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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

It would make a good verb too

I munckt
You munckt
He munckts
she munckts
We munckt
You munckt
They munckt

The only problem is the past tense

I have munckted
You have munckted etc ...

Not very good if you are old and have false teeth ass it is hard to pronounce and by the sound of it, it is only the elderly who should be concerning themselves with munckting.
 
Catholics receive extreme unction,
Just before they cease to function.
 
As a child, I wasn't allowed to eat bananas at supper time of an evening as my mother told me they would stick to my ribs. :shock:
 
Don't know if this counts but it amused me at the time.

Many years ago a relative of mine married an Irish man who had come over here to work. His family all came over for the wedding which was to take place in the local Methodist chapel which the bride's family attended.

The groom was a Roman Catholic and knew next to nothing about Protestant weddings.

As luck had it the bride's mother was organising a coffee morning in the chapel a few days before the big day and to take the lad's mind of his wedding nerves asked him if he would help her, so for the first time in his life he entered a Protestant church.

In order for the ladies to enjoy their coffee a large urn had to be filled so the mother in law to be asked him to take a bucket to the outside tap,fill it and throw away the water and repeat this three times. This was because the tap wasn't used very often and bits and pieces came out in the first couple of buckets but he didn't know this.

He duly filled the bucket and threw away the water three times and then brought the next bucketful to her and with a look of wonder on his face said," Tell me now, is this a ritual that Methodists perform every time they come to chapel?"
 
this is something i hark back to every now and again

i am guessing i was about 6 or 7 when this happened ... my dad drove my older sisters to their school and for some reason i was along for the ride that day even though i was at primary still ... after dropping them off we were driving along a fairly woody part of south manchester i think around bowden out towards dunham massey kind of area ... i asked my dad how far a mile was ... he then said hed show me going on to say "from here ( indicating a postbox ) to ... no wait from here" ( indicating a lamp post ) "to ..." then later "that tree is half a mile" ... "that roadsign is three quarters" and finally "there that gatepost, exactly a mile"

obviously he was checking his speedo to determine when he was at an exact mile however at the time i had no idea and so i was left with the notion that roadside items like post boxes and road signs were meticulously arranged at convenient intervals or basic fractions of whole miles !

edit / actually i would have been about 9 i think
 
Sherlock Holmes would time how quickly a train passed telegraph poles, which were set at regular intervals, and so calculate the speed of the train he was travelling on.

Bet your Dad could do that. ;)
 
I used to think that trains 'glid' on massive blades like ice skates, that somehow miraculously never slipped off the tracks.

Until I was about 35.
 
Ademordna said:
I used to think that trains 'glid' on massive blades like ice skates, that somehow miraculously never slipped off the tracks.

Until I was about 35.

Sounds like a great idea for a Steampunk story.
 
When I was about 5 (1978), I was playing on a wooden climbing frame and decided to see if I could hold hands with my adult self in case I ever became a frightened 'grown up'. I reached my arm up from the bottom of the frame, I promised myself to remember this and reach my adult arm back down when I needed to be a happier me. I've done this about 5 times out of personal nostalgia but it does tend to cheer me up anyway ..
 
Awww, Swifty! :cry: I want to take you home and wrap you in cotton wool...

This isn't quite relevant, but I think it bears repeating. Most of the facts about the birds and the bees I learned as I grew up were fairly accurate, but from somewhere I got the idea that the erect male member was about the same diameter as a pencil, but shorter. :oops: I never saw my parents or my brother naked, so I had no idea I was wrong.

Fast forward to my first serious boyfriend when I was 18 - I was a slow starter, and yes, I believed it until then :goof: I couldn't believe how big it was, and told him so. Repeatedly. He didn't seem to mind...
 
monops said:
Fast forward to my first serious boyfriend when I was 18 - I was a slow starter, and yes, I believed it until then :goof: I couldn't believe how big it was, and told him so. Repeatedly. He didn't seem to mind...

Bet he loved that! :lol:
 
Mythopoeika said:
monops said:
Fast forward to my first serious boyfriend when I was 18 - I was a slow starter, and yes, I believed it until then :goof: I couldn't believe how big it was, and told him so. Repeatedly. He didn't seem to mind...

Bet he loved that! :lol:

He did seem to be disproportionately pleased, yes!

