What a Child Believes

[kidsmoke]

When you're a kid, you tend to have some seriously imperfect ideas about how the world works. My (now grown) daughter and I were talking about this the other night and we had ourselves laughing until we were in tears about some of the things we, and others, had believed about the world when we were growing up. Sometimes it was due to white lies grownups had told us, or a misheard phrase on the news, or a simple "logical" leap we had made all within our own heads.

 

For example: When I was somewhere around age 7, my family traveled to MN and WI to visit relatives who happened to be farming families. One farm had a new set of tiny, adorable piglets. My two older brothers (I figured out later) were tired of me tagging along with them so my oldest brother told me pigs were very dangerous because their bite was poisonous, and I was too young to handle them safely. The boys wanted to go and play with the piglets without me. Now I hadn't just fallen off the turnip truck so I was suspicious enough to ask how we could eat pork, then, but my big brother convinced me that cooking destroyed the poison.

I believed a pig's bite was poisonous until I was in my mid-teens and raised a hog as a 4-H project! Beware of pigs and rattlesnakes!

 

I also used to have a real problem with confusing the words "magician" and "musician". That one got me teased mercilessly by my brothers. I'm over it now though, and I should be fine as long as Wilco doesn't decide to bring magicians to Solid Sound.

 

How about you? What bizarre things did you used to believe?

 

[froggie]

when we were kids, we couldnt wait to grow up. now it's a case of "what the hell were we thinking?!"

[NoJ]

A kid in the neighborhood told my young son that rabbits have poison in their fur.

[tinnitus photography]

i was always told that the equator was the hottest part of the earth, so i imagined a band of fire encircling the globe. i wasn't quite sure how that worked on the ocean, but i knew it did somehow.

[kidsmoke]

Well if the Cuyahoga River can burn, why not the ocean? 

[The Inside of Outside]

I thought mothers vomited babies.

[tinnitus photography]

Well if the Cuyahoga River can burn, why not the ocean? 

[lost highway]

I work with kids. One thought that beavers used their tails to build dams. I once heard a boy suggest that a speed boat could beat a jet in a race. Several think that Pig Latin is a legitimate language.

 

I won't even get into the sexual misunderstandings my friends and I lectured to each other as boys.

[Albert Tatlock]

In my teens I thought that I would make a great quality controller for Paul McCartney.

 

As my younger years I used to go underneath the stairs and pray for Wales to win in the rugby before games. I also believed that if I blinked a the split second the opposition kicker took a penalty or conversion they would miss. I still do that out of habit. It is surpisingly effective.

[Winston Legthigh]

When I was a kid, I thought the "OK" hand-sign (thumb and index finger form a circle, other three fingers up) meant "wrong!", thanks to my father's humor. I think he might have gotten it from Laugh-In show (perhaps Arte Johnson?).

 

Anyway - it caused confusion and arguments in grade school.

 

A friend of mine who grew up in Boston said when she was a kid, due to her accent, thought the correct spelling of fart was "F.O.T."

[Mr. Heartbreak]

A friend of mine who grew up in Boston said when she was a kid, due to her accent, thought the correct spelling of fart was "F.O.T."