkinsons so maybe I shouldn't be a milestone for people to measure themselves against

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Surely just writing your "1" as a vertical line does the same thing? Less is more!

But as a kid I wanted my "1s" to have those little "porch roofs" at their tops, just like in the typeset texts. That's what started all the trouble.

Where did those "roofs" come from in the first place?

 

[TheQuixote]

I'm not sure where the 'porch roofs' come from... when I joined my infant school's nursery at around 4, I was able to write my own name and numbers up to 10.

On my first day there I was forced to trace my name from a piece of card and also some numbers. I must have pointed out that I didn't need tracing paper and showed them how I could do it, only to be told off that my 'nines' were wrong.

I wrote nine like this ---> 9

This was "wrong, wrong, wrong" according to the nursery teacher, it should have been a straight line down from the loop instead

I still had to use tracing paper when writing my name up to middle infants, we all did. In fact, we had to trace everything. During freetime, if we wanted to draw we weren't allowed to just sit there and scribble whatever came into our head. We'd have to root through the picture draw, choose an image whether it be a seal balancing a ball on its nose or a country cottage, trace it and then colour it in. I hated it.

As for the European 'seven' with the dash through it: I used to do this as it was the 'in' thing to do when I hit secondary school. I dropped back to a standard '7' when an ex-colleague (who was even worse at figures and numbers than I was) began to get a rep' for constantly making mistakes with the book keeping and petty cash.

It was a way of differentiating between my figures and hers as I once got the blame for something she'd cocked up. "Oh, I thought it was you, you write seven like that..."

 

[rynner2]

But as a kid I wanted my "1s" to have those little "porch roofs" at their tops, just like in the typeset texts. That's what started all the trouble.

Where did those "roofs" come from in the first place?

From fonts like Times New Roman - the porch roofs are one form of serif.

Fonts without these little embellishments (like the font on this MB) are called sans-serif.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif

 

[barfing_pumpkin]

I always add the dash through the seven. Just stops a lot of confusion.

I do this too - it comes from various employments requiring me to take handwritten orders over the phone. Because my normal sevens often ended up looking like two's, I got into the habit of putting dashes through my sevens.

It's rather like radio operators who use 'niner' instead of nine, because it can often sound like a five.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

But my question is why is the typeset "1" used with the serif but the hand-printed "1" without?

My guess is that hand-written "1s" must have at some time in the past (perhaps back in monkish copying days) included the serif.

 

[rynner2]

My guess is that hand-written "1s" must have at some time in the past (perhaps back in monkish copying days) included the serif.

Isn't this where we came in?

In much of Europe, the 1 is written with a big porch roof, which can cause confusion with 7's, so European 7's are crossed through to distinguish them from 1's.

But in UK a simply stroke does for a written 1 - anything with a roof would be taken for a 7. (I guess the same applies in the US as your teacher thought you didn't know the difference!)

 

[rynner2]

But as a kid I wanted my "1s" to have those little "porch roofs" at their tops, just like in the typeset texts. That's what started all the trouble.

Where did those "roofs" come from in the first place?

From fonts like Times New Roman - the porch roofs are one form of serif.

Fonts without these little embellishments (like the font on this MB) are called sans-serif.

And Helvetica, a sans serif font, is now 50 years old!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6638423.stm

 

[rynner2]

...and from the comments section:

Two fonts walk into the bar, and the barman says, "sorry lads, we don't serve your type".

 

[liveinabin]

I have a vague recollection of a war film where a bunch of Germans were posing as English officers and were billeted in an English village. It was discovered that they were German because of the way one of them wrote nine and one in the European style.

I cross my sevens but my father told me off as it means you are crossing out the 7th commandment!

 

[Anonymous]

I have a vague recollection of a war film where a bunch of Germans were posing as English officers and were billeted in an English village. It was discovered that they were German because of the way one of them wrote nine and one in the European style.

Probably Went The Day Well or the *cough* remake Eagle Has Landed.

I cross my sevens but my father told me off as it means you are crossing out the 7th commandment!

Putting a line mid-way through a '7' would fool Sherlock Holmes into thinking you were a johnny foreigner.

 

[miss_scarlet]

1/ Cigarette smoke created clouds

2/ Teddys talked when you were out of the room

3/there was a lonley monster under the bed

4/ If I was a nice person I would become a fairy princess

5/your brain was like a tape recorder that needed rewinding evernight which is why you dream