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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

Well i think mine are rather boring. Well i thought the people on tv actually lived inside my tv i was about 4 or so i guess. well especially bob barker. oh and i called the civil was the silver war for years. well and when i was about 7 or so i asked my grandmother what it had been like during the civil war and she got very red in the face and mad (my grandmother lied about her age for years and i wasn't allowed to call her grandma or anything as she was to "young" young to be a grandmother) so you can imagine this went over like a lead balloon....i really think her life long dislike of me has its roots in that question.(hehe) well and the usual if you eat poprocks and drink soda you will explode.
 
My great-grandmother was a very small ancient woman who was pretty much bedridden. I vaguely understood from the adults' talk that she would eventually be 'passing away'.

My grandparents were of larger size than my great-grandmother, but not so large as my parents. I was smallest of all, but I understood I would be growing up to a size like the other adults ...

Mixing these basic facts together, my circa 4- or 5-year-old self generated this hypothesis:

Babies grow up to a peak adult size at around 30 - 40 years of age. After that a progressive 'shrinkage' sets in, resulting in people of very advanced ages (e.g., 90+ like my great-grandmother) becoming almost child-sized again.

I assumed that (barring death via illness or accident) a sufficiently old person would continue shrinking until they basically 'popped out of existence' in their bed ...
 
I'm hamster-sitting and about an hour ago I accidentally dropped it while I was cleaning it out.

The Hammy is fine but it reminded me of when I was younger, being told by numerous relatives and including my idol at the time - a brother's ex-GF - that if you held a hamster by its tail, its eyes would drop out.

I imagined hamster's eyes as being like two apple-pips that could come out at any time if I held them the wrong way.

It was a while before someone told me that they were joshing me. On one hand, I still have that mental image but at least it made me take more care with handling the hamsters and I didn't even dare try it out to see if it did happen or not...
 
When I was very young, I thought that my Dad was Graeme Garden - they both looked very similar in the mid 1970s. I sort of knew that they weren't actually the same man, but when my Dad went out to work, I assumed that he went to an office just like the one in the Goodies, had adventures and rode about on a trandem with his own Tim and Bill stand-ins. I'd only actually seen the Goodies a couple of times, when I was allowed to stay up late because of illness, but it must have made an impression.

A couple of years later on, when I'd found, much to my disappointment, that he was a primary school teacher, he'd often make references to a mysterious entity called "the Boss", obviously the headmaster. Somehow, I imagined that the Boss was a vampire, who only came out after the school had closed, and stalked the corridors at night. Eventually I sussed out that the Boss's real name was Dicky Lowe, but I was still terrified in top infants when we were told that Mr Lowe would be paying a visit to talk to us about going up to the "big school" next door. Somewhat relieved when he turned out to be, not a vampire, but a stern-looking old man with a certain resemblance to Sam the American Eagle in the Muppet Show.

I also used to think that TV, late at night, showed nothing but nude people and horror films. This was based on (a) whenever I woke up late on, and went into the living room, there always seemed to be some Hammer or Amicus potboiler on the telly, swiftly switched off by apparently guilty parents, and (b) I was told that I couldn't watch Monty Python's Flying Circus, because it featured "A bare man playing an organ." This last one gave me a strange image of Monty Python well into the 70s - I thought it was a real circus, with elephants, clowns etc, but with musical interludes from the bare man!

Just remembered another one, probably brought on by early exposure to the film of Jason and the Argonauts. I thought that skeletons were alive, could walk around, and were a bit nasty, which is why no one ever talked about it. Bones, skulls and the like, seen on news reports or in museums, were actually dead skeletons. I think I went into denial for a while after I found out that we all had skeletons inside us!
 
my mum used to tell me and my sister that every time we whistled indoors that a sailor would die. She insists now she didnt but I can clearly remember it - then came a stressed childhood telling schoolmates not to whistle and then giving them the reason. Oh dear. Naughty mother :roll:
 
It is a sailor's superstition that whistling will bring bad luck - specifically, you can whistle up a storm.
 
thats good to know and of course it makes sense now. I'll have to see who is registered on friends reunited and show them all that I wasnt the strange little red head that used to ask them not to kill sailors for no reason....... :yabba:
 
For some reason...when younger, I always thought that the White House was in the state of Washington (and not Washington DC) and thinking "How the hell did the British army get that far?." :oops:
 
johnnyboy1968 said:
I also used to think that TV, late at night, showed nothing but nude people and horror films.
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..or the Sci Fi channel as it's now known :).

I remembered another one whilst mowing the lawn last week - I used to believe, for some reason, that lawns were only the tips of huge plants, and blades of grass were hundreds of feet long and gradually pushed their way through the soil.
 
I used to think that only I could see the moon when it was up during the day.

Why? Because no books that I read ever mentioned the moon being visible in a blue sky. Because no person I was ever around, when the moon was up during the day, ever remarked upon it. So I assumed that I was the only one who could see it.

And you know, I still have _never_ read any reference in fiction or popular nonfiction to seeing the moon in the daylight sky.
 
I have, though I can't source it for you. My impression is of a Marguerite Henry book, but I've lost all context and it could have been anything with a boy protagonist. The moon that rises before sundown is called "the Children's Moon" because the children are sent to bed so early it's the only moon they ever see.

I'll put it in a book once, just for you.
 
