Asklemmy

I thought space rockets had to wait for. Ight to go into space. If they took off during the day whey would just go into the blue sky like planes do.

I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years

I thought 'tomorrow' was a day of the week. So when my mom would say we'd go somewhere 'tomorrow' I'd ask her every day if it was tomorrow yet, and she'd say no, and I'd keep waiting.

I hadn't had "the talk" and assembled my own understanding about marriage = "the ability to touch each other's private parts."

I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house's upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and "tag" touch the groom's crotch and then pull her dress up, and... at that point I didn't really understand what she would "have" under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically "tag you're it" style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

I didn't have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn't associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

I believed that for very small creatures (like ants) time was faster.

In kindergarden, when one kid was about to hit another, the other kid would say "if you hit me, you have to pay the health insurance!". None of us had any idea what that could mean, and I have no idea where that idea came from, but it worked, because to us, that sounded bad.

Some of my class mates thought that wrestling was real, and a few of them thought there was a place in the US where it was legally possible to kill a man during a wrestling match. They were quite offended when I told them how ridiculous that notion sounded to me.

For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.

It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn't had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?

I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.

One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan

That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.

English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression "search all nooks and crannies", but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.

Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!

I grew up with a family that didn't have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn't spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn't get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system .... I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

I'm Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn't have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle ... but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.

That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.

Bonus: My kid doesn't believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.

My parents didn't specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom's from a culture that doesn't traditionally celebrate Christmas.

So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman's X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

Growing up, we had a neighbor in the Air national guard who was a boom operator on KC-135 refuelers, meaning he controlled the boom that comes out the back of the airplane and transfers fuel to other aircraft. The boom operator lays face down on a bench and looks out a window in the back of the plane to control the boom.

When I learned that they "operate on their belly", I somehow interpreted that to mean he performed medical operations on people's bellies.

It didn't even make sense to me at the time but I figured there must be some special reason that the operation had to be done while airborne and I was impressed that our neighbor was not only a doctor but an airborne surgeon who specialized in this one belly surgery that couldn't be done on the ground.

That a blowjob involved the act of physically blowing air on the penis. When I found out it actually involved sucking, I was like, "Oooh...yeah that sounds much more pleasurable."

That adults had it figured out.

That average people actually care about anything but themselves.

That there is justice in the world.

When adults said things like "In this day and age, nobody says please and thankyou any more", I misinterpreted "this day and age" as "The Stayan Age", which was our current age, which obviously followed on from Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.

That the Empire State Building is a restaurant named Empire Steak Building.

When I was little, I thought that "cash back" meant that the clerk literally just handed you money out of the register if you wanted it.

I assumed that most people were honest and only took the cash if they needed it. I didn't know that it came out of your checking account lol.

That every time people had sex, the woman became pregnant. I thought that every sex scene in a film meant the film had to be stopped for 9 months until the actress could give birth.

That kissing is how you become pregnant. No, really.

When I was a young lad I thought milk was cow pee and was super confused by the world.

Not me but really funny - when my mom was little she thought white people weren't real. She thought they were made up for tv

There’s a highway that formed a loop around the city where I grew up and we used it pretty regularly, but mostly only the western half (since we lived on the west side of town). My parents explained the concept to me that it had “belt” in its name because it circled around the city like a belt goes around a person. This idea intrigued me and I eventually asked my parents if someday we could drive all the way around it. My dad seemed kind of surprised but said we could sometime. I got excited and started planning for things we would need, like a tent and food, since it would obviously take a long time.

The highway’s only about 25 miles/40 kilometers long.

That male orgasm was painful. I got this idea from seeing their o-face somewhere and assuming it indicated pain.

I used to think that there was a country called Cyclopedia, that was full of all kinds of fascinating things. I had a book all about it called "In Cyclopedia".

I scraped my knee and thought that putting skin-coloured paint on it would heal it

That a bon fire was a "bomb" fire and therefore, very loud and very dangerous.

That the world used to be black and white. I once asked how the people making The Wizard of Oz knew when the world was going to change, so they could film the movie correctly.

I thought propeller planes worked by spinning so fast that they temporarily moved the gravity out of the way so the plane could fly.

That cats and dogs were the same animal, the cats were the girls and the dogs were the boys

I ran up to my mom once, completely serious and said, "Mom! I know why all fat people are short. They use up all their skin!"

I felt like a genius until she laughed so hard she fell on the floor and peed a little.

that my grandparents remembered middle ages or even the dinosaurs

I used to think those coins in the fountain at the mall were just money people wanted to get rid of. One day, little me tried getting away with a skirt full of coins and got in trouble.

I mean, to be fair, a coin on the ground is fair game, and they don't make these "unspoken rules" clear enough, so I couldn't imagine a coin in a fountain not being free to just pick up.

There was a park near my house where often cops would sit to catch speeders. Driving past one day, I didn't see a cop and I told my parents I was surprised by this. My folks told me that they were there, just undercover. I asked where, and they pointed to a woman walking a dog and they told me it was an undercover speed dog. For years I'd point out suspected speed dogs when we'd drive places. I am not a smart man.

Tigers are female lions.