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

[treaclesoda]

I saw a seagull flying and it suddenly occurred to me that when I was little, I thought there were two different types of seagulls. Ones with legs, and ones without. Naturally the ones with legs had no choice but to fly all the time

I was a pretty bright child, I can't imagine why I thought that.

Please tell me someone else out there thought the same?

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

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 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).

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 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 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.

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 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"

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 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!

How do you pronounce banal then? ??

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

As a child, I thought bar codes on products were somehow linked to the shop's alarm system, and when they were scanned at the till that told the alarms you were allowed to take it out of the shop. I thought shoplifters would get caught because the bar codes hadn't been scanned and alarms would sound as they walked out the door!
I remember my younger brother once eating one of the pick n mix sweets in Woolworths, and thought 'Oh no, now the alarms will go off when we leave!'

Is Middlesex London then?

I remember it took me about two years to work out that when a patient's mum sadly said she was sending their dog, who had bitten her little boy, to live on a farm, she actually meant PTS. I must have been in my late 20s when she said it and I said something really stupid about what a lovely time he'd have there.

That portakabin was prounounced pour-TAKE- a bin

I used to think the Channel Tunnel was just a massive concrete tube that laid at the bottom of the sea. It used to worry me that it might crack and get completely flooded. Someone enlightened me about 2 years ago. I was 25

I always thought you gave a blow job by blowing

I've said this on here before For most of my life I thought it was Knights in White Satin

Middlesex - is a county that started to the east of present London (I think Chingford ish, certainly Hackney) and went around the City of London, so Islington etc., and then poked out to the West as far as Heathrow ish. But its now all been swallowed by London, but some people still use it in their postal address. Its useful for Geneology.
Most of London south of the river was Surrey.

I grew up until an embarrassingly advanced age (like, teenage) thinking that Madonna was a different person every few years. My mum had obviously made some comment when I was a young child about her 'reinventing' herself again, and I took it very literally indeed! It wasn't until I mentioned in passing one day that the current Madonna had been around for a long time that my error was discovered...

I genuinely believed that all the animals could talk at midnight on Christmas eve and even went downstairs to attempt a conversation with our family dog one year! I was about 7 I think

Ok, so i may have learnt a lot a little from this thread center parcs, sinn fein (I actually googled that one to make sure it was the truth, because I was so sure it was a person) , Arkansaw is another revelation....

Some of my own:

In Primary school, and my friends were playing kiss chase. I was running around screaming "no no! I'll get AIDS!". Freddie Mercury had just died, I'd been watching the news and asked my mum what aids was and how you got it. She'd said by kissing: y'know, toning it down somewhat for an inquisitive 7 or so year old. I got a right bollocking from the dinner lady over that one Thanks mum....

I thought that black people had black babies, white people had white babies etc and everytime I saw a mixed race child with one of their parents, assumed they were adopted My friends mum came to pick her up from school, I excitedly asked her what it was like to be adopted, did she know her real parents etc etc. She had some explaining to do and I was gutted when I found out that the lady was her ACTUAL mum. I always wondered what it would be like to have been secretly adopted, having famous parents who gave me up so I could have a normal life, away from the limelight

I used to think for an embarrassingly long time that when people worked for satellite tv (e.g. Sky) they had to actually be taken up to the satellite in a rocket and broadcast from there.

Pineapples don't grow on trees! Who knew!