Randomly odd things you believed as a child and possibly beyond...

[Elmo230885]

I live this type of thread...

(I'm not talking about believing in Santa or the tooth fairy)

I'll start. I had a cousin named Stephen and he had the middle name Dean. For some reason he used to switch and go by either name. So as a child I believed that Dean was short for Stephen in the same way Bill is used for William.

That Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees was really a lion.

@ChurchOfWokeApostate I too used to play the game with thunder and lightning: also if you divide the number of seconds by three, you get the number of kilometres between you and the storm.

The same book where I read that explained how you could make a small indoor rainbow with sunlight through a window and a glass of water, but I never managed to make that work. (I've tried it just now - not a colour to be seen!) It also had an experiment for collecting dust by leaving a sheet of paper out for four weeks, but my mum never let me leave the paper out for a day, never mind four weeks!

I always thought I had a very good sense of time; I'd try to guess what time a clock might say before looking at it, and I'd often have a good idea, but there was an occasion in childhood when I failed spectacularly.

After a day at school, I felt very ill, so I went to bed, at about 5 o' clock. When I woke, I saw it was 7 o' clock (in summer, so still daylight), and I went down and had some breakfast. I couldn't understand why everyone around me looked so puzzled. Finally somebody told me that it was still evening! I genuinely thought it was the following morning.

When I was tiny I remember watching tv with my grandparents. We were watching something with cilla black in whilst we ate Our chicken dinner. My granddad said something along the lines of “she’s got a bloody odd voice”. My nana replied snappily “ so would you with a chicken bone wedged in your throat”. She was clearly pissed with him for interrupting her show however, I believed cilla blacks Liverpool accent was due to her having a chicken bone wedged in her throat. I didn’t know any one from Liverpool in real life!

I also believed babies were born orally. A friend of my mum’s was saying to her that having her wisdom teeth out was “a worse experience than having the kids” then proceeded to stretch her mouth open to show mum where they’d taken the teeth. I assumed she she demonstrating how the kids were born. Made sense to me as babies grow in tummies and when you’re sick stuff comes back out your tummy. Also, overheard a joke about oral sex on tv once which seemed to back up the theory.

I used to think sex involved the man inserting his limp penis (before I knew about erections) into the woman and they'd then just roll around on the bed for a while.

This is so disgusting, but my friend and I believed that the man would urinate into the woman.

I heard the word boner and concluded a bone moved into the penis to create pan erection.

@Natsku

I used to think sex involved the man inserting his limp penis (before I knew about erections) into the woman and they'd then just roll around on the bed for a while.

Sounds like my first wedding night.

@nowaitaminute

I believed that parents HAD to be married in order to have a baby! Probably until I was 10!

I also believed that everyone owned their house. Until we sold ours and rented while we built a house...the renting concept really baffled me! I always wondered where the owners were staying as I couldn't possibly imagine that they had ANOTHER house 🤣🤣

This myth is still around! I've helped out in my daughter's school for the past couple of years and am not married to her dad and have a different surname to her. This past year in particular, the amount of her peers who have told me i can't be her mum because I'm not married is unbelievable!

However, I am so old that I can't remember any odd things that I used to believe were real!

Thanks for all the nominations for this to go into Classics. We've moved it over now.

Elmo230885

They are on Youtube, but I recommend you watch, "American reacts to..." by a YOUtuber called Tafe 316 when he watches them.

I was explaining them to a friend and recommended, "spirit of dark water" , he thinks my childhood would be terrifying.

Omg you've reminded me - my mum bought me one of those "how your body works" things which obviously included a section on sex. The picture & description of dtd didn't make clear at all that an erection, while hard, was still a bit flexible at its base. I genuinely thought that was it, rigidly sticking upwards, stood to attention, with minimal gap between said erection and the man's lower belly, and this gap would be just large enough to enable the missionary position as per the cross-sectional diagram in the book. As such, the concept of alternative positions confused me up to a surprisingly late age! 😂 Even now, when I think of the concept of an erection, the first image I get in my head is of the strictly vertical soldier in the line drawing!!

