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What childhood beliefs or misconceptions took you an embarrassing time to figure out?
I'm talking about silly harmless stuff like "I believed in Santa Claus till I was 13", and not deep existential stuff like "It took me till adulthood to realize that my parents were doing their best despite their their failings".
When I was 6 I asked my grandma why are some of the shows she watches in black and white. She replied that it’s because they’re old shows. So, of course, I concluded that once a show gets past a certain age it loses its colours. I still was bothered why that is until 1-2 years later when I figured out that I misunderstood what she meant.
I didn't put it together that childrens shows were made by adults until I was about 10, and that "seasons" were a concept around 12. Then I learned about how shows like "The Angry Beavers" only had three seasons but ran consistently for the better part of a decade and felt tricked.
Along these lines, I thought child and adult actors were the same person, and they waited until the children grew up to finish filming the show or movie.
Oh goodness, this brought back one of mine. My experience with my own video camera / recording on VHS tapes when I was a kid lead me to believe that (non-cartoon) shows had to be filmed in chronological order from the first scene to the last scene. I had no concept of editing or having multiple cameras.
I figured the camera would run, they would do the intro scene, stop the camera, and check if it was good. And if it wasn't, they'd re-wind the film and try again. Then they could move on to the next scene once they got it right! This could mean driving everyone out to a different place entirely, and then returning if the story demanded it.
Yup, that was definitely another one I had.
Shows that presented themselves as kid-run (like Zoom, All That, etc.) really made that confusing. Also it wasn't until my teens that I realized that wasn't Michael Jordan's actual family, dog, or house in Space Jam
Seasons and times that things were airing were super confusing for me. In my head, everything was a rerun.
Jumping off of this. I thought people who were color blind saw everything in black and white until I was 13.
I'm pretty sure there's a good amount of people who believe that one into adulthood, lmao
That seems to be a pretty common one. My nephew initially thought the same when I showed him clips from some of my favorite black & white slapstick comedies. When he asked why the world didn't have colours back then I was tempted to joke about it, but decided it was probably best to just tell him the truth instead. ;)
Tangent: I have always wondered what would result of a social experiment if a child were taught from birth that red is blue, blue is green, and green is red (i.e., the sky is green, the grass is red, an apple is blue.) Would they ever figure out they were lied to, or would it be assumed they were some new variation of colorblindness?
Since their word for red is basically "blue", then any attempts to diagnose would run into that wall, wouldn't it?
Nothing to do with the topic, but the messing with his head comment brought it to mind. Sorry, carry on!
An interesting question.
I suppose the child would either have to grow up in a pretty isolated setting, or otherwise the whole society around that child would have to be in on the experiment? If the first is true, I think it wouldn't take much effort for the child to come to the conclusion that their parents' dialect for some reason or another differed from the standard language when it comes to colour words, and the child would adjust quickly when coming into contact with other people, as we tend to do. If the latter... if the whole society is using "red" for "blue", doesn't that then practically make "red" mean "blue"?
Languages actually vary quite a lot when it comes to colour words. Ancient Greeks wrote about purple seas and bronze skies -- it has been argued that they didn't have the word for "blue". In Japanese, the word for "blue" also covers "green" to an extent, although a word for "green" was introduced into the language about a hundred years ago, so the word for "blue" has lost some of its greenness. In English, "red" is "red", but Hungarian splits that into two (one of which is kind of darker red, but it's a bit complicated). I think the minimum attested number of colours in a language is just two -- in those, the only colour words are basically for "dark" and "light").
But we can also ask: is your blue the same as my blue? After all, "blueness" doesn't really exist in physical reality. What you perceive as blue is a range of frequencies of light. Your eye captures that wave and your brain converts it into "blueness". Just like your ear captures other types of waves and your brain converts those into sounds. As far as I'm aware, there really is no way to know that your brain converts the blue frequency into the same colour interpretation as my brain. For all we know, your blue could be my red. And then we are sort of back where your question began.
Brains are weird. Languages are weird. Perception is weird. And it's all so very fascinating.
