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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

Ah, the dangers of unlikely things!

This stirred a memory from the reading of Peter Pan in early childhood: Captain Hook plans to poison the lost boys. He sets a cake as bait on Marooners’ Rock in Mermaid’s Lagoon. This is to entice the boys, because he thinks that no boy could resist such a delicacy. “They will find the cake and they will gobble it up, because, having no mother, they don’t know how dangerous ‘tis to eat rich damp cake”

This made me wonder momentarily if my Maiden Aunts were evil for plying us with rich almond cake. The fear was set aside when other relatives would tell us that fresh bread was bad for our insides. We could spot the self-interest in that one! 8)
 
I remember my Mom's Mom convincing me that coconut-filled chocolate candies "tasted absolutely horrible" and were even mildly poisonous. She'd then get rid of the evidence through the supreme self-sacrifice of plopping the evil thing in her mouth and eating it.

I couldn't figure out why men gave their sweethearts bottles of TOILET water.

And like millions of other small boys I firmly believed that if you spread vanishing cream on youself you'd almost immedia
 
Well the vanishing-cream thing turned up regularly in cartoons. It was only quite late in life that I learned it was just a play on words, having seen Bugs Bunny and others use the magic kind so often.

More on the history of the Pond's product here

Their Cold Cream was familiar enough over here. :)
 
Cold cream was invented by a chemist named Henry Tetlow, to whom women should burn incense at least once a day.

Because those foundations which cold cream totally (and almost immediately) replaced had all been LEAD-based.
 
Can you still get cold cream? Or has it been replaced with new ones at 50 times the price but with added aqua and some meaningless scientific-but-natural compound?

I just ask because my Mum used cold cream during the winter and I always wondered why she didn't have hot cream for the summer.

As for the Christmas smell... the whiff of the radiators at school being turned on at the beginning of December (come heatwave or artic gale) - burning dust with a slight bouquet of old socks and melting crayons :D

Jane.
 
mejane1 said:
[M]y Mum used cold cream during the winter and I always wondered why she didn't have hot cream for the summer.
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You belong here. <g>
 
mejane1 said:
Can you still get cold cream? Or has it been replaced with new ones at 50 times the price but with added aqua and some meaningless scientific-but-natural compound?

I just ask because my Mum used cold cream during the winter and I always wondered why she didn't have hot cream for the summer.

As for the Christmas smell... the whiff of the radiators at school being turned on at the beginning of December (come heatwave or artic gale) - burning dust with a slight bouquet of old socks and melting crayons :D

Jane.
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I think Boots still keep up selling old lines of traditional stuff like cold cream; the big round glass jars look almost appetising.
My radiators smell funny when I put them on; old baking dust and stuff. Strangely it doesn't remind me of anything though as my childhood house never had heating!
 
Oh yeah, and I thought that song went Moon River, wider than the Nile...

Made perfect sense.
 
I was talking to my sister today and she said that she believed that if you slept with your hands under your pillow you would have nightmares. She also believed that if you wanted to wake up at a specific time then you should bang your head againt a wall the number of times of the hour that you wanted to wake up e.g you wanted to wake up at 07:00 then you banged your head 7 times. She claims that I told her that...I would NEVER take advantage of my older sister status and feed such untruths to a sibling :twisted:

Not something that I believed as a child more something that really annoyed me. I loved "the adventure game" which had the same puzzles on it each week. I could not understand why if a particular celebrity was going to be on the adventure game why they did not watch it the previous week and know how to solve all the puzzles
 
Delores_de_Syn said:
I was talking to my sister today and she said that she believed that if you slept with your hands under your pillow you would have nightmares. She also believed that if you wanted to wake up at a specific time then you should bang your head againt a wall the number of times of the hour that you wanted to wake up e.g you wanted to wake up at 07:00 then you banged your head 7 times. She claims that I told her that...I would NEVER take advantage of my older sister status and feed such untruths to a sibling :twisted:
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I've heard of the head banging trick too, only it was on the pillow not the wall, never tried it though.
 
gncxx said:
Delores_de_Syn said:
She also believed that if you wanted to wake up at a specific time then you should bang your head againt a wall the number of times of the hour that you wanted to wake up e.g you wanted to wake up at 07:00 then you banged your head 7 times. She claims that I told her that...I would NEVER take advantage of my older sister status and feed such untruths to a sibling :twisted:
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I've heard of the head banging trick too, only it was on the pillow not the wall, never tried it though.
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I've done it. It works...

