Until I was about seven, I thought that the entire world had been in black and white until roughly 1960. And then magically switched to color. Like the movie Pleasantville. Given my age, it wasn't entirely illogical. Cameras capture the world as it is. Pictures taken before 1960 are in black and white. Therefore, the world prior to 1960 must have been black and white. My dad explained the flaw in my logic (while laughing his ass off) after I asked him if it was surprising when he switched to color.
I had no concept of internal organs. I don't know why. I used to think the torso was just a gaping pocket with your heart hanging out in the upper corner. In my mind, you chewed your food, and when you swallowed it fell into the bottom of the pocket and just sat there until you pooped when it would fall through a hole in the bottom like a funnel. I think I held this theory until I was about 4 or 5.
When I was in the fourth grade, I thought that Babe Ruth was a black guy. I sat down to write a short paper on someone famous who had overcome hardship, and my paper was about how Babe Ruth had it hard because he had to deal with racism. I proudly presented the paper to my sister to have her look over it. There was a 5 second pause while she read the first couple sentences, then, "Bewildered, you are a retard." I think I must have been mixing up Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. Either way, I was convinced until that moment that Baby Ruth was black.
I never understood where I got this from, but as a kid I believed the stomach was a giant atomizer along the vein of the core of the friggin' Deathstar. Like, food dropped down your throat and then got vaporized into useful molecules (and poop, I guess). Hell, it's still easier for me to imagine the stomach doing this than it is as some kind of fleshy cocktail shaker full of corrosive fluids. I always believed that teachers lived quaint quiet lives. Then I got to college and realized education majors were amongst the hardest partiers. The Mask was shocking at the time because I had never seen such convincing visuals. The green mask mimicked Carrey's facial features exactly. I asked how they were able to stretch his face like that and my dad told me that he was born with a naturally stretchy face. Not understanding that girls had 3 holes, I assumed they peed from their vagina. Common belief, I'm told. Watching Enter the Dragon with my family, I found the scene with the black guy screaming, "Bullshit, Mr. Handman," hilarious. I was so young that the idea of "bad words" had not crossed my mind. So I kept repeating it for the whole next day. My dad regulated on me after hearing me say that.
All this talk of food reminds me that as a kid I used to think that pee was your body getting rid of things that you drank, and poo was your body getting rid of things that you ate. And since I used to have a drink while I ate something, I was thoroughly amazed at how clever it was to separate it out.
Until I was about 13 I thought black men's cum would be black, since I as a white kid came white sperm. Thank you Lexington Steele for curing my naivety.
Am I the only one who was confused by "shoplifting" as a kid? I somehow knew what "prosecuted" meant before I knew what shoplifting was, and "shoplifters will be prosecuted" signs confused the hell out of me. I thought it just meant taking someone's cart, like at the grocery store or something. I guess I understood that it was a big inconvenience to someone to steal their cart with all their carefully-selected groceries and stuff in it, but it seemed a bit over the top to take legal action over it. I don't know how old I was when I figured out what it really meant, but it was probably at least middle school
I was confused by those signs too, but in the opposite way. I knew what shoplifting was, but had somehow picked up the understanding that "prosecuted" was just another word for "executed". I remember thinking that was either incredibly harsh or that shoplifting was way more serious than I had ever thought. I sure as hell never swiped anything off the shelf at a store though.
From Norm Macdonald's twitter: "When I was a boy I thought all my dreams were in my pillow waiting for me to go to sleep." I remember after hearing that girls weren't like boys and didn't have penises, that I understood that to mean they only had testicles.
When I was little I thought that clouds were solid and that you could sit on them. I blame a combination of cartoons and Mary Poppins for that. I thought planes had to go around them so they wouldn't bounce off and crash. When I was on a plane at age 4 or 5 I was scared of that. There was a combination of relief that we wouldn't crash into a cloud and devastation that you couldn't sit on a cloud. I was also told the "marshmallow farm" story when I was young and living in upstate NY.