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 convinced myself that average speed cameras on the motorway mean it's perfectly legal to drive at 90mph for a mile if you've been stuck at 50mph for the preceding mile.

The deeper meaning of the chicken joke is an urban myth!!!

Dh thought an average speed measure was there to see how fast people drive so if he drove faster it would mean they'd put the speed limit up!!

I didn't know that I had a vagina hole until secondary school, when we were studying the female anatomy. I thought I weed out of my vagina hole and that women only had 2 holes.
This led to me going home and looking for said hole in a mirror and not being able to see it, which in turm led to an entire YEAR of anxiety worrying that I would need to have a hole surgically constructed.

Ifinishedthebiscuits That's similar to me. I thought it was the average speed of the traffic do if some people were 60 it was OK my doing 80 as it all averaged out to 70. Dh looked at me very strangely when I explained my reasoning!

Rover

I'm 37 and up until this very minute I thought tonsils were the dangly bits at the back of your throat.

Ponty, you don't need to steer because the train can only go where the tracks go. Like the saying 'I was railroaded into doing it', it implies you had no choice over the direction you took (of your actions) :)

@RestlessTraveller There are lyrics that don't include old ladies stuck in the lavatory? That's news to me 😂😂

I believed that the whole world used to be black and white, because my dad explained that it suddenly changed one day, just as they were making the Wizard of Oz, which is why that film is 'half and half'. He said that he and my mum were really lucky as they woke up one day and the world was in colour! I believed this until I was in my teens 😳

I had a friend at uni who spent her childhood thinking that The Trailer was a cult film that everyone had seen apart from her. Fuelled by people saying stuff like 'It was a good film, but not as good as The Trailer'.

pontynan Trains steer by the tracks and the cant of the wheel.

So imagine you have two straight parallel tracks with wheels a fixed distance apart. Now if you imagine that the wheels are not flat, but have a slight angle, up from the inside of the track to the outside (the wheels are effectively cones that are cut off).

So when the rails turn around a corner, the train continues on it's straight path so the wheels are slowly mounting the rail on one side and slipping off the rail on the other. Which means the side that the wheel is mounting up the rail is becoming larger (as it slides down the cone the circumference of the circle is growing larger) and the opposite is true on the other side. As the wheels have a fixed axle what happens is one side starts turning a greater distance with each rotation and the opposite is true of the wheel that is becoming 'smaller'.

And that's how trains steer. Generally the only control that the train driver is an accelerator/brake (called a combined traction brake controller).

Ponty, the train is steered by the track. It can only go in the direction the track takes it, and the points, which switch it onto the correct track for its destination.

A stopem floppem is not German for a bra
The actual German for a bra is Büstenhalter (BH), which means "breast holder". Learning this was the moment I decided to take German at uni!

And I never realised that the word "albeit" was pronounced all be it. In my head for years it was pronounced "al-bite".
Same here, although I thought it was "al-bayt"

I thought hyperbole was said hyper-bowl (like tree bole) for years as i had only ever seen it written down. I only realised it was said bow-lee when i read it as a rhyme in a very pretentious poem.

I made an idiot of myself by pronouncing gesture as guess-ture in 6th form. That was fun

I only realised that tonsils aren't the dangly bit last year when i googled a white bit in my mouth i was worried about and found a diagram showing it was on my tonsil. I think it was because people have their tonsils removed and the dangly bit looks easy to cut off!

I have never thought about how trains follow tracks round corners, i think i just assumed either the wheels could swivel or corners are very gradual so it didn't matter that they are fixed. I thought they had a lip on each edge that fit over the track, the cone shape is really clever

I also just suddenly realised that wrist sweat bands were for wiping sweat from the forehead when i read pp comment!

Feeling really dim right now...

I used to wonder why most train tracks were shiny. DF told me that the porters went out and polished a mile each morning.

When I first passed my driving test and drove my first car around it took me a better part of 8 months to find 5th gear when driving in the motor way. I just kept going from 4th back into 3rd and everyone thought it was just a really old noisy car. Even my Dad said that's a very noisy car and never once did anyone question if I'm in the right gear. I had no idea until one day I actually managed to get into 5th gear and realised the car isn't noisy!

That you could catch a cold from going outside with wet hair!
In fact my dh said this to me only yesterday

picoloangel Are you sure she genuinely believed that? That's the sort of thing you'll hear in our office all the time. Along with wine and jam doughnuts counting one of your 5 a day, and no calories if there's no label or if no-one see you eat it. We don't actually believe it though!

I believe in the steamy eyeballs thing too, OP - and I'm standing firm! 

@bilbodog But what I want to know is how they towed them through the tunnels??

Wait how do you pronounce hyperbole????

The men walked them through by laying on boards and 'legging' it through if needed. The horses were walked over the top or around by road.

Hi per bollee

I thought that Benjamin Button was a real person. To be fair I'd only heard the story mentioned and never watched the movie myself

I also thought (until about 13) that ATM's had tunnels behind them and the money you withdrew was being sucked out of your own personal bank account stash.

Our local church hall was used as a slimming world group and i must have misread the sign one day as 'swimming club' and spent years wondering where the pool came from because I'd never seen it before.

Some personal ones:

Grew up believing in didn't like black fruit pastilles and gave them to my DF. Years later I realised he just used to tell me I didn't like them so I'd give them to him!

Used to think that motorised invalid carriages were daleks. Ashamed to say I would run away screaming...

DSis (12 years older than me) phoned home with her a level results. 6yo me couldn't comprehend why our DM was so happy DSis was having a grey day. Actually took a few years before I realised she'd got a grade A!

BelfastSmile so are the fluffy ones and yellow ones both not called dandelions then?! 😳

I feel I must be the only person in the world who has always known what the matter was. Bloody Johnny, and his lingering at the fair - where are my ribbons, eh Johnny?