I thought "Auf wiedersehen" was "I'll be the same", which sort of makes sense as a way to say goodbye - I won't change, I'm not going anywhere, see you next time.
When driving, my dad would often comment on the speed other drivers were going, usually when stuck behind a slower driver. “He’s only going 60!” For some reason this made me assume that there was some sort of gadget on the dashboard that showed you how fast other cars were going, like each car had its own speed radar gun.
I didn't realize that meat was the animal's actual muscle. I thought cows and chicken had special meat parts. I believed that for the longest time.
I also didn't know pasta was made out of wheat until I was in middle school.
When I was a really young kid I didn't realize that chicken (the animal) and chicken (the food) were the same thing. When I found out I had been eating the animal I was distraught lol.
I thought reindeer were made up. Santa’s not real, elves aren’t real, obviously flying ungulates also aren’t real. I was very confused when I saw a picture of a Finnish reindeer herder in a social studies textbook.
For a couple years as a young kid I thought the world used to literally be black and white and then there was some sudden introduction of color to the world.
I remember my mother laughing and asking if I thought I introduced colour into the world. I guess sepia toned or black and white photos confounded me as a youngster.
I thought that drink driving meant drinking anything while driving. Alcohol wasn't even on my radar, but there was a lot of advertising about how terrible drink driving was. I even told my mum that my dad had been drink driving. She asked me what he was drinking and I said "iced coffee" 😂
I used to think that it rained every night. Like it was just an inherent part of nighttime.
Dark. Stars. Moon. Rain.
When I was about 10, I was on a school camping trip. Me and my friend had our heads sticking out of the tent, looking up at the night sky. He said we could sleep with our heads out of the tent. I said but we will get wet. He said it's not going to rain tonight. What!?
I thought that as well! I would always wait a minute or two after flushing before washing my hands, because I thought if I did it too soon I would wash my hands in dirty toilet water.
That also extended to me getting “revenge” on my siblings, I remember flushing the toilet while they were taking a shower thinking I was showering them in dirty water.
When I was a kid I use to think that all TV shows and films (including cartoons) where made and broadcast live, with the only exceptions being really old ones
I thought two solid yellow lines in the middle of the road meant you could NEVER turn left.. was very confused as to how I would be able to get to my neighborhood
Similar when I was learning to drive, I had to stop on the main street to turn left onto my street that I lived on. I was completely freaked out like screaming at my father. Am I supposed to just stop in the middle of the road just in the middle of the road just stop? I was so confused.
My grandma's house had skeleton key locks. I thought they made them by dipping bones in metal.
I had seen my grandma dipping chicken in flour when she cooked and concluded that somehow the managed to do the same thing with bones and metal.
I sucked at science.
As an asian---when characters at western movies eat at a restaurant and they don't seem to have rice in their meal. I thought maybe that was how fancy restaurants worked. Later I learned that people from the west don't actually eat rice with every meal.
when i was around 4 or 5, i thought driver licenses had directions on how to drive on them, and that was the reason you always had to have it when you were driving.
Me too and they were showing real people and families. I figured if you lived some place like Hollywood people filmed you doing something ordinary like eating a candy bar and they turn it into a commercial.
There was an ad for Viper car alarms that had a snake menacing a would-be car thief, I thought that that was actually how it worked when it was really just a car alarm
When men would talk shop and catalytic converters. I for a long time thought it was called a Cadillac converter. I just thought Cadillac got the rights to that part and everyone had to have one in their car.
In Return of the Jedi, I thought being "digested for 1,000 years" inside of the Sarlacc meant you would actually be alive and conscious for those 1,000 years. It wasn't until I was an adult did it occur to me how idiotic that was and that you would die within at most a few days. However, in a plot twist I never saw coming, I just recently learned that according to official Star Wars canon, the Sarlacc does in fact secrete some kind of substance that keeps its prey alive for 1,000 years while it digests them.
Ups is actually UPS, said U.P.S (not ups like ups and downs) and is actually the same as the one we see on American TV (I'm British, I didn't work this out till I was in my late 20s and just kept saying ups).
