Misunderstandings you had as a child

[NoEffingWay]

When I was little, there was a florist near my house. It had beautiful displays of flowers, and I used to spend ages looking in the window. What I really wanted to do was save my 20p a week pocket money and buy my Mum some flowers. Not just any flowers but the ones that said ‘Mum’ on them. I was in my teens before I realised these were for funeral cars . Luckily for my mum, there was a sweet shop next door where I spent my 20p on sweets every week so I never even asked!

I used to think you could fast forward and rewind the normal TV, but that didn't really make sense because you might get up to a bit that hadn't been broadcast yet, so I decided they must reset it at midnight, so you could only go up to midnight on the day it was, and then you'd have to wait till the next day for more TV.

Oh my God, me too!!

I thought Sesame Street was a real place and I really, really wanted to go
there.

The song ‘.. can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street..’ echoed and compounded my frustrations.

I dare say I’ve mentioned it before on here, but thinking that the prettiest fairy in my Flower Fairies book was the Fuck-seeya Fairy. Until I actually said it one day, and was hastily corrected by an aunt…

which is sort of fair enough as it was named after a man called Fuchs so really ought to be pronounced Fuchs -ia.

I thought I was going to be wheeled off to a theatre to watch a play to take my mind off the operation I was having.

For a while I thought the $ symbol meant something bad - parents were watching a news program which had one appear as some sort of graphic and they tut-tutted

I used to think Australia was 6 months ahead of us, so if it was January in the UK, it would be July in Australia. And so if you had just turned 6 in the UK and went on holiday to Australia, you’d suddenly be 6 and a half.

And so you should be NINETEEN! 😆

I went to a catholic school and there was a lot of talk about Protestants. I remember watching the bill on tv and getting confused as to why women were being arrested for not being Catholic.

😂😂😂

😄

When I was in the sixth form I was still under the impression that people were still while they had sex. He inserted it in and then they lay there for a bit. I think because of seeing diagrams in books.
My kids were shown a video with a cartoon of it in about year 5 (age 9-10) so wouldn't have that misunderstanding

I thought this too, I blame neighbours, wasn’t that broadcast here 6 months later?

I thought sanitary pads were toilet roll for fancy grown up ladies so when I deemed myself old enough (probably about 6) i started helping myself to them to wipe my bottom and flushed them

Oh dear

These posts are fabulous. My sides are sore laughing. Just brilliant 🤣😂🤣😂

You must have watched Spaceballs, where the villains fast forward through the video cassette of Spaceballs, to look ahead find out where the good guys are. "Instant cassettes! They're out in stores before the movie is finished."

We lived under a flight path and I though that airplane noise was just the noise the sky made. I remember we stayed with some friends of my parents who lived in rural Dorset and I asked why their sky didn't make a noise like ours.

@PiggieWig The phrase "trespassers will be prosecuted" appears in a lot of children's stories, such as The Selfish Giant. I thought that they were very long words to be in children's stories. There's a computer game with a level called Hell, with the sign "we do not forgive those who trespass against us!".

I remember hearing that a party game was going to be "pin the tail on the donkey". It thought this would be painful for the donkey, so I asked about it. I was told that it was a picture of a donkey, and I had to try and put the tail in the right place. I was still a bit puzzled, as this sounded easy. Nobody said that Blu-tack would be used instead of a pin, or that I would be blindfolded!

Not so much a childhood misunderstanding, but the way a story was cunningly told, with things that would go over the children's heads. My grandparents had a lovely record of The Ugly Duckling, narrated by a young Robert Hardy (Minister of Magic in Harry Potter), who says "it was then that I had to go on a long business trip, right down to Egypt, and it wasn't until the following spring that I arrived back in Denmark." It's only on hearing this more recently that I realised that "business trip to Egypt" meant like a migrating bird, and that Denmark was the author Hans Andersen's home.

I used to think they got switched on at night like lampposts. I was embarrassingly well into my 40s before that one was explained to me

Until she was 17 DD2 assumed that journeys (even short, local ones) always took longer coming back due to the rotation of the Earth.

Worryingly, when she casually mentioned this she had recently won the Maths Prize at her grammar school!

I used to think that everyone lived till they were 100, at which point they turned blue, fell over and died. No idea where that one came from

I used to think that the wooden crosses in some building sites or roadworks (which I now know are to indicate site levels) were to mark the graves of dead builders!

I also thought that ‘pedestrian’ was a nationality (like Australian!) when I saw the ‘caution, pedestrians’ signs in car parks, I always wondered why they didn’t understand road safety!

I used to call Mojos ‘Orows’ because I was obviously holding them upside down for years.

I asked my dad where he was going?
I'm away to see a man about a dog.
I really thought I was getting a pet dog.
Not knowing it was an adult term for 'mind your own business'.
No dogs involved..boo.