Things that you've thought that were in fact absurd

[Pacificplaza]

Inspired by another current thread: what things have you thought to yourself, and accepted as true, which on telling someone else have quickly transpired to be completely ridiculous?

E.g: I always thought that when drinking a hot beverage, that the misty effect observed should you happen to glance down into the cup was your EYEBALLS getting STEAMED UP in the manner of a pair of glasses. When I casually mentioned this at work everyone kindly pointed out that I was just... seeing the steam.

My car is an old banger with no air con, just the air blower. For my entire life until my ExDP corrected me, I thought you had to 'run' the hot air until it turned from cold to hot eventually in the same way you do the tap. Rather than just turn it on once the car's warmed up. The hours I must have spent grimly tolerating a stream of freezing air in winter .

I'm not normally a simpleton by the way, I've got degrees and stuff and mostly manage to function.

So please tell me I'm not alone!

I bet you have a really nice - and special - herd, Charolais?!

Tigers =/= lady lions

Back in the olden days and I was 6/7 prior to 6am the only thing you could watch was open university, so I would go on the job listings on Teletext instead.

I also watched a lot of The Bill with my Nana where the words "you're going to do time" were spat out with regularity.

So imagine my surprise when so many of the ads called for time-served electricians/ plumbers/ bricklayers.

Now given I was the only person awake at that time there was no one to disabuse me of my increasing confidence that to get any of these jobs, I'd probably have to go to jail first. I believed that for far too long.

And if animals are going to market they're not all going for a browse :)

Quim I have no idea. Perhaps we could start a new reality show called 'Becoming Lulu' or something and find the new one? Surely she's due for regeneration soon.

I'm a city girl moved to the country. There is a field as you drive into our village which has lambs in it in spring. Asked DH where the lambs had gone ...as they were sooooooo cute. He told me the farmer moved them round the fields.
It wasn't until I read years later the village newsletter which offered fresh lamb legs for villagers at a reduced rate !!!

I also thought mince pies contained mince meat and turned them down saying 'no thanks, I'm veggie'.

Still valid, unless they are explicitly vegetarian ones - normal ones will contain suet.

verystressedmum Are you my DD? It took me ages to convince her that the moon has no light of its own...!

I was thirty when I found out that 'chinning' someone did not mean banging their head with your chin. Which, as my friend informed me, would be a really strange way to have a fight.

Thanks MN for teaching me that men and women have the same number of ribs!!!!!

Oh Whitney I know that now too, I think it only came out how wrong I was when someone said the ones I was offered didn't contain suet and I said something like 'yes but the meat in them' in my most polite voice

Ooh another one - I was having a debate with a colleague about whether or not you can eat the skin of a kiwi fruit. I called upon a third colleague from New Zealand to settle the argument, saying 'surely you must know the answer to this'. Didn't realise NZers are named kiwis after the bird rather than the fruit. In my late thirties.

Some more push backs - for the PP who thinks that planes just reverse away from the stand!!

I used to wonder why sporty people wore sweatbands on their wrists, since wrists don't sweat

How in god's name does being a vet (or farmer) who is helping a cow to give birth suddenly turn you into an astronaut?

It doesn't it's the space suit stops you from scratching your nose. Thought that was pretty obvious?

Why do sporty people wear wristbands? 🤷🏼‍♀️

@Roundandroundtheapartment to wipe off the sweat from their forehead

owl - you're not alone with Prince Philip. My friend thought he was her son until she was 16ish when we mocked it out of her
She was confused because she thought that the husband of the Queen would be the King and children Prince/Princess as per Prince Charles. I assume she thought the King had died years before!

Mind you same friend also thought the films Armageddon and Deep Impact were based on true stories, and that when you get £10 out from a bank it's the same £10 you put in, so you're not in the best of company

I grew up in the midlands near a small town called Alcester. For many years while watching the news I was genuinely terrified of going there because of all the Troubles... I was in my late teens before I realised 'Ulster' was quite a different place and I hadn't just been lucky every time I was dragged there to the little antiques shop....

Wow, interesting. Thanks PoopyPanda. So much to learn still!

I hadn't thought that much about it but I thought Davidoff was the Hoff too .
I didn't know Constantinople and Timbuktu were real places until a couple of years ago. I had books when i was little with weird animal creatures that lived in Timbuktu. A Dr Seuss book also mentions Constantinople and Timbuktu together. As Timbuktu is obviously pretend then Constantinople must be too 😂

also apparently 7% of americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows
www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/american-chocolate-milk-brown-cows-study-us-dairy-innvoation-adults-a7793016.html

almost more worrying is that even if they didn't believe the brown cows thing 48% couldn't hazard a guess as to where it did come from.

Ah, Peppered, you were thinking outside the box there - I didn't take that into account !

I thought wolves were made up.

I thought east and west changed depending which direction you faced.