Things you used to think and now can't quite believe you did

Up to last year I thought dragons were real but had become extinct.

How do you pronounce banal then? ??

I didn't realise Middlesex was London until recently! I'm 33 and have a doctorate! Also when I was little I thought the sun was turned on and off by a whopping great big light switch..
To let was Toilet with the "i" missing.
My mum said once "I swear by my new cooker" and I imagined her standing next to it reeling off expletives!

I thought condoms in the gutters of lay-bys were what lorry drivers put on their willies so that they could pee while driving along and then discard them when the stop for a break.

I thought Cognito was a place. X went to the shops incognito.

My brother when watching a b&w film where the hero was diffusing a bomb and had to cut the red wire "but how will he know? They're both grey"

There were all sorts of things that mysteriously had two names for them, one of which I only heard spoken aloud, and the other written down:

"yot" and "yakt" (yacht)
"ballay" and "ballett" (ballet)
"key" and "quway" (quay)
"jail" and "gay-ol" (gaol)

The list was quite long!

I thought oral sex meant snogging, well into my early teens. I thought I'd done oral sex during a game of spin the bottle at a sleepover aged 13. A very kind friend later explained to me I hadn't. Phew.

I remember overhearing my mum having a conversation about a friend who had 'stopped drinking' I barged into the room to inform them that they would die without water and they must ring their friend immediately to tell them.

I thought Australia was a bandstand.

As a child, I thought there was a gorilla and a crocodile that lived under my bed that were trying to get me in my sleep. One day my mother told me that I didn't need to be scared anymore because she had sent the scary beasts away to live in Australia.

I had no idea what Australia was, but in my head it was a giant brass bandstand in the middle of a desert and it had lush red velvet carpet throughout. It was filled with hundreds of scary creatures that had been banished there by all of the mothers of the world.

A holiday down under still does not appeal

I thought all cats were female and all dogs male.
Funniest / saddest though is that I heard about death row on the news and thought it was like Coronation Street, I pictured a row of terraced houses where criminals lived happily until they were guillotined (my mum told me a lot about Henry the 8th).

As a small child I used to try to go sleep lying on my front. My reasoning was that if an intruder tried to murder me, being stabbed in the back would hurt less than being stabbed in the heart.

I also thought that when you ate food it passed onto a conveyor belt that travelled through your insides, which were lined with shelves, like a library. Little homunculi lived inside me and would sort the food into it's different components: bread, biscuits, cabbage etc and put it on the appropriate shelf.

Didn't learn about the Arkansaw/Arkansas thing until I was well into my 40s and didn't know the reason until this thread

I thought "banal" was pronounced "baynel" - until my early 30's

And when little i thought cats were girls and dogs were boys and they would have litters of cats and dogs

I used to think that people were moving so fast that it looked like they were standing still in front of you. I used to look from side to side when my mum was sitting on the couch to see if I could see a blur from her shooting from one side of the room to the other, whilst holding a conversation with me

That reminds me Camel of someone i knew - cambridge uni student and doing STEM subject - who hadn't realised until university that the earth went round the sun not the other way round.

Also the swimming pool thing, but green dye for me. I'm sure this was true in the US?
And, that Elizabeth 1st was Elizabeth II's mum.

As a kid I thought that if I couldn't see something, no-one else could either. I hated my little brother, so if I saw something nice, a cute animal, for example, I would tightly shut my eyes so he wouldn't see it either. I spent whole episodes of favourite TV programmes with my eyes pointedly closed until eventually my mum asked what was going on.

I had no idea about Eeyore until I read this thread.

Me too Ottos! Even while I was pregnant in my thirties Also thought the placenta and the umbilical cord were different words for the same thing until I gave birth

I grew up where there weren't any squirrels. Having only seen them in books etc. I thought they were the size of rabbits. When finally I did see one I was amazed they were so small. When I mentioned this to DH after we were married he inquired how something the size of a rabbit would be able to leap through trees without breaking them - hadn't thought of that!

MrsW "can't stand gravy" haha haha fantastic

I thought that too Otto

Brilliant thread, I've had to de-lurk just to post this.

I didn't really pay it much thought, but if it ever crossed my mind, I used to think that the baby's umbilical cord was attached to the inside of the mum's bellybutton, and it sort of tethered the baby in place.

I thought for a long time that when a tennis player was serving at Wimbledon and the ball hit the line and "bleeped" out, the bbc were bleeping out the player's swearing.

Eeyore....! Heehaw well I never.

So prunes are plums - didn't know that either.

I thought the man in Frost, only fools and horses and darling buds of May were all different actors well into my 30s!

I also thought the wombles were common and used to wonder why they sang about it.

Alsatians and alastians were two different breeds of dog. The latter being the long haired type (had never heard of a German shepherd)!