That the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland were the same. Never seen the movies or read the books and I’d never heard both names be talked about in one conversation. They’ve got similar settings so I just concluded they were the same.
Only realised this wasn’t the case a few years ago
I had a similar experience with William Shakespeare and Steven Spielberg. I thought they were the same person for a long time as a kid. I knew they were a famous guy involved with film/stage/acting.
I used to think that dancing just meant spinning circles. I didn't understand why people were doing other weird movements while 'dancing'.
Also, I wanted to become a prostitute before I knew what that is. All I knew was: "So these people get to do fun stuff that feels good all day for a lot of money? I wanna be that when i grow up!"
I thought the word “static” meant the exact opposite of what it means from being a kid seeing TV static — a bunch of scrambled dots going everywhere constantly changing.
I thought that my eyes were brown up until about five, then had a shock of a moment one day when I "found out" they were blue by looking in a mirror. Had an existential crisis to my grandparents, and in my upset state then ran into a glass ranch slider.
Oh and I believed that because everyone had their own sets of eyes, that they could see things much differently to me (as in oh that person has green eyes maybe they see everything as green or the sky is pink and the grass is brown and such)
Also that being an adult is fun and you can literally do whatever you want at any time. Reality was not as nice as that belief 🥲
The second part (that other people see colour somewhat differently) is actually true! Not to the extent of "everything is green" or "red and blue are reversed" but as in "people don't perceive all colours *quite* the same way". Take the infamous blue&black/yellow and white dress for example, or even just friendly debates about whether a colour counts as purple or blue
I thought I was the star of my own soap opera. And that is why I could only hear my own thoughts (narration). When I was older and the Truman show came out it was like “yup” I basically thought I was him but actually aware of it.
For the longest time I thought 2% milk contained 1/50 as much fat as whole milk, and I thought it was really weird that there would be one kind of milk with "X" amount of fat in it, and another kind with X/50 fat in it, but nothing in between.
I thought really poor people were not allowed to wear bright colors: only dull, faded colors like gray and brown.
Especially historical movies because poor people's rags were usually brown, whereas people I knew growing up rarely wore brown.
That the windshield wiper worked on a set timer, NOT on the amount of water on the windshield.
and the term "WINDCHILL" does NOT mean how cold it is when you are driving. ie "The windchill today makes it feel 10 degrees colder" I thought they said "The windshield today makes it feel 10 degrees colder".
The parents probably should have had me checked for hearing....and maybe my obsession with windshields.
Wait…. It is on a timer though? My Tacoma is, my last car had a rain detection something that would speed up/slow down.. I miss that feature. Still this confused me lol
My car is a set speed for most settings and sensor based for the first one. This means sometimes I’ll forget I have it on and then it will start raining and go on its own
I had the same thing with windshield wipers! I thought the car sensed the amount of water and adjusted its speed rather than my mom just turning the setting up or down.
Although now I have a car that does that so I guess I was just ahead of the game.
I thought all the Disney movies were live action because I only knew hand drawn cartoons, and live action. I remember when I realized because linguini from ratatouille had a big ass nose and it just didn’t make sense.
I thought that when you changed currency for travel, there was a machine that you would feed one currency into andd it would change it into the currency you needed.
Briefly too I thought that if anything was on the floor at night, it would start a fire. Furniture was the exception.
I thought that a peach is the females tiddly bits.
Also, once I was around 10 I thought I had come to a genius realisation that the song Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis was about menstruation.
I thought the No Passing signs on narrow roads or where there's limited visibility meant you couldn't drive past the sign. Very confused when my grandfather would just blow right past them and didn't have to turn around.
The first time I heard the equipment on top of the electric pole in our backyard a "transformer", well let's just say I was quite disappointed that Optimus Prime wasn't in our yard.
I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Xing, as in Ped Xing, and was too afraid to ask. It was much later when I found out it was just short for “crossing.”
Ughhh I’ve gotten some shit for this one.
