I screamed “ME TOO” at more than half of these.

in Random Crap, weekly reruns

Yesterday I used twitter for what it was made for: admitting mortifying true statements which you’d only ever admit during slumber parties or when really, really drunk.

me: “True story: I always thought that Smurfette and Loni Anderson were related because they had the same hair.”

I expected crickets, but instead a flood of people came to my aid to admit incredibly embarrassing stuff they had once believed as well.  And it was beautiful.  Just a few of my favorites:

“I thought Gorbachev’s birthmark on his head was a tattoo of the USSR. I thought he was just super patriotic.” ~ @GriggioDC

“I used to call the back of my knees “kneepits.” You know, like armpits.”  ~ @joannerjoanner

“I have a friend who though cemeteries were in alphabetical order until she was in her 20’s.” ~ @cmamerson

I thought rhinos and hippos were the same species, Hippos were the girls and rhinos were boys.” @oreo_borealis

I thought that there was a planet named Goofy since there was one named Pluto. When it still a planet, that is. ~ JennKirscher

“I thought “voidware” was a thing & wondered why it was prohibited. (Radio promotions: void where prohibited)” ~ @paula_londe

“I used to think it was “the curve” and not “the curb,” because it was curved.” @Joannerjoanner

“I thought “Jet Airliner” was “big ole Chad in the line-up, don’t carry me too far away.” Because, really, please don’t.” ~ @RevAmyZ

“For years I thought chickens were female turkeys b/c my mother always bought chicken breasts (hello, female)” ~kellyg49

“I thought Luby’s was an oil change place.” ~ @KellyBundysTwin

“I thought round hay bales grew up out of the ground that way” ~ @Thrushiebaby

“I thought “No Parking Anytime” signs meant we couldn’t park anywhere, not even in our garage, and we’d have to drive forever.” ~ @kravenswood

“I always thought Jesus’ middle name was Harold (Jesus H. Christ) because “Hark The Harold Angels Sing.” ~ @JennyL791

“I thought talk about euthanasia was talk about youth in asia. So many disagreeing with them.” ~ @Trivialtee

“I thought the song “Smooth Operator” was about a telephone operator.” ~ @melafina

“I thought the blue signs with the H on them pointed to where a hotel was.” ~ @MichellePlyem

“I thought ‘END CONSTRUCTION’ signs were protest pickets.” ~ @tadjemiii

“I thought ‘Exotic Dancers’ was a place I could take hula lessons.” ~ TiltedWorldView

“I used to think maxi pads were the shoulder pads in women’s clothing” ~ @Michaelrclair

“Friend once said “Wonder why there seems to be no French people in French Foreign Legion” Um, it’s French FOREIGN Legion.” ~ @Learusty

“I thought being cremated meant you were turned into body lotion for your relatives” ~ @killerbdesigns

“I thought as a kid that braces were just paper clips bent around your teeth…so I tried it. They’re not.” ~ @Melflynn0

“I’m still not entirely sure if reindeer are real animals.” ~ @jjoanning

“As a kid I thought the radio had all the musicians live and never figured out how they all fit in the studio.” ~ @WarPizza

“I thought cats were girls and dogs were boys, and they would mate to make girl kittens and boy puppies.” ~ @addiful

“I only ever went to the arrivals part of the airport, cause I was arriving at the airport.” ~ @Rustymarble

“Until last year, I thought Ming the Merciless was an ancient Chinese emperor known for his particular cruelty.” @laurinemily

“I thought the guards in The Wizard of Oz were chanting about Oreos.” ~ Azsunyx

“I used to think that Manfred Mann sang “wrecked up like a douche”. Asking my Mom to explain provided no clarity.” ~ @AlanKercinik

“I thought road runners only existed in cartoons. Like rabbits in drag.” ~ @Missy_Ann_Tx

“I thought Kosher pickles had no pork in them. Which made me wonder about all other kinds of pickles.” ~ @ocularnervosa

“I thought it was weird that Mr. and Mrs. Floyd named their son Pink.” ~ @sarrup

“I thought signs that said ‘To Let’ were for the bathroom and were just misspelled.” ~ @imommygame

“I thought the Corner Furniture store in my town only made furniture that went in the corner.” @florabell444

“I thought that all of the companies with 1-800 phone numbers were in the same city.” @jas508

“I always thought radio antennae were just towers to hold up lights, and the lights were there so planes didn’t hit the towers.” @thecarie

“I thought salt and pepper were opposites, so if you used too much of one, you could just add a little of the other.” ~ @sassafrass584

“I believed there was some arcane connection between cantaloupes and antelopes. (Like, they grew in the same places)” ~ @fullofstars

“I thought Don Quixote was a story about a donkey named Hotey.” ~ @afternoonNapper

“My first day of school, I expected the ‘restroom’ to be filled with cots for naptime. I was very disappointed.” ~ @Ohhh_Snap

“I thought that Roy Orbison was blind because he wore those sunglasses. Only found out this year that wasn’t true. I’m 35.” ~ @Kelly_Grayston

“I thought Planned Parenthood was called Planet Parenthood and had some connection to Planet Hollywood.” ~ @StevenOblander

“I thought the band was called “The Pet Schmode” & always wanted to know where you could buy one. #DepecheMode” ~ @ Blackswanmuses

“I thought some of my family were ‘distant cousins’ because they lived in a different town.” ~ @tonyinabag

“I thought writing in cursive was how you communicated with Spanish people.” ~ quill_intheink

“I thought signs saying “Trespassers will be prosecuted” meant they would be killed.” ~ @nwkmom

“I thought going “cold turkey” involved deli meat until I was 20.” ~ @rocket_tan

“I thought there was some central location where people monitored traffic and switched the lights from green to red.” ~ @barbaramcthomas

“I thought snails were slugs who found homes.” ~ @LaurenCentrella

“When I was little I thought that too! Once I put a slug next to a shell from the beach & said ‘There you go!'” ~ @PanyaV

“My daughter liked slugs better, so she  peeled snails to free them. 🙁 ” ~ @KKerns

“I thought my crayon box was made in some town called Sharpener. Because it said, “Built in sharpener” ~ @jrHeadbox

“When I was young I thought that the past had actually been black & white. I asked my Mom what it was like when they got color.” ~ @wench

“I thought Moody Blues song was “Knights In White Satin”. I couldn’t understand why the knights wore white satin & not armor.” ~ @Ottawagrrl

“My daughter thought seagulls grew up to be eagles.” ~ babsbeaty

“I thought TBA was the name of a very popular local band.” ~ llexuus

“I thought Christ was Jesus’ last name. Mary Christ. Joseph Christ.” ~stateofchangekc

“I thought married people were ‘awfully wedded’.” Iheartconsumer1

“I thought you couldn’t be out of money if you still had checks.” ~ @GW_HPFF

“I thought my Aunt Yvette was named Auntie Vet till I was 18 and added her on fb.” @tyler_kalin

“I thought skunks lived on the side of highways because that’s the only time I ever smelled them.” ~ @authenticalex

“I told my mom to make my brother a boy cheese sandwich because I thought I always ate girl cheese sandwiches.” ~ @spicedrum

“Signs said “It is a crime (misdemeanor) to consume alcohol on premises.” Thought misdemeanor was Spanish for “crime” til 15.” ~ @Lemonberry32

And my personal favorite:

“@TheBloggess reading all of your responses today, makes me realize that I’ve found my tribe. My odd, widely dispersed, Internet tribe. ~ @BroccoliDoc”

Welcome home, y’all.

**************

And in entirely unrelated news, it’s time for the weekly wrap up:

What you missed in my shop (tentatively called “Eight pounds of uncut cocaine” so that your credit card bill will be more interesting.):

What you missed on the internets:

This week on shit-I-didn’t-come-up-with-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome:

  • I have no idea.  I sort of spent all week yelling about how much I hate Rick Perry.  I’ll make it up to you next week.

This week’s wrap-up is sponsored by the wonderific folks at ZERT, a site where people can join and enter giveaways for free every day, 24 times each day.  They also have Quick Draw giveaways which last a few days, and Featured Giveaways which are given away each month.  You should probably check them out.

894 thoughts on “I screamed “ME TOO” at more than half of these.”

Read comments below or add one.

  1. What order ARE cemeteries arranged in? Alphabetical would make it so much easier to find your dead people.

  2. When I was little I used to believe I didn’t have “thoughts” because I didn’t have one of those little white thought bubbles over my head like they do in comic books.

  4. I love you even more than usual for compiling all of these into a single location. Reading them was one of the highlights of a shitty week.

  10. Me? For the longest, I would specify that I wanted to go see movies “in a theater near me”.

    My daughter, age 5, still thinks that I’m telling her to put on her “inside boys” instead of her “inside voice” and she always gets so irritated with me and yells “NO! I’m an INSIDE GIRL!”

  11. I once dated a girl who thought Mount Rushmore was a natural formation.

  14. I thought foliage was spelled foilage until last year. I’m 42. I pronounced it “FOIL- ej” – ooo – look at the landscaping on that house – what nice FOILej!

  15. As they came to get us for the Becoming a Woman movie in sixth grade, the boys were teasing us. I very self assuredly clued them in that they, too, would likely be called to watch their own movie – what did they think tampax were for? (pads for us, and going by the anatomy of my younger brothers, the logical conclusion was…)

    On a lightly similar note… a coworkers three year old son asked her why Daddy had a thumb down there.