Re: misheard lyrics, who can forget the beautiful song by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson - "Tonight I Sellotape my glove to you"?
 
ramonmercado said:
Ademordna said:
I used to think that trains 'glid' on massive blades like ice skates, that somehow miraculously never slipped off the tracks.

Until I was about 35.

Sounds like a great idea for a Steampunk story.

Dibs!
 
One for the Cymraeg speakers:

When I first moved to North Wales, I was bemused by the fact that all the local cemeteries had the same name, and wondered how people differentiated between them in conversation. "Oh look" I said to my wife-to-be in the car one day, "there's Mynwent Cemetery again - how do you tell them apart when they're all called that?"
What makes this even more embarrassing, was that I prided myself on my liberal views of the language and could already pronounce most words before I even moved here. Probably should've spent more time on the vocabulary, though.
 
RyoHazuki said:
"Oh look" I said to my wife-to-be in the car one day, "there's Mynwent Cemetery again - how do you tell them apart when they're all called that?"
Although I don't speak a word of Welsh, I can spot a few words, so I was amused when my other half commented, as we were passing through Bala, that Ar Werth must be one of the most popular estate agents in Wales.

Having said that, there does appear to be a company named AR Werth in South Wales. Either a joke on the English, or a mistake, surely?
 
Peripart said:
there does appear to be a company named AR Werth in South Wales. Either a joke on the English, or a mistake, surely?

I expect that'll be a (rather poor) pun, although if we're talking 'clever' business names, that's a whole other cringeworthy thread on its own...


Back O/T, remember those illuminated revolving things from the late 70s made of thin fibre-optic bundles? When very young, I used to love visiting my grandad in Essex so I could be mesmerised by the shifting colours and gently waving strands (we didn't have a TV). "Now don't touch them!" he would warn me urgently in his rural drawl, "they're shaarrrrp, and they doo traaavel!"
To this day, I have no idea what he actually meant by that, but at the time I was seized by a mental image of one of the fibre strands piercing my finger, detaching itself from the base, and "traaavelling" along my veins until it reached my heart, where it would without doubt kill me in agony. Obviously, the warning worked and I never ever touched that or any other one. I probably wouldn't even touch one now, you know, just in case.
 
RyoHazuki said:
Peripart said:
there does appear to be a company named AR Werth in South Wales. Either a joke on the English, or a mistake, surely?

I expect that'll be a (rather poor) pun, although if we're talking 'clever' business names, that's a whole other cringeworthy thread on its own...


Back O/T, remember those illuminated revolving things from the late 70s made of thin fibre-optic bundles? When very young, I used to love visiting my grandad in Essex so I could be mesmerised by the shifting colours and gently waving strands (we didn't have a TV). "Now don't touch them!" he would warn me urgently in his rural drawl, "they're shaarrrrp, and they doo traaavel!"
To this day, I have no idea what he actually meant by that, but at the time I was seized by a mental image of one of the fibre strands piercing my finger, detaching itself from the base, and "traaavelling" along my veins until it reached my heart, where it would without doubt kill me in agony. Obviously, the warning worked and I never ever touched that or any other one. I probably wouldn't even touch one now, you know, just in case.

My own Dad told me something similar. His point was that the glass fibre would easily pierce the skin and be difficult to extract.

Edit: It's possible there was a grain of truth in there - my Dad taught craft, design and technology and at one point he was teaching the kids how to make stuff with glass fibre. He was also the ROSPA safety adviser to schools in the area.
 
RyoHazuki said:
One for the Cymraeg speakers:

When I first moved to North Wales, I was bemused by the fact that all the local cemeteries had the same name, and wondered how people differentiated between them in conversation. "Oh look" I said to my wife-to-be in the car one day, "there's Mynwent Cemetery again - how do you tell them apart when they're all called that?"
What makes this even more embarrassing, was that I prided myself on my liberal views of the language and could already pronounce most words before I even moved here. Probably should've spent more time on the vocabulary, though.

Had to use Google translate: "graveyard cemetery".
 
My own Dad told me something similar. His point was that the glass fibre would easily pierce the skin and be difficult to extract.

Mathmos Galaxy, which was one of the more expensive versions of the fibreoptic lamp, did actually have a plastic cover over the top, which I suppose might reinforce the idea that they could be dangerous.
 
We had one of those (not the posh one!), I think my folks have still got it packed away somewhere. They got it as a wedding present.

I was always told that bits could break off and get stuck in your foot forever.