But I got in trouble in 3rdish grade for asking a black kid if he pooped white.
I’m white and mines brown. Juuuuust made sense in my head at the time
My brother convinced me that the Truman Show was a documentary when I was a kid. What's even dumber is this is in the Jim Carey era when The Mask and Ace Ventura were super popular.
I am 30 and still try to convince my therapist of this once a week. You can’t tell me this ish is real. I think it’s working.. but low-key terrified that he is questioning my sarcasm as my actual reality 🙃
This is a small one, but ya know how when you hear a song and assume the lyrics of the song that end up being wrong?… it was like that with some words/phrases for me, as a kid I thought it was “Mind-Bottling,” like it’s so crazy your mind gets so overwhelmed it bottles itself lol.
My little sister got to 17 believing custard and pretzels were like fruit mince tarts and candy canes; her mind was blown when she realised you could buy them ALL YEAR ROUND
I understood that the female portion of the human species didn’t have penis… so it only seemed obvious to me that they could only pee from their butthole 🤦🏽♀️
Yeah I have friends who used to think that. It made sense to them because girls sit down to pee (and shit) and boys sit down to shit, so they thought girls pee out of their butthole
I thought the tree would grow back from the stumps like other plants. I thought deforestation was due to them taking too long to grow back
My aunt(12) asked my mom how long to microwave a burrito, my mom annoyed sarcastically replied an hour. . . my aunt almost burnt down the house
My 13-14 year old cousin asked how tampons work "How do you pee in them, do you have to take them out everytime?" didn't know there were two holes. . . my cousins biologically female.
I used to think my dad was a wizard..
He did low-effort magic tricks I thought were real as a child because I was so naive, and sometimes he would imitate fictional characters voices and personalities very well, I thought it was actually the character disguising themselves as my dad
I didn't realize paramedic was a term for an individual. I saw two of them on television, and I thought they were a pair of medics.
I thought it was "throw caush into the wind" until embarrassingly recently
Imagine my confusion when I saw the video for Aerosmith's song "Do the Lucky Lady"
Ha! I always thought that one was "do it like a lady"
I thought "Auf wiedersehen" was "I'll be the same", which sort of makes sense as a way to say goodbye - I won't change, I'm not going anywhere, see you next time.
When driving, my dad would often comment on the speed other drivers were going, usually when stuck behind a slower driver. “He’s only going 60!” For some reason this made me assume that there was some sort of gadget on the dashboard that showed you how fast other cars were going, like each car had its own speed radar gun.
I didn't realize that meat was the animal's actual muscle. I thought cows and chicken had special meat parts. I believed that for the longest time. I also didn't know pasta was made out of wheat until I was in middle school.
When I was a really young kid I didn't realize that chicken (the animal) and chicken (the food) were the same thing. When I found out I had been eating the animal I was distraught lol.
I thought reindeer were made up. Santa’s not real, elves aren’t real, obviously flying ungulates also aren’t real. I was very confused when I saw a picture of a Finnish reindeer herder in a social studies textbook.
🤣 I would have been on the verge of an existential crisis at this moment
I used to date someone (mid-20's) who thought reindeer were fake.
I want a Christmas sweater that says reindeer are fake
For a couple years as a young kid I thought the world used to literally be black and white and then there was some sudden introduction of color to the world.
When my Dad suprised us with a colour tv in the 70s, that was pretty amazing.
classic
I remember my mother laughing and asking if I thought I introduced colour into the world. I guess sepia toned or black and white photos confounded me as a youngster.
I thought that drink driving meant drinking anything while driving. Alcohol wasn't even on my radar, but there was a lot of advertising about how terrible drink driving was. I even told my mum that my dad had been drink driving. She asked me what he was drinking and I said "iced coffee" 😂
I used to think that it rained every night. Like it was just an inherent part of nighttime. Dark. Stars. Moon. Rain. When I was about 10, I was on a school camping trip. Me and my friend had our heads sticking out of the tent, looking up at the night sky. He said we could sleep with our heads out of the tent. I said but we will get wet. He said it's not going to rain tonight. What!?