This was a Steve Martin joke back in the day. He advised "talking wrong" around the young child of someone you hated.
"We have purposely trained him wrong as a joke."
My parents emigrated to the US from Hungary. When I was 5, we went back to visit family there.
I have many vivid memories of the trip. In fact, I celebrated my 5th birthday there. I can still, to this day (I'm in my 50s now), clearly remember my blue and white cake with a big, gilded, blue-and-white candle shaped like a "5" on top.
...
Except I didn't celebrate my 5th birthday there. Apparently, it was actually my 6th birthday, which I didn't learn until well into adulthood, and even then, it took my parents several years before they convinced me my memory was faulty.
The crust of the bread does not somehow have "all the vitamins" in it. This is a lie I was told as a child to get me to eat the crust of my sandwiches. It fooled me for much longer than I want to admit...
I have super fine and straight hair, and when I was a kid I wished it was curly. So my parents told me a variation of this - if I ate the crusts of my bread and drank my milk, my hair would become curly!
I don't actually remember if I believed it... and if I did, I don't remember when I realized it was a lie, haha.
Some truth to that with the fancy seed covered breads.
I guess this is probably more serious than other answers here.
I was in my early to mid twenties before I realized that poor people don't choose to be poor. I grew up in a somewhat fundamental evengelical environment, and it wasn't until I became a foster parent and sat down face to face with poverty that I began to understand it.
I vividly remember being about 9 and realising your birthday was the day you were born.. It honestly blew my mind and I told my friends expecting their minds to be blown also only to find out that nope, thats common knowledge. It's wierd how you go along with things and they just sorta become normal without you ever thinking about them that hard.
Also writing that out just dredged up a memory of something I hadn't thought about for yonks...So we didnt really do santa, the tooth fairy, or any of those classic childhood things, but my brother managed to convince me that the queen wasnt real. She was just a mascot for the country like how kellogs frosties has tony the tiger, and I cant really remember how he sold me on it initially, but I remember thinking about it and rationalizing it bc she's on all of our money, always at big national events showing support and whatnot, plus our school would do a big event every year for her jubilee or something and put up union jacks everywhere.. And yet I had no idea what she actually did. It just made a lot of sense so I never really questioned it. That was, until I started to learn about the history of the royal family in school and had the silent realisation that I'd been pranked and I shouldn't mention this to anyone ever.
And this isn't exactly a misconception exactly, more a failing of the british education system but we weren't taught a lot of grammar rules explicitly, you just learnt them by doing and figuring out what "sounded right" and I wound up talking to a norwegian friend online when i was 16/17 and having my mind blown again when I learnt that there was a rule for when to use 'a' and 'an'.. For me it was always whatever rolled off the tongue easier but in reality it was decided by consonant/vowel sounds. I learnt more about the rules of english from my foreign friends than my teachers.
an aside
btw, there are A LOT of accents in the uk so being strict about grammar rules can be sort of pointless anyway. For example - if you drop your consonants a lot, you would say "an headache" out loud but have to write it "a headache" because you cant exactly write "an 'eadache" in a formal setting.I was very young, 4 or 5, when I learned that women take their husband's name.
I thought that was unfair and said so, and my mom told me (I don't recall the exact words) "sometimes women keep their name". I understood that to mean that sometimes men also discard their own name entirely and adopt their wife's name. And that made me happy and the world seemed fair again.
I was an adult, 20-ish, before I finally realised how it actually worked, and the world has seemed inherently unfair ever since.
The world may be unfair, but not every country/culture actually uses the same surname system.
E.g. In Iceland neither spouse takes the other's surname as their own, and their children don't take either parents' surname. Instead the children's surname becomes <parent's first name>+sson for boys, <...>+dóttir for girls, or <...>+bur for non-binary people. Which parent they base that new surname on is initially up to the parents, but people can decide to change it later if they wish to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name
In Spain neither spouse takes the other's surname, and children are given two surnames, one from each parent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs
In India there are a bunch of totally different naming conventions usually dependent on the family's culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_name#Names_by_culture
And there are also lots of other surname systems still in use all over the world.
