When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.

  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I thought space rockets had to wait for. Ight to go into space. If they took off during the day whey would just go into the blue sky like planes do.

  • Stamau123@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I thought ‘tomorrow’ was a day of the week. So when my mom would say we’d go somewhere ‘tomorrow’ I’d ask her every day if it was tomorrow yet, and she’d say no, and I’d keep waiting.

  • Jhogenbaum@leminal.space
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    6 days ago

    I hadn’t had “the talk” and assembled my own understanding about marriage = “the ability to touch each other’s private parts.”

    I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house’s upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and “tag” touch the groom’s crotch and then pull her dress up, and… at that point I didn’t really understand what she would “have” under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically “tag you’re it” style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

    I didn’t have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn’t associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

    • Stamau123@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I think that is true in a way. Since information has a shorter route to get to their brain than larger creatures, they may react slightly faster

  • UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    In kindergarden, when one kid was about to hit another, the other kid would say “if you hit me, you have to pay the health insurance!”. None of us had any idea what that could mean, and I have no idea where that idea came from, but it worked, because to us, that sounded bad.

    Some of my class mates thought that wrestling was real, and a few of them thought there was a place in the US where it was legally possible to kill a man during a wrestling match. They were quite offended when I told them how ridiculous that notion sounded to me.

  • SoulWager@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.

    It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn’t had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?

  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.

  • theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan

  • wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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    8 days ago

    That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.

    English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression “search all nooks and crannies”, but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.

    Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

    So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

    What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

    I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.

      • AquaTofana@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        This is always my answer to this question. I thought radio stations must have been the busiest places with all those bands coming and going!

  • BananaPeal@sh.itjust.works
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    8 days ago

    That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.

    Bonus: My kid doesn’t believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.

    • erusuoyera@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      Clarke’s third law. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Quicksand thing is fucking stupid though.

    • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 days ago

      Every kid from the 80s & 90s was taught* to believe that, so I don’t blame you.

      &nsbp;

      *By movies & books & games and shit, not by teachers. Well, maybe some teachers…

  • HandwovenConsensus@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.

    So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

    I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      7 days ago

      When I was a kid my dad would often pull up the NORAD Santa tracker on Christmas Eve, and that combined with seeing the film War Games at way too young of an age had me believing in Santa for much longer than I should have because “why else would the federal government devote so much money to tracking him?” I think it was specifically seeing the exact same animation of him being welcomed into a country by a pair of fighter jets for the third year in a row that finally killed that line of reasoning (because obviously the NORAD Santa tracker site is shot with television cameras or something)

      Kid logic is wild

  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 days ago

    I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    That a blowjob involved the act of physically blowing air on the penis. When I found out it actually involved sucking, I was like, “Oooh…yeah that sounds much more pleasurable.”

    • suodrazah@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I was so confused, I couldn’t imagine why people would enjoy that more than a “suckjob” or “headjob”. Turns out people just say whatever they want and it can mean anything.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 days ago

      In my language the expression is “jemandem einen blasen” (to blow one to someone) and I remember reading a long time ago about a story where a teenage girl (?) actually injured her boyfriend when she blew into the penis. Seems not to be a very good idea.

      • WIZARD POPE💫@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        In our language it’s to ‘pull’ someone ot better “jemandem einen ziehen” as we are civilised and have grammatical cases such as dative. So I hope nobody got it confused and ripped of someone’s penis.