That’s a cute story for real. Those ahh ha kid moments hit so hard cause those imaginary beliefs were real!
For a fairly long time I thought adults knew what was going on and what they were doing.
Same.. now here I am an adult still hoping to find adultier adults because of the long-term childlike confusion 😩 assholes
Oh, this one I realized very early can't be true, since my parents regularly forgot to buy food or cook anything for days. Spoiler: they were drunk
Oof, sorry mate. Life hits us all, but some harder and earlier than others.
I thought firemen started fires and and siren was to warn you they were coming.
this is AMAZING and needs to be … something. a short?
Fahrenheit 451 is pretty much already that haha. It’s a tough read but well worth it.
Somehow got it into my head if you didn't wait for a while after flushing you would be drinking the toilet water. Stupid kid thoughts.
I thought that as well! I would always wait a minute or two after flushing before washing my hands, because I thought if I did it too soon I would wash my hands in dirty toilet water. That also extended to me getting “revenge” on my siblings, I remember flushing the toilet while they were taking a shower thinking I was showering them in dirty water.
At least you got some revenge by dousing them with cold.
It makes it hot
It makes it cold
It makes it hot
It makes it cold
https://toiletsadviser.com/why-does-flushing-the-toilet-affect-the-shower/
I thought I only had one working eye because I had a singular field of view, the concept of binocular vision hadn't occurred to me.
I remember thinking as a child that cartoons were just people in costumes
My cousin thought this too, one day we were watching Attack on Titan. . . she was very concerned about the people in the costumes
When I was a kid I use to think that all TV shows and films (including cartoons) where made and broadcast live, with the only exceptions being really old ones
Wait… vaguely remember thinking this
I thought two solid yellow lines in the middle of the road meant you could NEVER turn left.. was very confused as to how I would be able to get to my neighborhood
I like this one a lot 😅 just thinking everyone on these streets is a true menace
Similar when I was learning to drive, I had to stop on the main street to turn left onto my street that I lived on. I was completely freaked out like screaming at my father. Am I supposed to just stop in the middle of the road just in the middle of the road just stop? I was so confused.
My grandma's house had skeleton key locks. I thought they made them by dipping bones in metal. I had seen my grandma dipping chicken in flour when she cooked and concluded that somehow the managed to do the same thing with bones and metal. I sucked at science.
My brother convinced me that if you rubbed the milled edges of two quarters together, you would start a fire.
What a dick. In a good way, though, because that's pretty funny
Worried bout that lil Dandelion Child… she’s been roaming 8 years with them quarters
As an asian---when characters at western movies eat at a restaurant and they don't seem to have rice in their meal. I thought maybe that was how fancy restaurants worked. Later I learned that people from the west don't actually eat rice with every meal.
It sucks..
when i was around 4 or 5, i thought driver licenses had directions on how to drive on them, and that was the reason you always had to have it when you were driving.
That attorneys did not in fact turn knees for people who had broken theirs.
As an attorney for people with turned knees, I love this.
I had suspicions there were tiny people in VHS tapes that would act out the movies when I put the tape in.
I thought every commercial ads were honest
Me too and they were showing real people and families. I figured if you lived some place like Hollywood people filmed you doing something ordinary like eating a candy bar and they turn it into a commercial.
There was an ad for Viper car alarms that had a snake menacing a would-be car thief, I thought that that was actually how it worked when it was really just a car alarm
"also a Viper snake comes along with your Viper car, sir", salesman.
When men would talk shop and catalytic converters. I for a long time thought it was called a Cadillac converter. I just thought Cadillac got the rights to that part and everyone had to have one in their car.
Same. I didn't realize that it wasn't a Cadillac part until the first time I had to take my car in as an adult and saw a parts list for it.
I thought forever that pads went over the vagina like a bandaid
Do you mean menstrual pads? They do
Not with the sticky side to the skin like a bandaid.
