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

[Carryonrunning]

Was just chatting to a friend about this:

1. Hearing all the boys in class talking about how a girl’s tampon fell out in the classroom. Lived in fear of this for many years before I realised they meant it fell out of her bag, not her body!

2. Opening the door of a sauna with my cousin (which was right in the middle of the spa area, so not private) on holiday in a nice hotel and my uncle inside shouting at us to close the door. I cried for weeks thinking I’d inadvertently seen him naked (although I didn’t actually see anything). Couldn’t look at him for years without feeling sick before I was old enough to realise we were just letting the heat out and annoying the other people in there! No one was naked in mixed sauna in the very public pool area of a nice spa hotel full of people!

So did I!!!!!

I remember carrier bags for the Spa shop had "8 Till Late" emblazoned on them in an italic font. The 8 looked like an 'S', so I thought it said, "Still Late." I could never work out how a shop could be late for anything.

I believed the complete opposite. That you'd get your period, it was a once-off event, and you'd never have to go through it again.

I was just devestated when I heard it was every month!

I was about 6/7 and we were learning the song Alice the Camel for a big performance.

It was during the Blair government and they kept talking about Alice the Camel on the radio news. Never watched the news but radio 4 was always on the radio

I was shocked when I did watch the tv news and it was a chap called Alistair Campbell not a camel.

Me too. I asked my Mum if I could go and help the police with their enquiries; I thought it meant knocking on doors and asking people questions.

Oh god....... I'm in my 30s buying a house myself and have only just this second processed that this is not what happens.

When I was a child, I thought that writing in cursive was some sort of telepathy, that adult just thought in their own heads what they wanted to communicate, scrawled a random squiggle on the page, and other adults would magically be able to understand what the writer had wanted them to know. I thought that you could only read messages intended for you, and that everyone magically obtained this ability when they became an adult. I was quite put out when we started learning cursive at school!

I always read the windows of John Lewis as “never knowingly understood” rather than undersold and couldn’t understand it.

Shops used to have an "open/closed" sign on their doors supplied by an advertiser. the closed sign would often say "CLOSED, Even for Ever Ready Batteries" or whatever product. As a child I only knew about odd or even numbers, so really struggled with the phrase. Was the shop only open on odd days for ever ready batteries? Funny how the young mind tried to find an explanation for the words. And the phrase still reads strangely to me now.

I always had a new outfit for my birthday when i was a child. Until a few years ago, I thought this was what was meant by birthday suit

I remember being about 11 and learning that condoms are used to protect against something called sexually transmitted diseases. I assumed that these diseases spontaneously came into being and that if you were to ever have sex without a condom you would 100% get one. Therefore even married couples must use them every time.

I also learned around the same time that condoms are only 97% effective at preventing pregnancy and deduced that if you ever want to have a baby you must do it at least hundreds of times with a condom and wait until you were one of the lucky 3%.

Admittedly I also thought that putting it in once was having sex once and putting it in twice having sex twice etc. so I was seriously underestimating the work that would have to go into such an endeavour.

I was quite easily scared of the warnings we got at school. I was absolutely terrified of sparklers because if the safety videos and when my dad went lighting a firework I'd cry because I was so scared he'd get his head blown off.

I remember my year 6 teacher telling us that there was a thing called alcopops that tasted just like pop but were actually alcohol and how awful they were and I was so scared I would accidentally have one and die.

I know a lot of kids really needed the videos to warn them off playing on train tracks but for some of us sensitive children they were absolute nightmare fodder. I did later find out that my intrusive thoughts I've had my own life were OCD so that could explain it too.

I was embarrassingly old when I realised that 'sleeping tigers' was only played at parties to give the adults a break. I could never understand why you could move loads and never be 'out'.

When I was about 8 I had a sand art kit where you peel the stickers back and sprinkle the coloured sand to create a picture. The sand came in little sachets. One day I took some to school, including the white sand packet, and kept them in the drawer under my desk. A boy saw them and told a teacher and I got called into the headmasters office with the teacher to discuss where I got it from and why I brought it into school. I explained what it was and was told I could go back to class.

For ages I thought sand art craft was somehow bad and I was in trouble for being terrible at crafts. I was really upset and confused for ages. I never played with it again.

Suddenly remembered the incident about 20 years later and realised the teacher thought I had brought drugs to school 😂

Until I was about 12 years old,I always misread 'pubic hair' as 'public hair'! I used to think 'What's public about it?!'. 🙄

I didn't realise what "undersold" meant until I was embarrassingly old. I thought was referring to stock levels.

When I was very little I knew people had cats and/or dogs but didn't know anything about them and I wondered to myself whether cats were female dogs.

@Renamed That was interesting, thank you. The last line of the article mentions Kellys in Roman Road, Bow E3 - that was the exact place that I saw my hero eels escaping from, although there is just a shop there now with its eels pre chopped and jellied - the stall outside with live eels is no longer there.

Oh my God, I thought that until right now!

That reminds me I used to get confused and think the Conservatives and the Tories were two different parties!

I blame Beatrix Potter for this commonly held misconception

When I was 5 and started school the headmistress would shout "apologise right now" if someone was in trouble. I used to live in fear of her saying it to me because I didn't know what it meant!

When I was in year 1 there were 2 children who were deaf in my class and both of them had named beginning with the letter D. I thought that if your child was deaf you had to call them a name beginning with D. Not sure what I thought would happen if a child became deaf when they were older.

This comes up a lot - I wonder why? And why are the cats always the females and dogs the males?

Not me but DS1 got upset at school when he was 4. The teacher said to him "have a good holiday" and he thought he was going to get into trouble because we weren't going away for half term.

Just going on what I heard in pop songs, I thought there was a city in the US called Ellay that was completely distinct from Los Angeles.
(Too embarrassing to admit my age when I connected the LA thing.)

I thought that about condoms too. The teacher went on about how you must always use a condom otherwise you could get an std and I thought how on earth are you supposed to have a baby when you want one if you always have to use a condom. I asked my mum who have me a withering look and said by the time you are ready to have a baby with someone, you should be able to trust them not to give you can std. I was quite shocked at that because our teacher said you shouldn't trust anyone not to give you something.

I used to think W.H Smith was pronounced 'Whismith' is was so difficult to say. Another one here being told God was movin his furniture around when it thundered.