  18. I thought ‘seldom’ was a discouraging word. You know – ‘Where ‘seldom’ is heard, a discouraging word’?

  19. Relatedly, I thought for years that Dire Straits were singing “Sultans of Suede.” To this day, when I hear that song, I picture them all in blue suede suits.

  20. “I thought the song “Smooth Operator” was about a telephone operator.” ~ @melafina

    ….OMG. That just clicked. I’m 29.

  21. I also spent most of the week yelling at Rick Perry. Its heartwarming to know that when I’m done yelling I can feel at home with so many people who think like I do.

  22. I’m right there on the reindeer thing. In the last few years, I’ve started to get a sense they really exist. Do they?

  24. Great, great post. I’m gonna come back here when I’m having a rough day ’cause I feel sure it’ll make me smile.

    Mine: I thought “Do not pass” signs meant do not pass the sign, and that my parents were constantly breaking the law. I was terrified they’d be arrested for it.

  26. My husband thought babies came out your butt because his mom told him (at 4yo) that having a baby felt like you had to poop really bad.

    I though poop was stored in the butt cheeks. And pee in the vaginal lips…which is why you had to pee more often than poop…the butt cheeks had more storage capacity.

  27. I used to think that people who died in the movies really did die, and wondered how they got people to volunteer to do that.

  28. I used to think that the operator was listening into our calls. Apparently, I was just able to read the future, but mistook her for the NSA. Although, I hope the NSA isn’t all old-timey, like it was in my head, with red lips, big sprayed curls in her hair, and a pinafore dress.

    Actually, now I hope it is.

  29. Oh, thank you! I was laughing so hard I couldn’t think of any 🙂

  30. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to look up some Moody Blues lyrics. Then apologize to my mother. Because that argument happened. Whoops.

  31. I used to think that thing about the Oreos. Then I watched Wreck It Ralph with my kids and said out loud, ‘HOLY CRAP!! LOOK They’re saying OREO…OHHHHHHHH’ and they ARE Oreos just like I used to think.’ and my kids were like…..”what size was the bus you took to school?” and I was like, “Screw you!! That guy in the mall is just wearing a SUIT! there is no Santa Clause!! And remember Grandma’s super minty cup in the bathroom? That’s because she took a shot then chased it with mouthwash so the rest of us didn’t know she was ball to the wall drunk every day!!!” ps…my kids now sniff their cups before they take a drink just to be safe……

  32. Reindeer are domesticated caribou. Both exist, I promise. I have eaten them.

    Yes, you, on that Rick Perry. This whole last week has been such a week for news, I’m exhausted. Mostly because I’m shouting at a lot of people, both angrily and happily.

  33. I thought that pushing out a baby on the hospital bed gave you a flat butt because all the moms I knew had them. Turns out that’s just what happens when you get old

  34. When I first heard the Three Dog Night Song, my girlfriend and I thought the lyrics were, “Eli’s coming in a cocksafe . . .” and we asked another kid, what’s a cocksafe, because we had NO idea (just that it must be really gross and how could they play a song like that on the radio, anyway). When the kid we asked stopped laughing we found out the lyrics were actually, “Eli’s coming and the cards say. . .”

    Still. I cannot hear that song without thinking it says cocksafe.

  35. LOL! I had a boyfriend in college who thought (when he was a kid) that the AC/DC song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was “dirty knees and the thunder chief”. 😀

  38. My daughter had an imaginary friend “Have Kimberley.” She was always good. She be-haved all the time!
    Apparently I told her to behave too many times!

  39. Until my mid twenties I thought the signs in elevators that say “In case of fire use stairs” meant that there might be a fire and people might want use the stairs instead of if the building is on fire don’t use the elevator.

  41. I come from a family of ppl with severe allergies & aversions to cats (….can…can i still join the tribe?) as a result i never spent time with cats. Until i was in my late teens, i thought cats didn’t poop. I thought they were kind of the opposite of birds–instead of their pee coming out with their poop, cats’ poop came out with the pee. That’s was the litterboxes were for.

  42. I thought a lugie was AN alugie until I was nearly 20. And I thought Elvis was singing about his “loose weight shoes” instead of blue suede until I was 15. I figured that’s how he danced so well. The shoes made his feet loose. Make sense, right? Right?!

  43. The kneepits idea just makes sense! I think I will start using that…

  44. @Lemonberry32 Me too! I kept thinking spanish was so much more efficient than english because they only needed the one word to express that whole sentence.

  47. I used to think that Olivia Newton John and Elton John were brother and sister. I called him “Elton Newton John” (and wanted to be him when I grew up).

  48. Oops, i used the wrong email… Its actually the one in this comment & includes the numbers…. Ugh!

  49. I LOVED reading these. Great post!

    When my son was 4 he learned the Pledge of Allegiance at preschool. He wanted me to practice it with him at home. We finished the pledge “…with liberty and justice for all.” He yelled, “Wait you forgot the last part!” Then he very seriously stated, “You may be seated.”

  50. Until I learned about editing, I was convinced that the dates on “Love Connection” occurred between the commercial breaks. I could never figure out how ALL OF THAT HAPPENED so fast. I had a very weird view of dating until I figured out what was really happening.

  51. When my youngest daughter was 6, we were listening to the radio and Hall and Oates “Maneater” came on. She asked, “why does the woman eat men?” I told her it was just an expression she replied “she eats them with expression?” I didn’t know what to say to explain…after pausing, she said “Is this a song about zombies?” “yes it is, yes it is!”

  52. Until about 5 years ago (I am 40 now) I thought the ABC Package store, was a place like Mail Boxes Etc., where you could take your packages and mail them. Then I actually went into one with a friend. She about pee’d her pants laughing when I told her.

    I still think it’s Knights in White Satin, and when I was little I thought the “awfully wedded” thing too. It’s good to have peoples. LOL

  53. I used to think that all foreign languages were essentially cryptograms and all I needed to do to translate them was to find which letters corresponded to each other.

  54. I thought in the song, Disco Inferno, they were saying “brand that mother cow.”

  55. Awesome. I thought “Tomorrow … on Today” was the stupidest thing ever said on television and I hated NBC for saying it every. single. freaking. day. Was it on tomorrow or was in on today? Make up your mind. I think I was like 12 when I realized the show was called Today.

  56. I had to tell my sister that the eggs we eat do not come from a special kind of chicken which lay eggs that don’t hatch. She’s 24.

  57. When I was little I would sweep my dads body shop and sing along into the broom, “hold me close I’m tired of dancing” was a very popular song… Took me a long time to make the connection to my dads laughter

  58. My boys still call grilled cheese sandwiches ‘boy cheese’ sandwiches (they’re 10 and 6).

    My youngest son called his blue jeans jellybeans. 🙂

  59. I used to think that Tom Petty was “Free for it” (Free Fallin’) and wondered what it was he was free for.

  60. I thought that the part of the Lord’s Prayer that said ” and lead us not into temptation” was actually “and lead us not into Penn Station”.
    This is the big train station that is right under Madison Square Garden in NYC.
    My dad invited me to go see a hockey game, at the Garden, and that we would take the train in from NJ.
    I was all like ” Oh no, you’re not gonna lead me into Penn Station!!!”
    Later, I heard him muttering something to my mom about “your son”…

  61. I love you, and our weird tribe 🙂

    When I was little, I believed so completely in Santa Clause that I freaked out at the idea of this strange old man coming into my bedroom at night, and the entire family had to put their stockings out on the landing for the next 2 christmases.

    And yes, Reindeer are real. I’ve met some.

  62. For the longest time, I heard, “my Auntie” instead of ” Miami” and Always wondered why the news reporters were talking about their relatives.

    I also believed the word “bastard” to be synonymous with “pirate” and had the difference explained after babysitting one day by the mother of the child I had been playing pirates with.

    And yes, I don’t even live in Texas anymore (San Angelo refugee here) and I was yelling at Rick Perry all weekend.

  63. oh! My mother told me that orange soda was “monkey’s blood” so she could have all of the oranage soda. She did the same thing to my uncle when he was a child.

    Today, neither one of us will drink orange soda.

  64. I always thought “Street Not Thru” meant it wasn’t finished yet. Glad you posted this because I missed it on twitter!

  65. I thought the presidential candidates literally ran for president. I remember wondering how they could run so fast when they were so old. However I blame America for having elections on the same year as summer Olympics (1984, Dukakis vs Reagan). I figured it out by the next elections.

  66. Jenny, I love you and your followers on Twitter! I can’t remember weird things I used to believe, but a lot of these sound familiar.

  67. ““I thought snails were slugs who found homes.” ~ @LaurenCentrella” My husband pointed this one out to me. I had to ask him if it was true. Up until today, I thought they were just like hermit crabs…. He insists that it’s important to note that I’m 28 years old. >.>

  68. When my neighbor across the street had a baby, I asked my mom what color it was. She responded, “what color do you think it is?? Blue?” me. “no, mommy – is it a black baby or a white baby??” didn’t quitegrasp race and ethnicity until elementary school…

  69. Okay, “Blinded by the Light” is totally talking about douches. I have looked up the lyrics and supposedly he is saying ‘deuce’, but as far as I know the two are not pronounced the same. So clearly he is screwing with us. I also thought “Night Moves” by Bob Seger was “Night Moon”, which sort of makes sense even if it’s a little redundant. And obviously it is “Knights in White Satin”, duh. 🙂

  70. As a child, I thought islands were floatting and a bridge was the only way to keep them in place.

  71. When I was young and dinosaurs freely roamed the earth, we used to read a publication called the TV Guide, wherein I frequently saw a listing for what I only assumed was a talk show, “To Be Announced.” I was 16 when I suddenly got it. Unfortunately for me, I got it out loud in front of the whole family…

    Also, I thought Jesus grew up to be Santa Claus.