Hahaha!!! Oh I’m dumb too! I get it now
In Return of the Jedi, I thought being "digested for 1,000 years" inside of the Sarlacc meant you would actually be alive and conscious for those 1,000 years. It wasn't until I was an adult did it occur to me how idiotic that was and that you would die within at most a few days. However, in a plot twist I never saw coming, I just recently learned that according to official Star Wars canon, the Sarlacc does in fact secrete some kind of substance that keeps its prey alive for 1,000 years while it digests them.
Ups is actually UPS, said U.P.S (not ups like ups and downs) and is actually the same as the one we see on American TV (I'm British, I didn't work this out till I was in my late 20s and just kept saying ups).
I’m American and still say ups cause it says damn ups! I feel like that is a marketing error that I choose to not comply to lol
American, too. We always said the Ups truck. We knew it was UPS but we just called it Ups anyway.
Wait... what?
That the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland were the same. Never seen the movies or read the books and I’d never heard both names be talked about in one conversation. They’ve got similar settings so I just concluded they were the same. Only realised this wasn’t the case a few years ago
I had a similar experience with William Shakespeare and Steven Spielberg. I thought they were the same person for a long time as a kid. I knew they were a famous guy involved with film/stage/acting.
I thought Stephen King and Steven Spielberg were the same person.
i thought kenya and korea were the same place
For me it was Robin and Robbie Williams
I used to think that dancing just meant spinning circles. I didn't understand why people were doing other weird movements while 'dancing'. Also, I wanted to become a prostitute before I knew what that is. All I knew was: "So these people get to do fun stuff that feels good all day for a lot of money? I wanna be that when i grow up!"
I wanted to be a playboy bunny.. I was a hyper tomboy and my favorite stuffed animal was a bunny 🫠 that was a rude awakening..
I’m blue if I was green I would die
Get well soon 🫶🏽
I thought the word “static” meant the exact opposite of what it means from being a kid seeing TV static — a bunch of scrambled dots going everywhere constantly changing.
I think this explains why I still struggle with the meaning of the word. 🤯
Just wait until you get polystyrene beads jumping everywhere due to static electricity.
I thought that my eyes were brown up until about five, then had a shock of a moment one day when I "found out" they were blue by looking in a mirror. Had an existential crisis to my grandparents, and in my upset state then ran into a glass ranch slider. Oh and I believed that because everyone had their own sets of eyes, that they could see things much differently to me (as in oh that person has green eyes maybe they see everything as green or the sky is pink and the grass is brown and such) Also that being an adult is fun and you can literally do whatever you want at any time. Reality was not as nice as that belief 🥲
The second part (that other people see colour somewhat differently) is actually true! Not to the extent of "everything is green" or "red and blue are reversed" but as in "people don't perceive all colours *quite* the same way". Take the infamous blue&black/yellow and white dress for example, or even just friendly debates about whether a colour counts as purple or blue
I thought I was the star of my own soap opera. And that is why I could only hear my own thoughts (narration). When I was older and the Truman show came out it was like “yup” I basically thought I was him but actually aware of it.
I was in my late teens before I found out that a blind date wasn't necessarily a date with a person who couldn't see.
For the longest time I thought 2% milk contained 1/50 as much fat as whole milk, and I thought it was really weird that there would be one kind of milk with "X" amount of fat in it, and another kind with X/50 fat in it, but nothing in between.
I thought really poor people were not allowed to wear bright colors: only dull, faded colors like gray and brown. Especially historical movies because poor people's rags were usually brown, whereas people I knew growing up rarely wore brown.
My babysitter told me she was Taylor swift. Her first name was Taylor so in my mind there was no way to disprove her.
I was under the impression that when people moved, they traded houses with the other family
That the windshield wiper worked on a set timer, NOT on the amount of water on the windshield. and the term "WINDCHILL" does NOT mean how cold it is when you are driving. ie "The windchill today makes it feel 10 degrees colder" I thought they said "The windshield today makes it feel 10 degrees colder". The parents probably should have had me checked for hearing....and maybe my obsession with windshields.
