What do you remember from your childhood that you now realise you really misunderstood?

givemushypeasachance · 24/01/2025

And I thought the motorway road sign symbol was a monster or creature of some kind, with big legs.

Oh God! Are you my eldest sister? She put Mr in terror of the giants, which would try to stamp on the cars, when I was about 4.

as you approach the middle, you look left again

thankfully not! scary though.

So did I! 😁

Another rhyme with a grisly origin is:
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
a pocket full of posies:
Atishoo, Atishoo,
We all fall down.

It refers to people sneezing and falling down dead from a disease (I think The Plague), one of the symptoms being a ring of spots on the face.

Was well into adulthood before I realised the euro tunnel wasn't a big glass aquarium you drove through.
Also thought heavy plant crossing meant a tree would cross the road.

There are so many violent ones. I didn't really think about it till I had my own kids and started reading them nursery rhymes, and then I thought WTF?!

A lot of them have some historical reference, like Goosey Goosey Gander, which probably relates to persecution of Catholics in the 17th century.

Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn't say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

I have only just looked up the origin of the Three Blind Mice - it seems this is also likely to be religious, this time persecution of Protestants by Queen Mary I.

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice?

Strange topics for children's rhymes though!

My parent's friends had a monkey puzzle tree in their garden and I genuinely believed it would grow jigsaw puzzles in a monkey design. I would check it really carefully everytime we went to their for a BBQ but alas, no free puzzles every grew

@DuesToTheDirt Oh yes, kids' poems and stories can be really nasty. In the lovely book "Each peach pear plum", consider the fate of Baby Bunting, who is sleeping in a cradle hanging from a tree branch; and one of the Three Bears accidentally shoots through the rope, causing the cradle to fall into the river, and drift away. Fortunately, he is rescued by the Three Bears, but it's the sort of thing that the children wouldn't notice, but the adults most certainly would! And then of course there are the original fairy tales, before they were toned down for the twentieth century.

When I was seven, I couldn't understand why my parents were so horrified that I had proudly read Roald Dahl's "George's Marvellous Medicine" to my grandmother. 😳

What??!
I didn’t grow up in this country, thanks god!!
I need to go read about the blind mice! Why would someone cut their tails off 😭

I don’t get it either! There’s a few things in this thread I don’t get, which is worrying 😀😀

@Gabitule I used to think that you had to stop walking if you saw a red traffic light. And when I knew better, I used to get really annoyed when adults crossed at the red man. In my childhood, there were still some old traffic lights on black and white poles, with "stop" written in the red light. I wondered why some had this, and some didn't.

On a pedestrian crossing in my town now, somebody got the red and green man the wrong way round, or they ran out of red man stencils. For the red man, a green man stencil has clearly been used, with one of the walking legs blocked out, so that it kind of looks like a standing man (and it does show red). I need to take a photo of it, and attach it.

I have but not watched it in years. But I genuinely believed it was a gold plated chequebook…🙈🙈

Kids poem, haha. You're familiar with nursery rhymes, yes? The three blind mice who had their tails cut off? The bough breaking and the cradle falling? Take him by the left leg and throw him down the stairs? It's a wonder we didn't all grow up traumatised.

I got that, but if a vehicle might appear from the right while we look left, then what’s the point of looking right in the first place just to look again. It saves time to look left and then right just before we step on the road

And I’ve also just learned that little piggy didn’t just go shopping in the market?!! He was taken there to be killed?! Are you guys sure this is correct? It’s a kids poem, maybe he did go shopping to the market 😮

Because a vehicle will be coming from your right (if you're in the UK). So you look right first of all, then if it's all clear you look left. Then before crossing the road you look right again, to double check that a vehicle hasn't appeared in the time it took you to look left.

I once read about an actor who talked about his estranged actress wife. I thought it was quite cruel to tell everyone about her mental state, which should have been kept private. Every time I saw her on television for quite a few years I thought that she managed to hide her illness very well.

Omg, I’m in my 40s and I’m actually learning new things from this thread. This is what ‘helping with enquiries’ means, right?? They are suspects! 😀

At junior school, long long ago , we did a lot of exercises from a book called First Aid in English, it had a cross on the front. I found the title very confusing, first aid in my mind was about helping people who had an accident.

From said book; what is the feminine of executor? I knew the answer, executrix. I thought that an executor was a man who chopped off people's heads so an executrix was obviously that rare woman employed to do the same.

Why not just look left then right and then cross? Why the need for the right, left, right dance?

I am not from the UK. We were just told ‘’look both ways’’

We had two elderly ladies at church who lived together. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid.
They used to come to us at Christmas and play KerPlunk.

Love this thread!

I was learning about traffic lights (in a town where we didn’t have any). I knew that the green light meant ‘go’ and the red light meant ‘stop’. But I couldn’t understand why both the cars and the pedestrians went on green and stopped on red, when it would have made more sense for cars to go on green and pedestrians on red or viceversa. I just couldn’t figure out how it worked in practice and wondered why adults were so stupid. It drove me crazy trying to figure it out.
I didnt realise they were following different traffic lights.

I was to young to know anything about sex. I thought that, to make babies, people had to get into bed naked. I remember thinking that I wished it wasn’t so easy to make babies because one day I might want to be in bed naked with a man but without making a baby. I remember thinking that it would have been better if people had to touch bellybuttons to make babies and not just get naked together.

Have you ever watched the programme? they show it at the end.

Not even this?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5d/d8/08/5dd808b2f84c10aaa37419a75b97ae39.jpg