    Also the female cats/male dogs things. Some things just make SENSE!

  72. Whenever I saw fencing in movies, I thought they said “En guarde” and “Souffle.”

    I had no idea it was “Touche” until my 20s.

  73. I remember thinking that “pitch” (as in “pitch black”) meant “extremely.” And so I would describe especially vibrant bananas as “pitch yellow” and so on. It took me a looooong time to realize what pitch actually was…

  74. I thought “Endsmeat” was what really poor people ate. You know — She couldn’t even make endsmeat! I was in my teens before it dawned on me that she couldn’t make ENDS. MEET.

  75. I used to think the song lyrics to Travis Tritt’s “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” were “I spilled tea all over your BLT” versus the somewhat more conventional “I spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E”. I sang it that way for years.

  76. In the phrase “Contents under pressure”, I thought the word “contents” was a verb that would imply some sort of implosion or explosion. As in, do not try to crush this can, it will content and hurt someone. I still read it that way in my head. Also, I always read the sign on automatic doors as “Automatic Caution Door”. Can’t un-see that.

  77. Adding on to Hank’s thought, we have a giant statue of Jesus nearby at the Great Passion Play. When I worked in retail, people always asked if it was natural or manmade. My hubby received that question, too, and he told them it was natural, and they had to mow down all the little ones that popped up overnight like mushrooms. He said that’s where the souvenir statues in the shops came from. PEOPLE BELIEVED HIM.

  78. I thought “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” were actually made in the 1950s. I thought this until I was in my 20s.

  79. We have an eye glass store called “Eyewear Liquidators”, their commercials sing their name over & over, for years I thought they were singing “I wear lick wedaters”. I had no idea what lick wedaters were or why someone would sing so enthusiastically about them.

  81. I thought “don’t drink and drive” applied to drinking of any kind and would get real stressed out when my aunt drank Pepsi while driving.

  82. Because of my mother’s thick Carolina accent, I thought that Pirates of the Caribbean was PARTS of the Caribbean until I was 14, went to Disneyland with my friends and read the damn sign! lol

    As for the person who thought the musicians actually lived in the radio? Ever hear the song “Angie Baby”? lmao

  83. For the life of me, I never could figure out why people would buy a house on a dead end road that clearly said…”No Outlets”. Did they like camping in a house?

  84. My father once convinced me that there was a giant boy-eating squirrel–I spent an entire summer wearing a peanut around my neck, just so I would have a bribe for the squirrel if I ran into him.

  87. I drove past a Trophy Cleaners and thought “wow, that’s a pretty specialized business”.

  88. Your book in Polish?! OMG I know what I’m getting my parents for Christmas, they will never know what hit them!

  89. Up until I was 17, I thought my dad just put water in his hair to make it stay. (Because that’s all I’d ever seen him do every time I walked past the bathroom.) Then I saw him actually put gel in his hair.

    When my dad got his motorcycle & I was learning how to drive (in my early 20s), I said that motorcycles were safer than cars because you could actually see the areas immediately around you–which you can’t do with cars.

    I’m 28 now.

    These are still two of my dad’s favorite stories to tell, & they both get uproarious laughter each & every time–from my dad AND from his audience!

  90. Enjoyed this post.. and ok, my mixed up lyric is a favorite joke now between me & hubby. He loves “classic rock”, and I’m not really there with him on it. He listens to Led Zepplin, and me, not so much. So, for a long time, I didn’t know the lyrics, and I told him the song was funny.. “you need Koolaid, really? lol..” ya.. whole lotta love & Koolaid. So, whenever it comes on the radio, I make sure to announce that he needs Koolaid. Been a few years, we still get a chuckle out of it.

  91. I thought that the alphabet went “abcdefghijkELEMENTAL P” because my name started with a P so it meant it was most important.

    I thought pimentos grew in olives until I was 21 and bit into one with a pit.

    I thought that I Love Lucy was a reality show before there were reality shows. They were married and had a kid and so I thought it was real.

    I thought that Roy Orbison was blind until I read this blog post and googled it. I’m 41.

  92. OMG,
    I am 29, and just had my world blow open. It’s not “Knights in White Satin”????

    One that I had was from when I was about 6. There was a 1-Hour photo store on the corner in Tacoma where I lived. I asked my dad what it meant, he told me that the store had cameras set up and every hour they would take pictures of the cars that passed by. I thought that until I was 18 and actually went into the store.

    My parents were jerks who lied to us all the time growing up.

  93. When I was little……..I remember my dad coming home and telling me that on the weekend we were gonna go to the flea market……(that term alone paints all sorts of amazing mental pictures in and of itself)…..but in what was surely a state of wonder, I asked my dad what that was………He told me it was where all the fleas from the flea circus ended up…..me being the gullible dork I was totally bought it. I don’t think anyone has ever been so excited to hit the dirt mall. Needless to say, when we arrived at the flea market, I was thoroughly disappointed. :/ My dad got a huge laugh out of it though 😛

  94. I used to think that ‘Exit Only’ signs meant that you couldn’t get back on at the exit. I didn’t learn about ‘No Return Access’ signs until I was in my mid-20s.

  96. My ex-wife thought that the Beatles’ song was called,
    “She’s Got A Chicken To Ride” …

    PS: “I always thought Jesus’ middle name was Harold (Jesus H. Christ) because “Hark The Harold Angels Sing.”
    OUTSTANDING.

  97. I must admit I also thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls and they mated to have boy puppies and girl kitties. On a related note, I was in the store with my toy poodle, Thor, whom I groom to have a mustache and goatee. A guy came up and told me ‘she’ was a beautiful dog. I told him he was a boy dog and the guy stared at me confused and said, “but she’s white!” I had to lift Thor up to show off his underneathy bits to convince him he was in fact a boy. I can only assume he thought all dogs with white hair were girls, all dogs with black hair were boys and can’t begin to imagine what he thought was the sex of all those dogs that are multi-coloured.

  98. and clearly, i can’t even get my own website address right.. i wondered why it looked wrong! >.< ok, in my defense, my computer died, i'm borrowing a crap laptop, until infinity, and i have nothing on it. i googled my own blog to find the address & must have pulled up my old one that i left.

  100. There is old version of “Jolly Old St Nicholas” performed by Maurice Chevalier that I listened to when I was a kid. Because of his French accent I thought the lyrics included the phrase “shoes for me dear Santa Claus” until my wife finally corrected me.

  101. Definitely yelling at Perry, too. But loving Wendy. And loving John Oliver for featuring her and her sneakers on The Daily Show the other night, and saying she might have invented a new product endorsement – “Fila” Busters. (Too bad she wasn’t actually wearing Fila shoes; that would have made it perfect.)

  103. When I was little, my dad told me that touch lamps were for blind people, so they didn’t have to find the knob. I didn’t realized that it was ingrained in my brain until somebody asked me why they made touch lamps.

  105. OMG I thought until this minute that slugs were snails that shed their shells.

  106. I used to wonder (an always asked my parents) what the “parmers” was in “Parmers and cheese” (Parmesan cheese). We still joke about it to this day.

  107. I was convinced that as long as you had a bank account you could just take whatever money you needed from an ATM. That is until I got in a ton of trouble for rolling my eyes and telling her to just go to the bank when she was worrying bout being short on money. Oh how I wish it worked that way now!

  108. “Jesus grew up to be Santa Claus” just undid me! Bwahahahaha

    I used to think that men had boy babies and women had girl babies. It only made sense.

  110. For a long time my older cousins let me believe that when we turned the clocks back during daylight savings, we went back in time during the night and the dinosaurs would come out.

  112. Sorry this is a day late! I was nuts even as a kid. 1. I would dance around in a saucy manner singing “Because I’m a Woman.” I was 5, and I thought this is what it meant to be horny because my dad inherited a pair of my Great Uncle Henry’s jeans with a patch on the knee. It had a devil on the patch with the word “horny” on it, and when I inquired about what this patch meant my dad looked befuddled and said it meant “to be sexy.” I was 6, and I’m not sure how I even knew what “sexy” meant. 2. The kicker…I could not say the color “orange” between the ages of 2-4. Instead, I said “ornish.” But I didn’t think said color was a color. I thought it meant bacon. And then the fatty part of the bacon was called “pineapple.” I’m a vegetarian now, and I’m quite schooled in diction now…;)

  113. I thought it was knights in white satin too, until I read this post! Thanks for setting me straight!

  114. I thought all corn growing in a field was the yummy sweet corn you ate at home.

  115. I just learned about nights in white satin… Today. From your blog. *facepalm*

  116. My son, Drew, thought his name was Justdrew because when people asked his name and I replied “Drew” they would always ask “Is it Andrew or just Drew” and I would answer “Just Drew”… he figured it out in first grade…

  117. After I graduated from law school, I discovered that Arizona did not have both a city pronounced “tuk-sun” and a city pronounced “too-sonn.” It turns out there’s only Tucson.

  118. It wasn’t until this post that I discovered Roy Orbinson is not blind…

  119. “I thought signs saying “Trespassers will be prosecuted” meant they would be killed.” ~ @mwkmom

    ME TOO. I clearly didn’t know the difference between “prosecuted” and “executed.”

    I also used to think that movies were like plays. The actors just performed it all the way through and someone recorded it. And the actors had to perform the movie again for every copy of the VHS. I was always impressed that the actors did everything the same way on everyone’s VHS.