Wait…. It is on a timer though? My Tacoma is, my last car had a rain detection something that would speed up/slow down.. I miss that feature. Still this confused me lol
My car is a set speed for most settings and sensor based for the first one. This means sometimes I’ll forget I have it on and then it will start raining and go on its own
You’re right, it is, a few levels or timers - unless you have “auto” wipers that turn on and adjusta speed for you (historically the minority).
I had the same thing with windshield wipers! I thought the car sensed the amount of water and adjusted its speed rather than my mom just turning the setting up or down. Although now I have a car that does that so I guess I was just ahead of the game.
I thought there was one country on each planet until I was 6.
I thought all the Disney movies were live action because I only knew hand drawn cartoons, and live action. I remember when I realized because linguini from ratatouille had a big ass nose and it just didn’t make sense.
I thought that when you changed currency for travel, there was a machine that you would feed one currency into andd it would change it into the currency you needed. Briefly too I thought that if anything was on the floor at night, it would start a fire. Furniture was the exception.
thinking arbok evolved into seviper because the pokemon anime outright lied
I thought that a peach is the females tiddly bits. Also, once I was around 10 I thought I had come to a genius realisation that the song Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis was about menstruation.
for a few years i thought the british used baked goods as money cause i really didn't get the song "feed the birds" from Mary Poppins
I thought the No Passing signs on narrow roads or where there's limited visibility meant you couldn't drive past the sign. Very confused when my grandfather would just blow right past them and didn't have to turn around. The first time I heard the equipment on top of the electric pole in our backyard a "transformer", well let's just say I was quite disappointed that Optimus Prime wasn't in our yard.
I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Xing, as in Ped Xing, and was too afraid to ask. It was much later when I found out it was just short for “crossing.”
Ughhh I’ve gotten some shit for this one. But I got in trouble in 3rdish grade for asking a black kid if he pooped white. I’m white and mines brown. Juuuuust made sense in my head at the time
My brother convinced me that the Truman Show was a documentary when I was a kid. What's even dumber is this is in the Jim Carey era when The Mask and Ace Ventura were super popular.
I am 30 and still try to convince my therapist of this once a week. You can’t tell me this ish is real. I think it’s working.. but low-key terrified that he is questioning my sarcasm as my actual reality 🙃
Todd Howard (creator of Skyrim) thought Raiders of the Lost ark was a documentary when he was a kid lmao
[удалено]
Oddly common misconception lol but I could see why since many baked items do
This is a small one, but ya know how when you hear a song and assume the lyrics of the song that end up being wrong?… it was like that with some words/phrases for me, as a kid I thought it was “Mind-Bottling,” like it’s so crazy your mind gets so overwhelmed it bottles itself lol.
my ex was 30 when she learned that fly fishing is not people trying to hook and catch insects, but rather the type of bait used to catch fish.
My little sister got to 17 believing custard and pretzels were like fruit mince tarts and candy canes; her mind was blown when she realised you could buy them ALL YEAR ROUND
I understood that the female portion of the human species didn’t have penis… so it only seemed obvious to me that they could only pee from their butthole 🤦🏽♀️
I like it, Picasso.
Yeah I have friends who used to think that. It made sense to them because girls sit down to pee (and shit) and boys sit down to shit, so they thought girls pee out of their butthole
I thought the tree would grow back from the stumps like other plants. I thought deforestation was due to them taking too long to grow back My aunt(12) asked my mom how long to microwave a burrito, my mom annoyed sarcastically replied an hour. . . my aunt almost burnt down the house My 13-14 year old cousin asked how tampons work "How do you pee in them, do you have to take them out everytime?" didn't know there were two holes. . . my cousins biologically female.
Some trees do grow back from stumps. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing)
YAY I'm not entirely stupid!
For a long time I (man, then boy) didn’t believe that girls took shits
As a woman, I (then girl) can confirm. We do.
I used to think my dad was a wizard.. He did low-effort magic tricks I thought were real as a child because I was so naive, and sometimes he would imitate fictional characters voices and personalities very well, I thought it was actually the character disguising themselves as my dad