Actually, I vaguely remember a family story about someone getting a dog hair stuck in their foot. Never understood that one. :?
 
SameOldVardoger said:
RyoHazuki said:
One for the Cymraeg speakers:

When I first moved to North Wales, I was bemused by the fact that all the local cemeteries had the same name... "there's Mynwent Cemetery again - how do you tell them apart when they're all called that?"

Had to use Google translate: "graveyard cemetery".

I'm sure you've twigged, Vardoger, but the point is that in Wales, almost all signs are bilingual Welsh/English. A lot of roads, for instance, have "ARAF SLOW" painted on them. And just to finish my statement of the bleedin' obvious, in realtion to my own post this time: "Ar werth" is, of course, the Welsh for "for sale", and therefore appears on pretty much every estate agent's sign.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
Actually, I vaguely remember a family story about someone getting a dog hair stuck in their foot. Never understood that one. :?

...and segueing smoothly into another childhood warning, I was always told that recently-shed hairs (human ones at least) would 'take root' and continue to grow in the soles of other people's bare feet and cause all manner of suffering and misery. Perhaps the hair of other mammals does the same thing?
 
Well, I know that tarantulas can "flick" irritating hairs at supposed threats....(Yes, not mammals, but relevant.)
 
Yes, they can, and depending on the species of tarantula and your sensitivities to its hairs they can cause you real discomfort for weeks! I'm particularly sensitive to one of mine, which is a real pain because she's a lovely docile specimen and I'd love to handle her. :(

This is a diagram of the different shaped hairs from different species - you can see how some of them are designed for maximum irritation and staying power!

http://i765.photobucket.com/albums/xx293/mcluskyisms/urticating_hair.jpg
 
garrick92 said:
Babies were made while you slept next to a woman, by your belly-button unknotting itself and snaking over and 'plugging itself in' to her belly button. Babies were therefore a complete surprise to both parents.
Never heard that before! But it makes sense, sort of!

When I was about ten, a school friend and I knew that babies grew in their mother's tummies, but we weren't at all sure how they got out.

So we asked his mother (a dental nurse). And she told us! :shock:

And, two kids later, I have to admit she was right! ;)
 
RyoHazuki said:
One for the Cymraeg speakers:

When I first moved to North Wales, I was bemused by the fact that all the local cemeteries had the same name, and wondered how people differentiated between them in conversation. "Oh look" I said to my wife-to-be in the car one day, "there's Mynwent Cemetery again - how do you tell them apart when they're all called that?"
What makes this even more embarrassing, was that I prided myself on my liberal views of the language and could already pronounce most words before I even moved here. Probably should've spent more time on the vocabulary, though.
This calls to mind an anecdote once read, about a lighter moment in a pretty nasty historical episode: many Polish inhabitants of the parts of, hitherto, Poland annexed by the USSR very early in World War II, being forcibly deported in 1939 / 40 way east into the Soviet Union, and "resettled" in Gulag conditions. This tale occurs in the memoirs of a surviving victim of this undertaking.

The deportees, in their train of cattle wagons, were travelling slowly through western Russia: people were looking out of the meagre "window" spaces and trying to figure out whereabouts they might be. One chap who knew no actual Russian, but was able to transliterate Cyrillic characters, reported seeing on the platform of every station that they went through, a sign which read (Romanised) "KIPYATOK". He remarked, "This is a screwy country -- every bloody village seems to be called Kipyatok." In the end, someone with a better command of Russian explained the mystery. The bewildered gent had been reading not the station nameboards, but the universal sign at each station, denoting the tap which dispensed hot (thus, presumably, sterilised-and-drinkable) water -- in Russian, "kipyatok".
 
That reminds me of a popular tale in N Wales (which I strongly suspect was invented as anti-English propaganda) - an 'expectant' English couple visiting a Welsh castle on holiday were enraptured by the exotic cymraeg words and phrases they saw everywhere, and decided that they would name their forthcoming son after a masculine-sounding word they had seen painted on a small stone building. Upon returning home, they duly named their newborn "Dynion", not realising that the small stone building they had seen was actually a gents' toilet.

Oh, and the irrepressible pedant inside me will not be still until I point out that the only 'wood-timbered' Morris cars were Mprris Travellers: passenger estates based on the Morris Minor saloon. Morris commercial vans were only ever condsructed with metal.

:D
 
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