  120. “Kneepits” and “elbowpits” are totally legit descriptors. Also, Roy Orbison isn’t blind?

  121. On a visit to Texas, I thought Luby’s was a stationery store because of the sign’s giant apostrophe. It made sense to my English major brain.

  122. My parents used to watch Tom Brokaw on the news. For my whole childhood I thought he was the president.

  123. I thought Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach was about staying with her boyfriend. (I’m keepin’ my baby!)

  124. Oh jeez, y’all just made my entire day with all these, I have totally found my people! When I was a kid(even through my teens) I thought that mail got from city to city through giant pneumatic tubes, like the kind at drive-up tellers at banks. I thought you put the mail in the mailbox at the post office, and it went into an underground tube that took it to the right city! It made so much sense in my head, much more than flying letters in planes! Of course I also spent an entire summer after I learned to read believing we were all characters in a giant book, and being afraid of whoever was “reading” it would finish and close the book and we would all die. It made more sense to me than what we learned in Sunday school.

  125. On a gross tmi note, my husband admitted to me he thought that ejaculate from African American men would be brown until he saw a porno involving a black man.

    He admitted this to me after one of our boys asked where the pink cows were for the strawberry milk. (Since white cows made white milk and brown cows made chocolate milk.)

  127. I love you all so much! I am bookmarking this, too, for sad days when I need to laugh for a week. Thank you, Jenny!!!!

  128. I thought the cars turn signal told you which way to go, i didn’t realize my dad controlled it.

  129. When I was little, I was afraid to go in elevators, because I thought they were somehow related to alligators. I couldn’t believe how trusting everyone else was to ride around in their mouths.

  130. I thought the Steely Dan song Bodhisattva lyrics were “can you show me, the shine if your Japan, the sparkle of your vagina, yes I’ll be there….Bodhisattva Bodhisattva etc. It’s actually the sparkle of your China.

  131. Check out Ken Jennings’ book “Because I Said So.” It’s full of these types of myths.

  132. Oh holy hell. It’s NIGHTS in white satin??? I never knew that and even googled it just now to be sure. I even saw them in concert.

    Also? I’m 58. Dang. That’s a long time to be wrong.

  133. When I was a kid, my mom taught us not to eat raw eggs, because they’d make you sick. But she’d let us lick the bowl whenever we baked a cake. So I thought that adding flour and sugar to raw eggs made them safe to eat.

  134. I used to think that the song that goes “secret agent man” was actually “secret Asian man.”

    And I call shenanigans on the gunpoint “confession.” That is definitely from an episode of Friends that I have seen way too many times (the one where Monica sleeps with a 17-year old).

  135. I thought Mars Bars were poisonous because my dad took them out of my halloween candy with all the homemade stuff and the apples that might have razor blades in them. It was years before I realized they were just his favorite.

  136. I was horribly disappointed when I had my first kiss and there was no soundtrack. I thought they always came with soundtracks.

  137. When I was little my great grandmother died and my grandmother told me they were going to spread her ashes…. I thought they had saved up all her cigarette ashes! It took days of them explaining for me to understand cremation. I thought it was so odd, I had pictured all these sad people carrying ashtrays around.

    I’m still going with “Knights in White Satin” they’re the manliest and I always thought it was “Big ‘Ole Jet out of ‘Lina” (like North or South Carolina?).

  138. Thank you for the laughs, this was hysterical! I said “Self defecating” for many years. I also thought Exit Only lanes meant that there was no way to get back onto the highway.

  139. I thought the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” had something to do with Native Americans until I watched it last year. I was 29.

  142. Mind. Blown.

    Roy Orbinson isn’t blind? It’s not Knights In White Satin? The guards aren’t singing Oreo? Slugs aren’t homeless snails? Whoa!

    So glad that I’ve found my tribe!

  145. I used to think my chest of drawers had a name, Chester Drawers. My best friend thought her fly swatter was called a flash water. I long for those innocent days of last week.

  146. I thought the things in the kitchen were called “covers” because they covered up the dishes & food & stuff. My sister called homeless people “indignant” instead of indigent. Apparently they were really pissed about having no place to live.

  147. I wondered how our car knew not to get off on the wrong exit. I mean the lane just goes there so the car must have to!! Every time, the car just veered away from the exit. I was AMAZED!!

  148. Well of course Roy Orbison’s not blind, NOW, he’s dead. Totally thought he was before…some things just “are”, never mind what you hear later. And yes, all those musicians in the radio station at once.

  149. I used to think that the “speed zone” signs in front of schools meant you were supposed to speed up.

  151. I always thought those signs that said “Slow Children at Play” were mean – did they have to announce that the children that lived there were “slow?”

  152. Until I was about 25 or so, I thought in the song, “Winter Wonderland,” the lyric was “Later on we’ll perspire, as we dream by the fire” instead of “we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire.” Because if you’re laying by the fire, you’ll be hot. And perspire sounds a lot better than “we’ll sweat by the fire.” Made total sense to me. Until someone finally noticed that’s what I sing!

    My brother until he was in his teens thought that all the pad commercials on TV were because women occasionally leaked pee.

  153. I always thought that the Boy George song, “I tumble for ya” was actually, “I come from Moya” and then I couldn’t help wondering where Moya was located… I also believed that mountains were the dead buried bodies/remains of dinosaurs. My poor husband.lol

  154. Valerie P.: My son, aged ~4, was FURIOUS with me that I didn’t know that the lyrics to that AC/DC song were “dirty deeds in the dungeon deep.” For weeks. I eventually started it singing it that way just to keep him from yelling at me. He’s now 19 and swears this never happened.

    To everyone else who keeps asking, the Moody Blues song is technically “Nights in White Satin” (think sheets).

    And count me among the people who thought musicians lived in the radio station. Actually, I ORIGINALLY thought they lived in the RADIO, and wondered why we never fed them, and worried about them getting cold in the car overnight in winter. When I mentioned this to one of my parents (I forget which one), they scolded me for being silly (… I was three…) and pointed to the radio, asking how I thought a grown person could possibly fit in there.

    I asked “Where does the music come from then?” and was told, “From the radio station!”

    So I pondered it for a while and that was when it clicked – oh! Of course! When you make a record everybody likes, you have to move to the radio station, where you take turns playing your song. FOREVER. I felt so sorry for the people who made a nice song and then had to go spend the rest of their lives in the radio station, but very proud of having figured out the logical answer to “how does the music get on the radio” without (much) help from a grownup.

  155. I take ONE DAY off from the internet and I miss this awesomeness!

    My confession: I used to think that 70’s TV show “Family Affair” was actually called “Family of Hair.” And I had a Mrs. Beasley doll, so it was really cool that the little girl on the show wanted to have one, too. (Clearly it was the other way around.)

  156. I didn’t exactly have any beliefs of my own that were totally wrong per say but I did used to believe everything that my Grandpa Matt told me so when he asked me to collect up all the caterpillars in the vegetable garden so he could count them. Then sent me off to the local shop for sweets so he could get on with counting them when I delivered him a large bowl full. I didn’t even think twice when he told me that he’d let them all go again but that I’d done really well to collect up all 267. In retrospect I think that there was some green caterpillar mush on the compost heap that night.

  157. I once loudly declared that a friend had been ‘stoned’ at a party, thinking it meant ‘very drunk’. Didn’t go down well.

  158. 1. When I was really little (5 or 6), I thought all black people spoke Spanish because Claire Huxtable did. I wasn’t sure why this didn’t apply to Cliff.

    2. A friend of mine went to Italy and kept seeing signs everywhere that said “una strada via” with arrows on them. He kept thinking that Una Strada Via must be a nice place if there are so many signs telling you where to go. Finally, someone he was with who spoke Italian explained that it just means one way road. (I could be remembering the exact phrase wrong. That’s just what I came up with based on my two years of college Italian).

    In response to a previous comment: When I have kids, they’re definitely going to grow up believing I must protect them from the dangerous poison-razor filled mini Butterfingers. And Reeses.

  160. wow, lots of updates from the time I opened this tab to the time I got around to posting! So… I guess y’all know about “Nights in White Satin” already? *sheepish*

  161. I STILL think it says in that Christmas song “Later on we’ll perspire, as we sit by the fire…..” no matter what anyone says. Wouldn’t you perspire if you sat by the fire. As you would say: You’re Welcome.

  162. My mom told us that the rainbow colored oil spots in the parking lot were little kids that got run over by cars when they weren’t holding on to their mother’s shopping cart.

  163. I couldn’t have put this on Twitter under my real name.

    Until I was 18 I thought that “rubbers” for contraception were small rubber plugs that men put in their penises. I was so confused about how women would put a hole in one when they really wanted to get pregnant. They must have a long, thin, strong needle to poke a hole into a skinny plug.

  165. For several years my brother and I thought that the movie theater was called the Theater Nearu “(you know, “theater near you”–I don’t know why but it was spelled that way in my head). My mom sometimes calls it that to tease us.

  167. Oh, wow.

    It feels good to not feel so alone now. Way more than I’m comfortable admitting hit a little too close to home.

  168. When I was little I thought it was called “old timer’s” not until I was in my teens did I realize it was Alzheimer’s. Also when I was little I thought that cartoons were real and I so was desperate to find the land where cartoons lived to live there myself.

  169. I thought Jet Airliner said, “Big old Jed had ta lie down.”

    Maybe he drank too much, I dunno.