@MsMiaWallace I still don't go near swans for fear of them breaking my arm. Surely this is sound advice?
Do you now go near swans with impunity?

I assumed with the help of my "how the body works" book that sex was always standing up, face to face, for procreation only, and in our house the location would logically be the downstairs WC.

Bedroom scenes on TV went totally over my head, had no idea there was any sex going on as the couple were not standing up,naked in their downstairs WC.

@Gulsink

I thought everyone who died was on the news. So when my grandfather died I remember watching the news expecting it to be mentioned.

I used to think this too! 🥰

@Cavagirl

Omg you've reminded me - my mum bought me one of those "how your body works" things which obviously included a section on sex. The picture & description of dtd didn't make clear at all that an erection, while hard, was still a bit flexible at its base. I genuinely thought that was it, rigidly sticking upwards, stood to attention, with minimal gap between said erection and the man's lower belly, and this gap would be just large enough to enable the missionary position as per the cross-sectional diagram in the book. As such, the concept of alternative positions confused me up to a surprisingly late age! 😂 Even now, when I think of the concept of an erection, the first image I get in my head is of the strictly vertical soldier in the line drawing!!

I thought the same! I remember catching a glimpse of a film (I want to say trainspotting) where the girl was on top and leaning back and I was really confused! And I was about 16 by this point. Not sure when I realised it wasn’t completely rock hard and immovable (late bloomer so didn’t even meet one face to face until my 30s altho I had definitely worked it out before then!)

My mum used to say that eating crusts would give you hairs on your chest... god knows why because as a girl I really didn't want that to happen and already liked crusts.

Think it was just something people say but I avoided crusts until I was about 8 because of it.

@LunaNorth you're telling me that a dogs heart WONT split if I pull it's legs apart? FFS, I'm 25.

@angelcakebananabrain lol!!! So glad it wasn't just me!!! A lot of the mechanics of sex I found extremely confusing as a child (although when you think of it the entire thing is extremely odd! Sperm and urine using the same hole???)

@PolkadotsAndMoonbeams I also thought that a man's erection pointed out at a 90 degree angle to his body, and was totally rigid and immovable. I couldn't understand how the missionary position was possible.

I got an awful shock the first time I touched a penis and it was MOVING (tbf I was only 12 so I bloody well deserved a shock, and it put me off for another few years, at least).

@Gulsink My parents showed me my own birth announcement in The Times, which they had kept safely, so I assumed everybody had this privilege.

I had (and still have) Claire Rayner's "The Body Book", which was written for children, and probably a bit controversial in the early 80s: it was very no-nonsense, straight to the point, full of cartoons I can't imagine being in children's books now: a boy weeing against a tree, a brother and sister naked in the bath (no foam to hide anything), close-up of a bumhole, a woman giving birth, with a baby appearing between her spread legs. It described (with illustration of a couple in the missionary position) "the most loving sort of cuddle there is for grown ups". The last chapter of this book was "growing old and dying", which was very sensitively written, but made no pretences about death at all, adding that sometimes even babies die ("but that is unusual").

It also said "most people don't like pains, but they are very useful". Even as a child, I was wondering: who on earth does like pains?

I loved science books as a child, but there were some things I read in them which I thought were too fanciful to be true; such as if you're blindfolded and holding your nose, you can't tell the difference between apple and raw potato. I never tried it though - perhaps I didn't want to prove myself wrong!

Not me but my kids...years ago I wanted to sit between my brother and my niece in the sofa, and for some reason the words I used to ask them to make room for me were "Can I be the jam in the glue?" So the whole family now use "the jam in the glue" to mean sitting between two other people on the sofa. My son and my daughter were both amazed to find out that "the jam in the glue" is not a universal expression for this and if nobody outside our family has any idea what it means.

At playgroup a girl broke her arm and had it in a cast. I thought that her arm had actually snapped off, and that she would have to have the cast on forever to keep her arm in place. I was OK with that, but was really concerned when they said she was going in to have the cast removed. I thought that was it and she would only have one a forever.