Exponential explosion coming in 3...2...1...
Shhhh, don't tell me they discard the second surname when naming kids. I want to believe that technically, they're undocumented components of the name, such that the child of a Firstname García Lorca and a Firstname Ruiz Picasso would be called Firstname Garcia Lorca Ruiz Picasso. After only a few generations, this blows up substantially, since you're doubling the number of names every turn. 10 generations with that tradition? 1024 last names. 30? More last names than the world population that first carried those names. Which means some of that original population appears in several places of your ancestry. Now you can read off of your name which ancestors of yours had kids with distant relatives. Ooof.
In previous centuries many Arabic names actually did something like that, albeit only tracking the patrilineal side. E.g. Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād, made famous in 13th Warrior.
Makes me realize how liberal we are with surnames in Portugal (you can read the section in the linked article). Up to four surnames, you can take any combination and order from your parents and grandparents, you can adopt your wife's surname, you can adopt your husband's, you can adopt neither, all's permitted. Sure, there are certain changes that are more traditional, but they aren't mandatory. I did not in fact realize there were western countries in which a couple couldn't choose to share just the wife's surname (without taking any shit for it).
Given names are a different matter, and you can't just name your daughter "Khaleesi" on a whim here. I have divided feelings about that. Probably good for the kids not getting bullied in school, but I'd like to see an acceptance of greater variety in people's given names.
I was probably too old when I realized that The Wonder Years wasn't a show from the 60s/70s, but rather a show from the 80s/90s about the 60s/70s. I think my dad telling me that he grew up when the show took place is part of what tripped me up. Plus a lot of the shows I watched as a kid were genuinely from the 60s/70s because that stuff made up the bulk of Cartoon Network's lineup in the 90s.
What's weird to think abut is that if the show aired today with the same time gap, it'd start in 2002, when I was around Kevin's age.
And Happy Days hehe
Oh, I totally had the same misconception but about That 70's Show.
In freshman year of college, my roommate and I maintained an ongoing, year-long, debate/argument about which were yellow-jackets and which were wasps. The debate mostly consisted of "those are yellow-jackets" ... "no, those are wasps" ... "nu-uh" ... "na-huh" ... and similar, carefully-crafted points and counterpoints.
In a full year, neither of us ever bothered to actually, you know, look it up. We were both 100% sure of ourselves.
Turns out, he was right, I was wrong. But it could as easily have gone the other way. We were both idiots.
PS: This was in the '80s, when "looking it up" was a bit more complicated than just pulling your phone out of your pocket ... but, you know ... not that much more complicated. We were in college, which is basically just 4 years of looking stuff up.
I miss the time before smartphones. Sure, many discussions were left unresolved, but they were so passionate and interesting! Nowadays, whenever a dumb discussion arises, my friend opens up Wikipedia and it's all over. I can remember the precise period of the transition, and that I complained about it even then!
I wish my friends were so easily appeased. Nowadays if it doesn't have 3 peer reviewed studies it's basically fiction or opinion.
I often will say “We could just look it up, but that’d ruin the fun”. People rarely Google the thing in question after that.
I was younger than that, later than that, and my brothers and I had the same argument. We settled it with an encyclopedia IIRC, but still never connected that yellow-jackets are just a type of wasp.
Two things came to mind while reading all these. The first was that I used to think that cats were all female and dogs were all male, both of the same species. I don't remember how I found out I was wrong, but I think that idea was born from the inordinate amount of time I spent watching mid century modern cartoons on broadcast tv.
And while thinking back on those days, I remembered that I also used to think that "batteries not included" meant "batteries not needed". For this, I blame advertising and their unrealistic advertising, but I also remember the movie Batteries Not Included being one of my favorite for a long time. Honesty, I really don't know for sure what caused me to think those things, but childhood is certainly full of creativity.
Ha! I had a similar misunderstanding. I thought goats/sheep were the same animal, goats being the male and sheep the female.
As a child, I assumed that since the police are authority figures whose job is to protect us and to solve problems, only the wisest and the most capable people would become police officers.