    And I too thought cats were girls and dogs were boys!

  171. I didn’t know that “Today” was a show. I remember watching promos as a child that would say, “… tomorrow morning, on Today.” I’d spend so much intellectual free time puzzling over that…

  172. I used to think beans were just really small potatoes. When I “realized” this, I asked my mother for verification and (probably in order to shut me up) she told me I was right.

    I thought that the “speed limit” was a physical place, and, once you drove beyond the limit, you got arrested. My mother, who obviously was quite prepared for parenthood, told me that, not only did a person get arrested, their children would be given up for adoption.

  174. Whenever we drove somewhere I always thought the other cars going the same direction were going visiting someone and the cars in the other direction were going to their homes.

  175. When I was little (this dates me) I thought if I just could color in the people on the TV that the colors would attach and our B&W set would turn into a color TV. I tried to do it once or twice but the people wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get the whole picture colored so it never worked. Luckily my mother never caught me at it.

    Proving that wisdom doesn’t always come with age though, or possibly that I’m just badly out of the pop culture loop, for the longest time I thought that Jessica Simpson was one of the Simpsons. I never quite figured out if she was Bart’s mother or sister though.

  176. Mine are both related to signs you see on the side of the road. I thought that “Hidden Driveway” meant that the driveway was camouflaged in some way and would always try to find it; I also thought that “Falling Rock” meant that it was the same rock that fell every time.

  177. OMG The AC/DC song DOESN’T say “Thunder Chief”???? Um, to me, it will ALWAYS say Thunder Chief. Dirty Deeds and the Thunder Chief. I didn’t get it, but have always though “Eh, it’s AC/DC, I’m sure they had their reasons.” Yeah, I’m 35.

  178. I grew up in the boonies, so I had no idea what a cul-de-sac was until I was like 15. I also thought cabbage and lettuce were the exact same thing, some people just called them one or the other out of preference. My fellow teenage friends thought both of these things were hilarious.

  180. When I was little I thought that when I closed my eyes the world disappeared and then magically reassembled when I opened them. I would shut my eyes really tight and then open them as fast as I could, to try and catch the world not being there.

    Also my dad told me that beef jerky was actually made out of scabs from cow’s knees and I believed that for a long time.

  181. When I was little, I thought the Beatles song “Come Together” said “Come together right now over meat.” I thought it was about having dinner together.

  184. I believed, for many years, that Bad, Bad Leroy Brown had a raisin in his shoe. It made sense to me – wouldn’t anyone be grumpy and inclined to fight if they had to walk around with a squishy old raisin between their toes?

  185. My husband thought that you take a pregnancy test by peeing in the toilet, then swishing the pregnancy test stick around in the toilet water.

  186. I used to think beauty colleges were colleges that only beautiful people were permitted to attend, and there was some sort of beauty quota you had to meet in order to be accepted….

  187. “Also, I always read the sign on automatic doors as “Automatic Caution Door”. Can’t un-see that.”

    OMG, ME TOO!!!! I still say that every time I see it! I really AM home!! Yay for weirdies!

  188. So….it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized that belly buttons weren’t formed by the doctor tying a knot in the umbilical cord. This was before I had my third child…at 36.

    I thought well into my 20s that the sliding doors that said “In case of emergency, push to open” meant somehow they would transform into normal hinged doors if you pushed on them.

  189. Until I was in my 20’s I thought they were Chester Drawers, not chest of drawers.

    I also thought Elementopee was in the middle of the alphabet.

    And I Googled “Knights in White Satin” and thought y’all were all just idiots and didn’t realize you WERE saying the right thing because it was clearly using the word “satin” because Google pulled the song up with that search. It wasn’t until the next to the last post when I realized it’s Nights.

    AND I thought until 5 minutes ago that slugs were snails w/o homes.

    I’m in my 50’s :p

  190. Just had an awesome laugh at my 49 year old husband who honestly thought it was “Knights in White Satin” and then laughed at all of y’all who thought Roy Orbison was actually blind. Was feeling pretty good about myself…..but wait, it’s NOT “Blinded by the light, wrapped up in a douche”? bwah hahaha

    Honestly…..spent most of my 45 years singing “Baby, you’re my LAMP POST” to David Soul’s Silver Lady.

    And ummmm……my (then) future husband to explain that men didn’t have to hold their penis when they pee because otherwise it would fly around like a hose. (I didn’t have any brothers…..I honestly thought it would fly around like a hose until I was 20). He (who I above made fun of for the Knights thing) also had to explain to me just a few years ago that “subtle” when written was actually the same word I pronounce “suttle” and they are NOT two different words. I think I was 40 years old at the time. I also thought hors d’ oevrs or however it’s spelled was pronounced Horz d’verz forever…… (I am not a smart woman /Forrest Gump voice)

  191. We call my Dad’s aunt “Auntie” (pronounced like Annie with a long a) so I thought that was her name until I was 10. My parent’s brought in a birthday cake and I thought we’d been given the wrong one and kept asking (loudly for maximum embarrassment) who “Eula” was.

  192. When he was very little (about 3), my ex-bf would sing the “Go See Cal” commercials. To his little brain, it was, “Pussy cow.” His mom and older sister couldn’t explain why it was so funny.

  193. I love this. I have no doubt that I have had many similar mistaken beliefs over my lifetime (none spring to mind right now) but this post reassures me that I am not alone 🙂

  195. When I was younger, my brother told me the balls on telephone wires were full of helium to help keep them up. He also told me that the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound was Japan and I couldn’t figure out why the airplane ride to Korea took so long.

    I also thought that Gene Simmons and Richard Simmons were brothers for a very long time. And earlier this year, I thought people were talking about Mumford and Sons were talking about Sanford and Son, and I couldn’t figure out why they were so excited about a 40 year old show.

    I also figured you’d like this: http://youtu.be/sMkTeHAorY8

  196. As a kid I thought that if you swallowed watermelon seeds you’d grow a watermelon in your belly. So when I saw pregnant ladies I would tell them “you’re not supposed to swallow the seeds!” and they’d be very confused.

  197. About joannerjoanner’s “kneepits”: My oldest son referred to his “legpits” on numerous occasions. He was talking about the area where his legs met his crotchal zone. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. (Then you start making comments about how weird it is that you are thinking about legpits and people look at you all funny.)

    As for WarPizza’s: I thought that too, but I didn’t wonder how they all fit in. Obviously, the musicians left the studio when their song was over and ran quickly to play their song in the next radio station. Had I ever heard the same song playing on 2 different stations at the same time, it would have blown my little mind. Obvious solution: all bands have a TARDIS! (Great, now I want to join a band. Who’s with me?)

  199. When I was about 4 or 5 my dad told me that pepper (the spice) was ground up bugs, like flies and mosquitoes. To this day, 50 years later, I still refuse to use it.

    When my boys were little, they wouldn’t let me drink ANYTHING while I was driving. And the first time they actually saw me drink a beer from a can at a barbeque picnic, they were disheartened and gravely disappointed. I was not the angel they thought I had been for so many years. (I always used a glass or a red Solo cup. Apparently they didn’t realize it was beer.)

    Roy Orbison really wasn’t blind? I never knew.

  200. @Christina,

    That version of the Food Court sounds like a great idea. I’m tired of “making dinner” meaning “making one dinner for the grown ups, a second for my oldest, and a third for my youngest.” Time for the boys to face The Food Court! (insert courtroom drama music here)

  201. Oh! And my Mom thought all of the roads running next to freeways were one long road named “Frontage.” She also thought it was pronounced frahn-taje, like it was French. She found out otherwise when we moved states and commented on it. She was 40. 🙂

  203. Juleah B. (#124):
    “When I was a kid(even through my teens) I thought that mail got from city to city through giant pneumatic tubes, like the kind at drive-up tellers at banks. I thought you put the mail in the mailbox at the post office, and it went into an underground tube that took it to the right city! It made so much sense in my head, much more than flying letters in planes!”

    Oh. MYGAWD. YOU TOO?! I have a frickin’ internet twin! LOL.

    When I was a kid, I thought this about the mail:

    The mail drops down this chute that’s underneath the mail bin, & leads to this MASSIVE underground chamber. This is where the sorting gets done, with several workers keeping an eye on things (making sure the system doesn’t get clogged or a letter doesn’t get stuck, etc.). The mail sits on a few conveyor belts & those lead to places the letters are supposed to go, & somewhere along the line, the letters go aboveground to warehouses that then sort the mail for each postman’s route.

    **************

    Most recently, I thought “motorboating” meant taking a wind-up toy & running it over your partner’s boobs while making the sound of a motorboat.

    …Did I mention that I’m 28?

  204. My uncle Steve, who is a 6th grade science teacher (an Authority on Things, and apparently also a troll), told me when I was about 5 that you could tell the difference between male pine trees and female pine trees by the pine cones…on male trees, they pointed up (hyuck-hyuck). I was 18 years old and walking across a college campus when I saw a pine tree (cones UP, bitchachos) and started laughing hysterically. I then proceeded to tell my 4 year old brother the same lie (troll genes)…I think he was about 16 when he figured it out.

  206. When we were wee ones, my friends and I were watching “Father of the Bride”. When Steve Martin says, “Don’t forget to buckle your condom! I mean, seat belt!” I asked, “What’s a condom?”. One of my friends gravely replied, “Oh, I know what THAT is. . . It’s kind of like an apartment.” We all looked at each other and assumed it was just too sophisticated and grown up to contemplate as children.

    We all now know the difference between condoms and condos, just for the record.