Sometimes. :roll:
 
I'm a lazy sleeper, but I do find that if I really need to wake up at a specific time, I do.
 
Delores_de_Syn said:
She claims that I told her that...I would NEVER take advantage of my older sister status and feed such untruths to a sibling
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Then whatever's the use of BEING an older sibling?
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Delores_de_Syn said:
She claims that I told her that...I would NEVER take advantage of my older sister status and feed such untruths to a sibling
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Then whatever's the use of BEING an older sibling?
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Too true....as the oldest sibling (with a younger brother and sister) I spent my childhood taking advantage of my older status and making both my brother and my sister do stupid things and believe even stupider things...

...but luckily Im over that now!!.... :roll:

...or am I?? :twisted: ;)
 
I regularly take advantage of my sibling status..s'not my fault she so gullible.. :twisted:
 
i believed that cats and do9s were the same species-- cats were the females (felines, hey) and do9s were the males.
 
I was about 6, when my cousin convinced me that when babies were born that they had to be molded into shape much like plasticine. Not only that, they were originally colourless and then had to be painted the correct colour to match their parents etc. My cousin is now a Biology teacher, wonder what she's teaching her pupils now! :)
 
This isn't from my childhood, but in Vic Reeve's autobiography he mentions that as a young boy just getting into music, he believed "lead," as in "lead guitar" was pronounced "led," and referred to the fact that the bands he liked played "heavy metal." I thought that was sweet.
 
kneesox1 said:
i believed that cats and do9s were the same species-- cats were the females (felines, hey) and do9s were the males.
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You mean it doesn't work that way? Oh dear! This may explain why my dog-breeding business went bust....
 
emmbob said:
....he believed "lead," as in "lead guitar" was pronounced "led"....
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I STILL have problems with lead, 'leed' and led.

P. S. If an orchestral conductor in Leeds lost his baton, could he still lead with a lead pencil?
 
1) That if you swallowed chewing gum, it stuck to your heart and you died

2) That raining cats and dogs was a literal term and I couldn't understand never being able to see any falling from the sky

3) That the red devils was in fact a term used to refer to the devil and he lived behind the curtains of the hall/cafeteria in my primary school (many tearful lunchtimes spent in there)

4) That if you took too long sitting on the toilet, the toilet monster would get you

5) That all men are b**t***s - oh, yeah, that one IS true

I've heard of the head banging trick too, only it was on the pillow not the wall, never tried it though.


I've done it. It works...
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Me too and it works. And I didn't join in April, I joined in August 2003 but can't work out what happened, oh yeah, life got in the way and I haven't been here for sometime...
 
I believed that attendees at "board meetings" beat each other silly with two by fours.
 
I used to ask my stepmum stuff, like "can I have some sweets?", and she'd say "Depends."
I always thought she was talking about pens.
 
H_James said:
I used to ask my stepmum stuff, like "can I have some sweets?", and she'd say "Depends." I always thought she was talking about pens.
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I could never understand as a kid while people who moved into my Northern Kentucky hometown from much more rural areas often spoke of "ink pens." What other kinds of pens are there? (Surely nobody's going to confuse writing instruments with pig sties?)

If wasn't until years later that I realized that they'd said "ink PINS" to differentiate between them and "straight pins," "bobby pins," "safety pins" and so on.

Reminds me of the story of the old mountaineer writing a letter who asked his son, who'd just graduated college, how to spell a certain word.


"Boy," he asked, "how do you spell theyit thar word 'rat'?"

"Pater," came the reply, "you spell 'rat' 'r....a....t.'"

"Son," the old man rejoined, "Ah dun't mean theyit mousey kind o' rat. Ah mean 'rat' as in 'rat now!'"
 
I remember how confused I became as a small child when I first read that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was born in....Georgia.
 
As I pointed out earlier today on another thread, as a small child I believed that Mickey Mouse's nephews were the sons of Donald and Daisy Duck, while Donald's nephews were the sons of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

This should give you some dim idea of why I never became a geneticist.
 
Someone just told me she thought that there were little men in the toaster, who made the toast.
 
I thought that there were little men inside my body that carried out all the physiological functions.

Of course there must have been even littler men inside those little men and so on, like those pictures-within-a-picture that go on forever.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
I thought that there were little men inside my body that carried out all the physiological functions.
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This is true - have you never read The Numskulls?
 
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