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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

Fluttermoth said:
For years and years, I thought Billericay was in Ireland.

I still remember the shock when I found out; I was in my early twenties :oops:

Come and visit Sodom & Begorrah.
 
I thought Belfast was in Germany and the bombs and violence on the news were WW2 still going on (in the early 70's). Strangely I had no confusion regarding the Vietnam war which was also on the news at the time.
 
Bethnal Green conjured visions in my mind of a rural idyll with a village green, trees, etc. My illusions were shattered when I actually went there for the first time in the mid 70s.
 
I thought the M*A*S*H TV show was about the Vietnam war when I was a child.
 
There was a book on my dad's shelves which had a deep crease down the spine, the damage somewhat obscuring the title. This resulted in an erroneous belief - lasting for some years - that there was a fictional Belgian detective named Potrot.
 
SameOldVardoger said:
I thought the M*A*S*H TV show was about the Vietnam war when I was a child.

It is, although it's set in Korea.
 
Ronson8 said:
theyithian said:
SameOldVardoger said:
I thought the M*A*S*H TV show was about the Vietnam war when I was a child.

It is, although it's set in Korea.
The sequel could be played out in the near future. :roll:

Probably without laugh tracks this time.
 
When M*A*S*H was shown in the UK, they didn't put the laughter on it. During one episode they forgot to flick the right switch and the canned laughter was included and the BBC was flooded with complaints! Mind you, by the last episode Alan Alda's chokehold of sentiment and sincerity on the series meant there weren't any jokes anymore anyway.
 
Fluttermoth said:
cherrybomb said:
Fluttermoth said:
For years and years, I thought Billericay was in Ireland.

I still remember the shock when I found out; I was in my early twenties :oops:

you mean to say it's not?? :oops:
it's not, but it should be! It sounds Irish.
You'll be telling me next that Pontefract isn't just down the road from Llangollen...

I though exactly the same about Billericay.

I also remember being quite surprised at finding Timbuktu was real!
 
hunck said:
Bethnal Green conjured visions in my mind of a rural idyll with a village green, trees, etc. My illusions were shattered when I actually went there for the first time in the mid 70s.
If you travel near Birmingham, by all means go to Balsall Common, but I'd definitely avoid Balsall Heath. They sound awfully similar, like two names for the same place.

They're not.
 
Peripart said:
hunck said:
Bethnal Green conjured visions in my mind of a rural idyll with a village green, trees, etc. My illusions were shattered when I actually went there for the first time in the mid 70s.
If you travel near Birmingham, by all means go to Balsall Common, but I'd definitely avoid Balsall Heath. They sound awfully similar, like two names for the same place.

They're not.

:lol: I made that exact mistake when I first moved to Brum about 7 years ago!
 
As a little kid, I was precociously knowledgeable about some aspects of life; and unusually naive, even for the age concerned, about others -- the latter tending to be, the more practical and everyday kind of matters.

Have been, almost from infancy, obsessively keen on geography and political-type-maps stuff. On first hearing the carol "we three kings of Orient are"; I wondered where on the globe might be, the land-mass occupied by the regions of Oari, and Tah -- it must obviously be quite big, if it could accommodate at least three separate kingdoms.

In my early childhood, we lived for some years in makeshift accommodation on a farm. Our landlords were the "old farmer", Mr. P., and his son the "young farmer". This was in the early 1950s: Mr. P. was a sweet fellow, then in his sixties. My father said one day, that "Mr.P. was a soldier in the Fourteen -- Eighteen War". This was, I think, the first mention that I'd ever heard, of World War 1. The correct significance sailed right by me: I remember thinking, "I know Mr. P. is quite old -- but surely he can't be some five-and-a-half centuries old." (I didn't have the nous, to ask Dad straight away about this mystery -- just puzzled over it in solitary fashion, for quite some while.)
 
Somebody mentioned Belfast and I do remember thinking it was Bell Fast along with Glass Go, and that Belfast was absolutely Scottish.
 
I was convinced that 'society' was pronounced 'so-shitty' when I was about 4. It occurs to me now that I was actually quite right.
 
onetwothree said:
I was convinced that 'society' was pronounced 'so-shitty' when I was about 4. It occurs to me now that I was actually quite right.

I always wondered, when I was little, why my mother used to get cross when I pronounced the Grand Prix as the 'grand pricks'...
 
garrick92 said:
I thought that Freddie Starr and Bobby Davro were the same person for quite a lot longer, which I excuse because they did actually look halfway similar and had similar personas. (If you were seven).
Yes! Me too! And they definitely looked similar, we're not mad... :?

Before I started actually reading longer books for myself, I used to think that they were made up of "tractors" instead of chapters. :oops:
 
The overflow vent at the back of the bathroom basin had "Twyfords" written above it, so naturally I thought that was the technical term for it. It wasn't until I was, like, 8 or 9 that I found out "Twyfords" was just the name of the manafacturer of the basin :oops: .
 
I recall believing that America and England were the good guys.

Heh, kids. :roll:
 
I believed Australia was a land of good fortune until I saw what happened to aboriginal people of that land.
 
skinny said:
I recall believing that America and England were the good guys.

Heh, kids. :roll:

Yeah, I had that misapprehension too. Silly me.
 
This isn't mine, but I had to share it. On the Radcliffe and Maconie show on BBC 6Music this afternoon they were asking listeners to tell them their misconceptions, much like this thread, and one guy e-mailed in with a doozy.

Basically, when he was a kid he thought people's feet grew bigger because they forgot to take off their socks at night, and the skin grew over the socks, making the feet bigger until they were adult-sized. Apart from being a disgusting concept, it takes some imagination to come up with something as outlandish as that, presumably if you cut open a foot you'd find layers of skin and socks like the rings in a tree trunk.

Also, and they pointed this out, if you did remember to take off your socks before bed you'd end up as an full grown adult with baby feet. And probably fall over a lot.
 
For a while I thought that Guerrilla wars were actually wars between gorillas.
 
Yup, and there was often mention of 'Congo guerillas'. My mother used to pay into some kind of benevolent fund with the Congregational Church and would drag one of us right across town on foot at regular intervals to 'pay the Congo'.

So on hearing of 'Congo guerillas' in the news I had images of gorillas in military fatigues sitting around or doing drill in the local church hall, a bit like a surreal Dad's Army platoon. :lol:
 
I used to think my Mum went to Maths every xmas. Turns out it was Mass.
 
I grew up in an overwhelmingly Protestant area. Catholic families were few, and their children almost always attended the parochial school in town. In elementary school I had a rare Catholic classmate. One day he told me about his dying elderly relative and how the family had called the priest in to administer extreme unction.

The problem was that my classmate pronounced the phrase in a compressed fashion (no doubt imperfectly echoed from having overhead it ...) that sounded for all the world like 'extra munction'.

I immediately asked what this 'munction' was, and why did critically ill people need more of it. He didn't know.

It wouldn't be until years later that someone disabused me of the notion of 'munction' and the practice of being administered an extra dose of it at death's threshold.

:oops:
 
EnolaGaia said:
...It wouldn't be until years later that someone disabused me of the notion of 'munction' and the practice of being administered an extra dose of it at death's threshold.

:oops:

That's fantastic. Munction definitely deserves to be a word - so I'm adding it to my vocabulary as of now.
 
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