    Also, snails aren’t slugs with homes?? My whole life is a lie.

  207. @Kitty,

    My youngest son (6 years old) just yesterday told me that he was able to count to 330 and so he had $330 to spend on things. My boys have some gift cards saved up from birthdays, etc and he was trying to figure out how much he had. 1) It’s nowhere NEAR $330. 2) If that’s how earning money worked, I’d spend all day just counting. “Nobody bother daddy, he’s counting in his room. If he does really well, he should have enough for new tablet computers for everyone!”

  209. When I was little Richard Simmons was all over the place. I saw him in an interview an I couldn’t understand why they where calling that LADY by a mans name. At 4 or 5 I could only see the behavioral gender markers at the time. It was a good few years before I realized that he was infact a man. But it confused me for years.

  210. When I was little, I thought “heart attack” was “hard attack.” You know, because it’s really hard to go through one and you end up in the hospital and all.

  211. I grew up an Episcopalian. In one of the parts of the church service the priest would mention “The Quick and the Dead would rise.” I thought it horribly unfair that the slow would not get to heaven…

  213. I was in college when Phil Collins came out with Invisible Touch. This was released about the time that Chilis introduced “Top Shelf” Margaritas. For several years, I swear I heard, “She seemed to have an invisible top shelf” and I thought that was the weirdest thing.

    And, yes, I was in college, but I wasn’t a drinker or smoker of anything. I thought the above completely sober. It was a couple years before I finally understood the true lyric. I think I still prefer my lyrics.

  214. I used to think blowjob meant you blow on it. I could never figure out why boys thought it was so great.

  215. When I was young we were too poor to get ice-cream from the ice-cream truck. My mother told me that it was called the fish truck and they only sold fish (which I didn’t like). She would say “wave bye to the fish truck”! I didn’t find out until I was 12 what the truck really was.

    I also used to think my pelvic bones were my rock hard abs I was 18 until I figured out I didn’t have any defined abs!

  216. Oh, I also thought it was “knights in white satin” and just figured Brits were an odd lot. Also, did not know that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind. Glad I am not alone!

  217. When I was younger I used to confuse Jim Bowie with David Bowie. I’m pretty sure that’s why I got an ‘F’ on my report about Ziggy Stardust at the Alamo. I also used to think Bowie knives were created specifically to kill David Bowie, and that was his only immunity. Like silver bullets to werewolves.

  218. My sister grew up thinking that when you had to put a pet down (euthanize), that the process involved a grocery checkout lane belt. You just put the animal on one side and when he got to the Vet, he’d get a shot.

  219. My sister thought that right before communion during Catholic mass, God rang the bells. [She was disabused of the notion around age 10 when we became altar servers and she had to ring them herself.]

  220. there wlll be plenty of time next week to hate rick perry.

    like starting monday morning in special session.

    i expect to hear screaming.

  221. I thought Roy Orbison was blind until I read your post. Huh.
    But I see from the comments I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure whether that should actually make me feel better, but it does.

  222. I grasped the concept of plurality at a young age (around 3) – I used to think one piece of cheese was a “chee”, and one of my mom’s knee high pantyhose was a “ho”

  223. For years my daughter heard, and said, “seagirls” for seagulls – goodness knows what her little brain thought “seaboys” might have been.

    Men holding their penises while peeing to stop them whipping about like hoses? That’s going to make me laugh all day! Thanks, everyone.

    (By the way, the correct plural for penis is ‘penes’, like crisis – crises. You’re welcome.)

  225. When I was younger I thought ninjas lived in my basement but only came out when the lights were off and jumped behind the couches when we turned them on. I used to bolt up the stairs when I turned the lights off so they wouldn’t be tempted to kill me and I would check behind all the furniture if I was the first one downstairs.

    Also:
    Mertelcycle (motorcycle)
    Hopachopper (helicopter)
    Yah chet (yacht)

  226. My daughter thinks M&Ms are called Auntie Ems. We also call the back of her knees her knee pits.

  227. I thought that the ‘light’ in the National Anthem was “Donnzerly.” As in, “My, what a nice, donnzerly light that is; it’s so soothing!”

    My sister did the thing with the salt and pepper, but because she confused the words “hot” and “spicy.” She would say, “I need more salt! My food is too hot!”

  230. Someone up there was never scarred by the skit that someone did that involved the “Always Fairy. With Wings!” (annul adult SF relaxacon that did a vaudeville show. Theme was fairies and etc that year. And yes, the girl stuck maxipads all over herself.)

  231. WTF. I had no idea that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind.

    And now I’m singing “Knights in White Satin” because of this. And that makes me think of Opus and half naked exploding porpoises.

    http://i.imgur.com/97YNx.png

  233. “I thought Moody Blues song was “Knights In White Satin”. I couldn’t understand why the knights wore white satin & not armor.” ~ @Ottawagrrl

    Me too! I was like, eh who knows why people did what they did in the 60’s & 70’s.

    So…It’s NOT “Knights in White Satin”?
    …Heads to google…
    Holy shit. That makes much more sense.

  234. I used to think Bob Dylan’s song “Rainy Day Women”, that everyone must get stoned…in the Biblical sense. I thought it was mean!

  235. I thought my Aunt Yvonne was Aunt Von until I was 40 and she friended me on FB!

  236. My husband’s cousin’s dad made up 3 words for his son. When he was a teenager, he learned that croutons were not called ‘zornax’ from a waitress at a restaurant. He’s still trying to figure out what the other 2 made up words are!

  237. Brilliant. I just giggled my way through this. My puppy is looking at me warily. XD

    I was notoriously difficult to fool as a kid (not so anymore!) so I don’t have any “when I was little” anecdotes to share. But I was probably 16 before I figured out it’s “intents and purposes,” not “intense purposes.”

  238. Well, someone beat me to it, but I also confused “Secret Agent Man” for “Secret Asian Man”. You know, like the second son of a leader of North Korea.

  240. When I was a teenager, my grandfather was in the hospital and dying. When I told my boyfriend, sobbing through tears, that my father had to go back to Iowa and take care of things because he was the “executioner” of his estate, he looked at me with equal parts shock and disgust.

    Oh, EXECUTOR.

  243. When I became a teacher, my son asked if I was going to be a different person….because at his school, there were “Girls” bathrooms, “Boys” bathrooms, and “Teacher” bathrooms. Apparently, I was not going to be a girl anymore.

    And I always thought that you fed the baby through the mom’s bellybutton when she was pregnant, since that was what was explained to me by my dad. That was an awkward conversation with my obstetrician that could have been avoided.

  244. “Man held at gunpoint” is a joke from the sitcom “Friends.”

    It’s sad that I know that but I’m a comedian. It’s my job to know when people steal stuff. STOP STEALING STUFF PEOPLE.

  246. I thought there was a band at the radio station who could play all the different songs.

  247. I thought that the Chumbawamba song, Tubthumping, was saying, “I’m on the dole, but I get up again.” I thought it was a song about being on welfare. I…am a fucking idiot.

  248. I think this might be a New Zealand thing only but I thought that Waikikamukau (why-kick-a-moo-cow) was a real place and I wanted to visit it cause I saw it in a book of funny place names. Turns out it is just a generic place name for small towns in New Zealand 🙁

  250. Did you know that a ‘forced air’ furnace has NOTHING to do with stairs, let alone four of them (and I could never figure out why a furnace needed stairs anyway).

    I learned this my first year in interior design. I was 26.

  252. I thought people who were in love were having an affair, until I was in like, 5th or 6th grade playing Barbies with a friend, who informed me otherwise when my barbie asked her ken to have an affair with her.

  253. “I thought that gunpoint was a place where bad things happened. “Man held at gunpoint”‘.” ~ @(redacted)

    That’s a line from a “Friends” episode.

    (I had a chance to look this one up and I found it attributed to tons of strangers all over the internet who also claimed to have thought the exact same thing when they were kids, so it’s entirely possible it’s just like everyone believing all cats are girls. But it was also similar to a line in a Friends episode so I’m going to take it down so the author doesn’t get messed with if it was unintentional. 🙂 ~ Jenny)

  254. I watched a lot of horror movies as a child (thanks mom!) and therefore was in perpetual fear of one thing or another. At one point, I fully believed that I was turning into a werewhoop (werewolf for those who don’t speak toddler). Still haven’t lived it down and I’m 28.

  255. Also, when I was little my dad told me that rhinos were rhinosauruses, and were the last living dinosaurs. I was super embarrassed to find out that was not the case on a class trip to the zoo.

    For years I also believed him that the hay bales in the fields were cow graves.

  256. Not me, but Charlie Brooker claims he thought the song “Islands in the stream” lyrics were “Ireland’s Industry” and was about economic troubles in Ireland in the 80s.

  257. “I thought signs saying “Trespassers will be prosecuted” meant they would be killed.”

    Me too! I thought ‘prosecuted’ meant ‘electrocuted’ and was terrified to walk anywhere near one of those signs in case I accidently put a finger in the prohibited area and was hauled away to be electrocuted.

  258. I thought the name of the paint store was “Ashwin and Williams” but really the jingle is “Ask Sherwin Williams.” I thought that until my 30s.

  259. When I was 5, I LOVED watching the Donny & Marie Osmond Show. I was so happy to see people like me (Filipino/Asian) on TV singing & dancing & having such fun with each other.

  260. I always thought that everyone had the same preset radio stations in their car. Like “Listen to Casey Casem on button 4! What do you mean what station? Button 4!!”