Strangely enough I have no memory of ever noticing the Moon in the daytime before I'd reached the "advanced" age of nine or ten, and my first thought then was that something had gone terribly awry with the Natural Order of Things.
 
stuneville said:
johnnyboy1968 said:
I also used to think that TV, late at night, showed nothing but nude people and horror films.
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..or the Sci Fi channel as it's now known :).
.
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LOL last night I was flicking throughn the cable channel index when I happened to see what the Horror Channel were showing...
'Humanoids From The Deep'... followed by 'Nude For Satan'
Those Oscar nominations must have rolled in :shock:
 
PortaCelt said:
And you know, I still have _never_ read any reference in fiction or popular nonfiction to seeing the moon in the daylight sky.
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Many modern authors are lousy astronomers, unfortunately!

I have probably wittered on about this many times before. Once upon a time, before streetlights were common, everyone was familiar with the phases of the moon. But nowadays you're likely to read about all sorts of impossiblilities, like a crescent moon rising in the middle of the night.

I've never heard of the children's moon before, but that could be anything from new moon to full moon (the full moon rises at sunset).

The new moon is already in the sky, towards the west, when the sun sets, and the intermediate phases will appear in in-between positions (ie, almost anywhere from West to East).

PeniG, check with an astronomer before you go to press!
 
Whenever I see the Moon during the day it always reminds me of infants and junior school and Autumn. Crisp, cold days that usually smelled of burning leaves (from gardeners tidying up their plots, I wasn't a juvenile arsonist honest!) and cola-flavoured Chewitts ;)

I do also recall pointing out the Moon to my olds and vice versa on many an occasion.
 
I used to always be perplexed by the Harvest Festival we celebrated at school (just me?). I had no clear understanding of what the theme was. We sang hymns about corn and the like and had a corn-doll in the hall but ultimately we seemed to collect tinned food for pensioners. To my small mind these events were not appropriately connected. Should we not give them bags of grain?

Does this celebration still exist, is it a Christian thing? My school was a fairly low-key C of E Primary school... It sounds more pagan the more I think of it.

My favourite hymn was: When A Knight Won His Spurs, which i used to taunt my father with: When Spurs won their matches, in the stories of old....

So now you know.
 
theyithian said:
...Does this celebration (Harvest Festival) still exist, is it a Christian thing? My school was a fairly low-key C of E Primary school... It sounds more pagan the more i think of it.
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Certainly does, though my younger son's primary school ones became steadily more secular year on year, with the emphasis heavily on the tinned food collection and being thankful that we have food.

Yes, it was a Pagan festival originally. Another takeover by Christian Acquisitions (Celebration Division) Ltd.
 
TheQuixote said:
Crisp, cold days that usually smelled of burning leaves (from gardeners tidying up their plots, I wasn't a juvenile arsonist honest!)....
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That's an odor of which modern kids have been deprived and I find that extremely sad.
 
theyithian said:
We sang hymns about corn and the like....
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I long believed (don't ask how long) that "Bringing in the Sheaths" was "Bringing in the SHEEP."
 
OldTimeRadio said:
... I long believed (don't ask how long) that "Bringing in the Sheaths" was "Bringing in the SHEEP."
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It can't have been long ago - 'Bringing in the Sheaths' was a satirical line used in reference to condoms and safe sex circa the mid-to-late 1980's ...

... Based, of course, on the 1874 Protestant hymn 'Bringing in the *Sheaves*' .... :lol:
 
stuneville said:
theyithian said:
...Does this celebration (Harvest Festival) still exist, is it a Christian thing? My school was a fairly low-key C of E Primary school... It sounds more pagan the more i think of it.
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Certainly does, though my younger son's primary school ones became steadily more secular year on year, with the emphasis heavily on the tinned food collection and being thankful that we have food.

Yes, it was a Pagan festival originally. Another takeover by Christian Acquisitions (Celebration Division) Ltd.
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Yeah, my nephew's junior school still collects tins, fruit and veg and distribute it to the elderly population in that area although they don't focus on the christian element to the festival that we had drilled into us when I was in juniors. My mother has had what we would have once called a Harvest festival hamper for the past couple of years from the school.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Based, of course, on the 1874 Protestant hymn 'Bringing in the *Sheaves*' .... :lol:
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"Sheaves" is of course what I intended to write.

You can tell I was raised Catholic rather than Protestant.

Shaves? Shafts? Shoves? Sheets? Sheds? Shreves?
 
TheQuixote wrote:
Crisp, cold days that usually smelled of burning leaves (from gardeners tidying up their plots, I wasn't a juvenile arsonist honest!)....


That's an odor of which modern kids have been deprived and I find that extremely sad.
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I can still smell it - it usually emerges around Autumn, and I call it - imaginitively enough - the 'Autumn smell'. Helps if you live near an allotment, where a lot of plot-holders begin having bonfires at this time of year.

Slighty OT - am I the only one who can smell Christmas coming? It usually starts at the end of November/early December, and is similar to the Autumn smell, but somehow crisper. It was generally stronger when it got dark - a frosty, slightly smoky scent; generally hard to describe, except that it was 'Christmassy'. I was really sensitive to it as a kid, but don't smell it so much now.
 
I just remembered mine. When I was very young I used to think that the term "Beatle" means anybody with a hairstyle like the beatles had. So I would walk in town with my mum and point at somebody, declaring "look its a beatle".
:roll:
 
My dad used to tell me horror tales of people dropping dead from the unlikeliest things, to scare me out of doing them. Typical was "there was a boy recently who drank his orange squash as quickly as you just did, and he died on the spot" ... I can't do anything these days.

I used to think that in the past, when there were cowboys in America, there were knights in armour in England. That must have come from all the 'fifties films the BBC used to show on Sunday afternoons, which made the wild west and the court of king Arthur look contemporaneous (ie. both taking place in about 1952).

I thought wrinkles could be repaired with Polyfilla, and suggested to my Nan that she try it out.

I thought "Captain of Your Ship" by Reparata and the Del-Rons was the first pop record ever made .... ?!?
 
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