I think I was in my teens when I overheard someone remarking that many, if not most people who become police officers aren't really the brightest individuals, and tend to gravitate towards power fantasies and downright bullying behaviour.
This thought, which had never crossed my mind before, made a lot of sense. But it also remodelled my understanding of not just the police, but of how society functions.
That usually seems to be an American perspective, IMO. Quite a few members of my extended family and social circle are in law-enforcement here in Canada, and none of them are stupid, or bullies... it's the opposite, they're super nice, caring people who went into that career because they genuinely wanted to help people. ACAB isn't a universal truth across the whole world.
True, I should have worded that much better, as I certainly didn't take what I overheard as the literal truth. I grew up in Finland, so this was in that country's context. As far as I personally know, most of the police there are also really nice people. The same is probably true everywhere.
I suppose the news coming from the US may have subconsciously influenced how I communicated above. Much like what @Adys worries is happening to our relationship with the police outside of the US. Thanks for pointing out that I was promoting an unhealthy message, without wanting to or realising it.
So, let me try to rephrase a little. What me overhearing this person's remark changed was my childhood assumption that the police are the ultimate best people, the wisest individuals in a society. It was only then that I realised that becoming a police officer doesn't require superhuman skills, abilities and dedication, but it's another career among others. One with something like mid-tier requirements in terms of education, at least in Finland. And like all careers, it likely attracts certain types of people more than others, for better or worse.
I worry about American cultural influence having this effect on police forces beyond US borders as well. Just because they have a trashy reputation in the US, I feel like over the years I’ve seen far more distrust and disdain towards the police grow in Europe for reasons that have nothing to do with how the police actually is over here. Even as far as completely unfounded fears, such as a fear of getting shot by police … in the UK.
I didn't realize there was a difference between "miss" and "mizz" titles for women until a few years ago. I just assumed they were the same title, just pronounced differently because of different accents.
Also I just (in the last 10 minutes) learned that my original pronunciation of "crayon" as "crown" is totally valid in the state I grew up in. For years I thought it was some childhood mispronunciation because my wife (from a different state) pronounced it "Cray-on" and poked light fun at me for saying it that way. For years now I have had to manually slow down and pronounce that word counter to how I learned it.
I don’t know if we grew up in the same place or not (and I’m mum about that anyway so I won’t confirm it even if asked 😆) but I said “crayon” as “crown” growing up too. For me, it was a southern drawl that turned both words into something like “craan” (though honestly, I’m unable to type the word as it actually sounds).
On a similar note, I had no distinction between “pin” and “pen” (both were said like “pin”). I didn’t realize they were said differently until I moved away and asked a classmate if they had a “pen”, and they were baffled as to why I would be asking them for a “pin” in the middle of a lecture.
So uh. What the hell are you talking about?
Ms. vs Miss - Ms., as the marriage-status neutral form, is an invention of second wave feminism and wear widely mocked and rejected by conservatives for years before eventually being adopted by almost everyone.
@mtset gave a good quick overview of it, but this article has some more details if you're curious -- https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/what-s-the-difference-between-miss-ms-and-mrs.html
I was unaware of this usage, thank you for the link!
Honestly, the Miss/Ms./Mrs. distinction is one of those archaic, misogynistic parts of English that needs to just go away.
Isn't Ms. the direct result of that being the case for Miss/Mrs.?
I get why it might be a good idea to go without those, but exactly why would you call such prefixes "misogynistic"? Wouldn't a word like "patriarchal" be more adequate?
Good call, "patriarchal" is the better word to use here. Of course, misogyny is the beating heart of patriarchy.
I recall the moment that I realized it's called a vagina not "pachina" and has nothing to do with China the country.
Similarly, someone who is "a lesbian" (noun) is not "elesbian" (adj).
Girls fart. And poop. And play Halo! And that stuff you're saying to them over the mic really isn't appropriate. In fact, wash your mouth out in general, son. Damn.
that staying up late instead of having a regular sleep schedule is actually bad (really really really bad)