  261. > “I always thought Jesus’ middle name was Harold (Jesus H. Christ) because “Hark The Harold Angels Sing.” ~ @JennyL791

    i wondered what the H stands for, so i looked it up on wikipedia, and apparently harold is not that for off 😀

    Using the name of Jesus Christ as an oath has been common for many centuries, but the precise origins of the letter H in the expression Jesus H. Christ are obscure. […] it is plausible that JHC similarly led to Jesus Harold Christ, Harold coming from the mispronunciation of the word “hallowed” of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.”

  263. I once thought ‘To Be Announced’ was an actual television show when I’d see it in the tv guide

  264. One of my best friends did not know Oreo had cream in the middle till she was like 10 because her sister use to eat all the cream out of them before giving them to her.

  265. I used to think that if you had to pee and you held it, it would become poop, and that if you held poop, it would turn into gas and you could fart it away.

    I also used to think that a vasectomy was called a “ball-sectomy” which makes more sense, I think. When I told this to my mom, she cracked up and had to call her sister to share it.

    My father used to think that the Tom Petty song was “free-falling llamas” and now it’s all I can think about whenever I hear that song.

  266. I used to think that newscasters could see me, since they were the only people on TV who would look directly at me so I would always make sure I was totally dressed whenever I was around the TV. I flashed a cute news lady once, but she didn’t react. It really jacked up my self esteem.

  268. When I was pregnant with my third child, my older daughter (then 3 1/2) asked what color the baby was going to be. My husband (we’re both white btw) whipped his head around and said “It better be white!” Lol I about wet my pants laughing 🙂 Also my sister thought the song lyric “life in the fast lane” was “I found the vasaline” I like her version better

  269. bahahahah! I loved the Jesus grew up to be Santa Claus. That’s ingenious!

    I always heard my aunt say that pickles grew on trees, so I believed it too. I think I was in my late 20’s before I discovered this myth.

    My kids are hilarious, but the most recent was when my 7-year-old came home from school and told us about all the fun he had with his class at “Cinnamon Bun Park” (Assiniboine Park) I didn’t have the heart to correct him. I think even I am renaming said park lol. And for the longest time every time we’d go over a bridge he’d say, “look a bitch!” The first time I almost yelled at him for swearing lol

  270. When I was a kid, my sister and I both thought giving someone the finger meant saying “Baby!” We used to flip the bird to each other all the time until our parents realized how clueless we were and educated us.

    I have to mention my mom’s faux pas because it still makes me laugh. She thought LOL meant “Lots Of Love,” so she posted it on a Facebook thread about someone’s death. Oops…

  271. When I was little, I thought that “don’t drink and drive” meant that no one in a moving vehicle could consume any liquid. I was convinced that the cops would arrest me if I even had one sip of water in the backseat.

  272. You know how the bottom of an exit ramp has a sign that says “Wrong Way” so that you don’t get on going in the wrong direction, in order to avoid a horrible head-on collision? I actually thought that they were telling us that we were going in the wrong direction, as in we were about to get really lost. I remember asking my dad how they knew we were going in the wrong direction.

    And I just had to google the Moody Blues. I’ve had that wrong forever. Either version, I don’t really get it.

  273. I thought “deodorant”was actually “Baby Orient.” No idea why…

  274. I thought the two modern day plagues were AIDS and “a bowl of irises.” Someone finally told me it was “ebola viruses.”

  275. When I was ten I thought a blow job was when you got your hair blow-dried.

  276. When I was a kid, I thought the way that you made your breath smell better was to put Chapstick on your teeth. I had all of my friends doing it too until our parents found out and told us that it wasn’t true

  277. Up until a few years ago, I thought Chicken-fried Steak was made from chicken. I mean, it’s got “chicken” in its name and other meat is called steak (i.e. tuna steak). After a 10 minute debate with my husband at a restaurant (I was 100% sure I was right), it wasn’t until the waiter confirmed that it was indeed beef steak – not chicken, that I accepted the illogical truth.

  279. my sister’s mom thought the clash song “rock the casbah” was really “fuck the cat’s butt”.

  281. When my son was about 4, he was talking to his dad about his time in the Army and he asked what (if anything) did he shoot. His dad answered “targets” and after a pause, my son asked him if he also shot the Kmarts.

    And I am also one of the ones that believed that all the bands were actually at the radio station to play their songs.

  283. OMG. Love ‘my people’!

    When I was little, I thought the people on TV could see and hear me if I could see and hear them, but only for sporting or live events. Because, you know thinking scripted shows could see or hear me would OBVIOUSLY be obsurd.

    The cycle continues. My daughter tells people her age is ‘3 in June’.

  284. Omigods.
    LOVED the “jet airliner” one – I never knew the same of the song; thought it was “we go jam in a lighthouse.” the next lyrics didn’t make much sense, but drugs explain most weird-ass lyrics.

    My best one is that when I was a little girl of five, my dad had taught me some things about First Nations in Canada, and I thought hide-a-beds were Haida Beds, invented and manufactured by the Haida people. I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I finally figured out the spelling behind the sound.

  286. When I was a kid I thought Aqua Fresh toothpaste was “Awful Fresh”, because it made your mouth feel “awfully” fresh. Didn’t realize “awfully” was a negative description.

  287. I used to think that when people said they didn’t have enough money to make ends meet, that they meant “ends meat” – which I thought meant they weren’t rich enough to buy real meat.

  288. When I was little I would never swim by the big light in the pool because I was sure it was going to open and a shark would come out.

  289. I used to think that an Ayatollah was a geographical formation only found in the Middle East.

  290. Youth In Asia and Donkey Hodie. (I even had nightmares about Donkey Hodie. He was a creepy donkey.)

  291. And don’t even get me started about guerrilla warfare during Vietnam!

  292. When I was little & The Donnie & Marie Show was on the air, I didn’t know they were brother & sister. I thought they were married. I thought they were the most beautiful married couple ever because they looked exactly alike. I was not a brilliant child.

  293. I thought you got pregnant by shaving your pubic hair until I was, uh, quite old. Don’t ask.

  294. I took many things literally when I was a kid so when the song “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” was popular I couldn’t imagine how on earth the lady turned blue – I’d never seen a blue person before… it was years before I figured out that “blue” was another name for “sad”. Would have made a great song for the movie “Avatar”…

  295. I second the person who thought “drinking” referred to all liquids. There was a PSA that had some female rock group singing a song that had a line “If you wanna be smart, don’t start (to drink).” I remember asking my mom why the band never got thirsty.

  296. When I was 11 we received an invitation that stated hors d’oeuvres would be served. I asked my mom what “whores d ovaries” were. She cried from laughing so hard, but never corrected me. I wondered about that for years until I learned what whores and ovaries are, and decided that having them at a wedding reception was both inappropriate and quite fitting at the same time.

  297. When I was about 8 or so I stayed up to watch an episode of MASH with my parents. The storyline for that ep was that Hot Lips Houlihan liked this guy but didn’t know if she could stay with him because he was impotent. I asked Mom what that meant, and she said it meant “he can’t pee.” And for YEARS after that I would worry whenever I heard that word. How could someone live without peeing? Wouldn’t they get sick and explode??? I told Mom this story a few years ago and she couldn’t stop laughing.

  298. My husband used to say “windshield factor” instead of wind-chill factor and always thought that it was because of ice on your windshield and that was how they measured the cold.

  299. I always thought Madonna was singing, “only boys that save their panties make my rainy day”. Oh geez!

  300. bawhahah….these comments are all so great…As a kid I too thought cats were ladies and dogs were men and when they fell in love and got married and had children, the boy babies were puppies and the girl babies were kittens. My father-in-law thought Hall & Oates was Hollow Notes. Which, to his credit, would be a clever band name.

  301. When I was in highschool they used to play the song “Love Rollercoaster” on the radio in our school cafeteria and for the longest time I thought it was “Tell Me Khrushchev”. It Was the ’70s.

  302. The sign “cross traffic does not stop” at major highway intersections – I thought it meant the traffic never stopped! Traffic just kept coming & coming! So much traffic! Until I was probably 25.

  303. Until I was about 10, I thought the lyrics to “Jingle Bells” was “Oh what fun it is to ride on a one whore sloping sleigh.”

  304. I believed until embarrassingly recently that wasps took actual photographs of your face when you pissed them off, which they stored in tiny wasp pockets I guess, so that they could track you down later and sting you. Thanks, mom.

  307. I thought a hymn when I was a kid said “pray for Russell”. It was “pray for us all”. I was so worried about Russell. He was a kid in our class. I thought he had a secret disease.

  308. I always wondered why people in foreign countries didn’t just speak English. I assumed they all thought in English (I did) and had to translate it to speak.

  309. I would love to blame this on me being young, but up until recently I believed they were called “rolly coasters,” not “rollER coasters.” You know, because they’re rolly? My kids say this too. It drives my husband crazy that I still say this at 32.

  310. I thought that “misled” was the past tense of “to misle” (pronounced with a long i) until I was 27. As in, “You are misling him when you tell him you like him but you really don’t.”

    Also, my family got a new car the same weekend I got m drivers license and my father told me it was illegal in the state of CT to let a new driver drive a new car until she had her license for a year. This sounded completely reasonable to me and I told everyone until my mother made my dad come clean.

  311. Just remembered another one. When I lost my first tooth, I was concerned by the “black spot” that showed in the gum. My mother told me not to worry, it was just a blood clot. Less than a week later, she went to take a casserole over to a friend of the family who’s father had just died. I was bored and rambunctious, so she told me to wait in the car, she’d only be a minute.

