Things that did not make sense to you as a child

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  • I thought you were only given gasoline to drink in jail.
    I thought artists only used typewriters to make art, paintings really confused me as to how they were done.
    I thought that my dad was friends with Robin Hood, instead of the reality that he was in an archery club.

  • emyndemynd 830 Posts
    My mom told me that when I was a youngin' I told her I wanted to act in movies, but eventually I decided against this because I wasn't confident that I could film the whole movie without having to go to the bathroom at some point (i.e. I thought they were filmed live, all in one sitting).

    -e

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    When I was a child, my pops took me to see the movie Wattstax. I was sorely disappointed because I thought we were going to see the actual CONCERT. I didn't know it was going to be a bunch of people in a dark room looking at what looked like my parents' home movies!

    From deductive reasoning, I remember people laughing and applauding at a Richard Pryor monologue, followed by Albert King's set (who I erroneously thought was B.B. King), but not much else.

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    And I remember seeing Stevie Wonder and Lou Rawls on Sesame Street and swearing it had to be someone else besides those two. Stevie and Lou were these hip soul singers, what would they be doing on this measly ole kiddie show?

  • The-gafflerThe-gaffler 2,190 Posts
    Cheque Books[/b]


    i never understood the fancy extra letters european people put in their english.

  • DB_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    Cheque Books[/b]


    i never understood the fancy extra letters european people put in their english.

    We used to have them too, until Daniel Webster was all "What the fuck is this "u" doing here anyway?" Then he published the first American dictionary without them.



  • DJ_NevilleCDJ_NevilleC 1,922 Posts
    I used to think flea markets sold fleas which was baffling.




    When I was 5-7 years old we lived in Mexico. One time my dad was going back to the states on a shopping trip and I asked him to buy us a television that spoke English.




  • RockadelicRockadelic Out Digging 13,993 Posts
    I remember being very confused as a kid when I heard a news story that said "The U.S. had sold arms to Guerillas"!! I had this vision of large monkeys eating human arms like turkey legs.

  • HarveyCanalHarveyCanal "a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
    I thought guerillas were really gorillas.

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    I didn't know that television shows used laugh tracks. I thought everything was filmed in front of a live audience. So if you saw a character outdoors crossing the street and getting big laughs, I thought that the crowd HAD to be on the corner watching the action.

  • DB_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    I didn't know that television shows used laugh tracks. I thought everything was filmed in front of a live audience. So if you saw a character outdoors crossing the street and getting big laughs, I thought that the crowd HAD to be on the corner watching the action.

    On a related note, studios used the same laugh tracks for decades. Meaning some of the folks laughing at those jokes were actually already dead.


  • DeegreezDeegreez 804 Posts
    My family was pretty much vegetarian so I never ate red meat as a kid and one day at school, maybe kindergarten, a kid told me what a hamburger was and where it came from and that he ate cows and I would not stop asking about it for weeks, it confused me so much I couldn't figure out the process whatsoever.
    Also had a neighbor, Theresa, a little girl who was very intense and bossy, and she would come by and demand that I go play with her. She would make up crazy lies about things, trying to convince me that she had a great white shark at her grandmothers house and s*it. She was always trying to get me to take my clothes off too by telling to me that she would never let me see the shark if I didn't do it. I found girls to be confusing for a while afterwards.
    Also I thought the ocean was made of beer. Don't know how or why that came about.

  • JLRJLR 3,835 Posts
    Fish filet:



    I couldn't understand how those thing were capable of swimming. I think I was 5 years old the day I discovered that was not their original body.

  • hertzhoghertzhog 865 Posts
    When I was a child, my pops took me to see the movie Wattstax. I was sorely disappointed because I thought we were going to see the actual CONCERT.

    Ha, this reminds me of being taken to a Pink Floyd "concert." It turned out to be this weird ass lazer show. Although I guess that cool light beams > prog-rock at that age (or any age, for some).

  • DB_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    I used to see "chaos" in comic books and thought it was pronounced "cha-oes" rhyming with "tacos". I knew the word "chaos" verbally, too, but never made the connection. I knew it was something pretty badass though, ???cause if the X-Men taking on an entire alien hoard on another planet was chaos, well, that's pretty badass.

    On a related note, a friend of mine was talking about the Edgar Allen Poe story "Murders in the Rue Morgue" a couple of years ago, and was talking about the mysterious villain, who turned out to be an "Ourang-Outang". He was all "I think it's like a gorilla." I was all, "Yeah. Or maybe even more like an orangutan."



    Dude is pretty smart too and was in his mid-twenties at the time. I still make fun of him sometimes for that.


  • DjArcadianDjArcadian 3,632 Posts
    June 21st Is "The Longest Day of the Year"[/b]

    I had this one for years, even though it is real simple.

    Don't all days have 24 hours in them, except in the fall when clocks go back?

    I kept asking my dad how many hours were in a day. He said it's always 24 hours. I never understood how it could always be 24 hours when summer daylight was always so much longer.

  • DjArcadianDjArcadian 3,632 Posts
    I used to see "chaos" in comic books and thought it was pronounced "cha-oes" rhyming with "tacos". I knew the word "chaos" verbally, too, but never made the connection.


  • nzshadownzshadow 5,518 Posts

    Bastards.

  • GropeGrope 2,970 Posts
    girls!

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    I used to see "chaos" in comic books and thought it was pronounced "cha-oes" rhyming with "tacos". I knew the word "chaos" verbally, too, but never made the connection.

    That was me and hors d'oeuvres.

    Saw that word in print often, but when I heard people talkin' 'bout "orderves" on TV, it was a while before I caught on that they meant hors d'oeuvres.

  • johmbolayajohmbolaya 4,472 Posts
    That was me and hors d'oeuvres.

    Saw that word in print often, but when I heard people talkin' 'bout "orderves" on TV, it was a while before I caught on that they meant hors d'oeuvres.

    Same here, when I first saw the words, I thought it was "horse d'ovaries" and I wondered what the hell that was. It's not as if I went to elementary school and had hors d'oeuvres. We had "pupus" at luaus and stuff, but not "horse d'ovaries". I just knew that The Jeffersons always referred to them when Helen and Willis came over.

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    That was me and hors d'oeuvres.

    Saw that word in print often, but when I heard people talkin' 'bout "orderves" on TV, it was a while before I caught on that they meant hors d'oeuvres.

    Same here, when I first saw the words, I thought it was "horse d'ovaries" and I wondered what the hell that was. It's not as if I went to elementary school and had hors d'oeuvres. We had "pupus" at luaus and stuff, but not "horse d'ovaries". I just knew that The Jeffersons always referred to them when Helen and Willis came over.

    Heh, heh. Slightly off-topic, but it reminds me of when I was eight years old and had a friend over. We were watching a Banana Splits rerun, and my friend noticed that all the cartoons they showed were made by "Hanna-Banana."

  • johmbolayajohmbolaya 4,472 Posts
    In the 1st grade, my teacher used to ask me on a regular basis if I needed "reinforcements", the small white stickers that are meant to be placed on the three holed paper when they wear out and tear.


    Yet at the age of 6, I thought that the teacher was always asking me if I wanted "refreshments", and I always said no, because in my mind it wasn't nice to eat until it was time to go into the cafeteria. She would always put the reinforcements on my papers, and for a few years I thought those were called "refresments", as in to "refresh" my paper, or to make new/nice again.

    This seems so long again, but then again it was over 24 years ago, but these days we'll watch a television show and hear about the 7-second delay. When I was growing up, all national news and sports broadcasts were delayed by three hours, so when they were over on the mainland, the stations would start to show it. All TV shows were delayed by a week. I discovered this when I had an auntie come back home and tell us everything that was going to happen in the shows we watched, and I could never understand how she knew. It was then she said that shows in Hawai'i were delayed by a week, because it was too expensive (back then) to transmit the signals via satellite, especially all of the shows that would air on a daily basis. News and sports, however, were always a top priority. My dad did a bit of betting on some sports, and when I discovered the "satellite delay", I wondered how anyone could really win when they could call family on the mainland and ask them for the scores. I also remember the introduction of the ESPN 976- number, where one could get all of the scores instantly. This was around 1981 or so. I'm sure a lot of people made money on sports betting by simply knowing about the technology that existed, it may have been $2 a minute or whatever it was back then, but a 10 dollar call for having all of the top scores, that was magic.

    What did not make sense to me at the time was that, even back then, Hawai'i had a lot of technology and to me always seemed ahead of the game because of the Japanese companies that were there, and yet TV shows were delayed by a week. I also remember seeing the commercials on KGMB (the CBS affiliate) in June 1984, the time my mom would move us from Hawai'i to Washington, that announced "for the first time, Hawai'i will be able to watch programming from the mainland... LIVE!" I was angry that I was not able to celebrate this victory with my friends.

    But this also meant that baseball games that aired on the West Coast at 9am would air in Hawai'i at 6 or 7am, or Monday Night Football would air at 3pm, when most people were still at work (and 3pm was "Checkers & Pogo" time.

    On that note, while the network affiliates did not have the means to broadcast live, the reason why they felt a need to go live (which seems funny now) was because Oceanic Cablevision were broadcast WTCG (now TBS) live, along with a few other cable networks (such as the new ESPN, CNN, etc.) I remember sometimes waking up at 3am in the morning just to watch cartoons and "The Three Stooges" on WTCG and wondering how cool Atlanta must be because of all of the great stuff the station was showing.

  • batmonbatmon 27,574 Posts
    Also had a neighbor, Theresa, a little girl who was very intense and bossy, and she would come by and demand that I go play with her. She would make up crazy lies about things, trying to convince me that she had a great white shark at her grandmothers house and s*it. She was always trying to get me to take my clothes off too by telling to me that she would never let me see the shark if I didn't do it.



  • When I was a kid, I thought previous generations lived in Black and White and a world of color only evolved later .. I thought those old B&W films really represented reality...

  • pickwick33pickwick33 8,946 Posts
    When I was a kid, I thought previous generations lived in Black and White and a world of color only evolved later .. I thought those old B&W films really represented reality...

    even weirder - my dad once brought home a portable B&W TV around '76 or so...and my mom tells me that i thought it was gonna magically show nothing but old fifties programs

  • covecove 1,567 Posts
    Yet at the age of 6, I thought that the teacher was always asking me if I wanted "refreshments"

    haha, that word confused me.
    I always thought it was refreshMINTS and always got surprised and happy when there was more being offered than a old tin with some little mints in it.

  • When I was a kid, I thought previous generations lived in Black and White and a world of color only evolved later .. I thought those old B&W films really represented reality...

    even weirder - my dad once brought home a portable B&W TV around '76 or so...and my mom tells me that i thought it was gonna magically show nothing but old fifties programs

    I'd buy that tv..
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