    It was dark, and to stall her from leaving, I asked, “What’d he die of?” Just before she hipped the truck door closed, both hands full of casserole, she said, “A blood clot.” It probably was NOT four hours later, but it FELT like four hours, before she came back to find me sobbing hysterically about being too young to die.

    And what’s up with everyone yelling “JOKE THEFT” at some of these? Do you seriously think no one else has ever had comparable thoughts, or that sitcom writers live in a vacuum? (Taking it personally because of how many times I’ve done a “ME TOO!” doubletake at the TV screen, only to be accused of “stealing the joke” later. Come on!)

    Also I had my son half-convinced my car had an ejection-seat button until he was like 12. He was pretty sure I was lying but didn’t want to risk it. It was the only way I could get him to leave the radio on the station I liked.

    Lastly, to the plural-penis-provider above, you’re correct that the proper Latin plural is penes, but in English (including the medical field), penises is okay. I had to mention that because your commented reminded me of the last comment I’m going to make here I SWEAR:

    I also had a come-to-logic moment involving a Terry Pratchett reference; I’d been reading the books for years, seeing the joke in book after book and not getting it. Then one day, out of the blue, it clicked. It’s too complicated to explain; suffice to to say that I was driving down the freeway all by myself and suddenly blurted out loud, “IT’S THE PENISES! Oh my God – it’s that – they are – because – IT’S THE PENISES!” and began laughing my head off. If anyone had been riding with me, I’m sure they’d have thought I was having a seizure or something.

  312. I was out of law school and working in a corporate law department before I realized that La Jolla, CA was prounounced La Hoya. Talk about embarassing when I asked a senior lawyer for the lajolla lease file.

  313. I thought “Afternoon Delight” was about ice cream until I was 25. Then I learned better! 😉

  314. I thought that Little Red Corvette was about a car until one of they guys in my class in high school explained what it was really about.

  315. I thought deer could only cross at the deer crossing signs. Also, I was raised Catholic and just recently learbed before the reading of the Gospel we say Peace Be With You. I’ve been saying Pleased to Meet You all tbese years.

  316. My bf used to say “mystery solved” all of the time in conversation. When my daughter was about 4 she looked at me and said “Mr. Resolve mom, Mr. Resolve.”

  317. I thought Mick Jagger was singing “Heartbreaker, with your .44, I wanna show you where to park.” Which seemed kind of anticlimactic (and oddly polite) given how mad he sounded.

  318. When I was little, I thought jaywalking meant walking down the street naked because “Naked as a jay bird.”

  319. When I was probably about 8 years old, I told my whole extended family an AWESOME blonde joke I’d heard (where did I even hear this? I have no idea). “Why didn’t the blonde like using her vibrator? Because it chipped her teeth.” I was expecting uproarious laughter at this clearly hilarious joke, but it was met with stunned silence. Finally, my dad recovered enough to ask me what I thought a vibrator was. Turns out I thought the joke was referring to the vibrating massager pad my dad used for his bad back, and that the blonde had just turned it up really high so it vibrated her whole body and made her teeth click together.

    There was a lot of relieved laughter when my family realized I wasn’t an 8-year-old pervert.

  320. I used to think that left and right were opposite for boys and girls. I think because at one point, the idea of right and left was explained to me by a boy who was facing me.

    Oh! My daughter (6) told me she thought the Katy Perry song (Last Friday Night) talks about “candy dipping in the dark.” I then got to explain about skinny dipping, to which she responded, “they’re NAKED?!?” Hehehe

  321. Knew a girl growing up who thought ‘Jet Airliner’ said: Big ol’ Jed left a light on.

    I also thought Roy Orbison was blind, and at some point for a reason I can’t recall, I thought the character Sloth in The Goonies was played by Dan Marino.

    It’s nice to be home.

  322. I thought Alaska and Hawaii were next to each other (and both a set of islands), because that’s how they were always presented on maps in school.

  323. So if it’s not “Knights In White Satin” then I guess the song is not actually about the KKK? Hm…( I am in my 50s and had to google this just now.)

    When I was in junior high I saw a hotel lounge that advertised “No Cover” which I thought meant they had naked dancers. Which seemed like an awfully racy thing for the Holiday Inn.

    When the first Gulf War started I was confused by the announcers talking about “Chockinaw.” Thought it was some kind of American Indian word. Took me half a day to figure out…shock and awe.

  324. So my mom asked me if I’d like angel wings. I enthusiastically said yes!!! What child doesn’t want wings to wear. I was convinced I could be a fairy! Sadly she was actually talking about bangs. I’ve never hurt so much since!

  325. Also, I had my daughter convinced for quite some time that I really had eyes in the back of my head. She’d ask me about something in the car, and when I said I couldn’t see she’d tell me to “use the eyes in the back of your head!” I ‘d respond that “I have to use my forward facing eyes to drive, and I can’t use both at the same time.” LOL

  326. “I have no idea. I sort of spent all week yelling about how much I hate Rick Perry.” Make it up to us? That’s been my favorite way to spend the evening this week. How could we possibly parlay our hatred into a drinking game? I was just glad to hear that Wendy Davis and I weren’t the only women in Texas trying to keep the republicans out of our reproductive organs.

  327. This has been the best 45 minutes I’ve spent in a long time!

    I had a guy friend in highschool (HIGHSCHOOL!) who asked if we girls were nervous to be around needles or anything sharp. When we asked him why, he explained the obvious: milk would spurt out of our boobs if we were pricked. As if boobs were, at all times, milk-filled water balloons.

    I used to love singing along to the U2 song “she moves in a Serious Way” – as a kid I thought guys must find serious women sexy. As opposed to mysterious women.

  328. I thought that pineapples grew on trees (like coconuts) until I went to Hawaii (in my 30s) and visited the Dole plantation. I swear, I walked around in a daze all day saying “Pineapples grow from the ground? REALLY????” I still can’t quite believe it!

  329. When I was little and my parents where driving me somewhere I didn’t see them turn on the turn signal, so I thought it magically knew where you were turning. Psychic turn signals.

    And I also believed that it was “Thunder Chief” instead of “done dirt cheap.”

  330. I used to think that in the Kenny Rogers song “Lucille”, she had “4,000 children and a crop in the field”. I could never figure out how she had so many kids.

    Then my oldest used to tell me when she was singing along with songs with her own words that she was singing her “own virgin”, instead of “version”. I would die laughing every time!

  331. Having no cable, and, frankly, not caring…I convinced myself that The Walking Dead was about the Donner party. My best friend let me down easily, because it would be kind of a good series…

  332. My sister used to think her friend in preschool was Jesus. His name was Xavier.

  333. I missed the Twitter party, but I thought you’d want to know that when I learned the Pledge of Allegiance in kindergarten, I envisioned 4 witches, clad in black, selling lemonade, every time we repeated, “…for which it stands…”.

  335. “Knee-pit” was totally a thing- “Ally McBeal”, anyone?

    A friend of mine was finally called out on Facebook last year when she typed “Chester Drawers” and then somebody took pity on her and explained it to her.

    My sister, when she was learning to read, would sound out street signs while my parents were driving. My dad almost wrecked after hearing her say “Come-FART Inn” from the back seat. And the local hair salon “Aileen’s” was “Aliens”.

    My other sister- the song that goes “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of…”? was “stuff that green tomato.”

    I still laugh at those old TV commercials about “Pour some shook up ramen!” (“Pour some sugar on me”) and “Rock the Cat Box” (Rock the Casbah).

    Saw someone mention the “dawnzerly light”. Remember that bit in “Ramona”? “Yeah, Beezus, turn on the dawnzer!” and then they had to explain to poor Ramona that the “dawnzer lee light” was not, in fact, someone singing about a lamp.

  336. Roy Orbison wasn’t blind. I thought so too. But what’s really sad is that he wore the huge glasses because some asshole told him he was too ugly to be a singer.

    My college roommate thought that the line “the truth will come to you at last” from Stairway to Heaven was “a Jew will bother you a lot” and wouldn’t listen to Led Zeppelin because she thought they were anti-Semites.

    My husband’s grandmother (who is 85) still thinks that the worst job in the world is to have to be the guy who sticks the money through the holes in the ATM.

    I was once sent to the auto parts store by my cousins to buy blinker fluid. And I went to three places before I figured it out.

    I propose that we make Knights in White Satin our tribe’s theme song.

  337. Whenever I was in trouble as a little girl my mom would yell “Sara Ruthann!” I didn’t know until I turned 16 and needed my birth certificate to get a drivers license that my name was actually Sara Ruth. To this day she’ll still yell Sara Ruthann. I have no idea where the Ann came from.

  338. I used to think “stool softener” was something that made chairs more comfy.

  339. My husband has taught my son’s to sing, “dirty deads, done with sheep!”

  341. Oh, and a friend’s son totally did the “No, mommy, I just want one chee” thing when he was little. She (the English major) said “Ok. You can have A PIECE OF CHEESE.” but he still didn’t get it. We still laugh about how clever he was!

  342. When I was a kid, I believed that the emergency broadcast signals they’re mandated to play on the radio were actually aliens making contact and that the fuzzy, “If this was an actual emergency…” voice at the end of the signals was the aliens breaking through. To this day, emergency broadcast signals give me the creeps.

  343. When I was little my older sister told me mayonnaise was made out of pterodactyl eggs. I still can’t eat it.

  344. I always heard the lyric in “Bad Moon Rising” was “there’s a bathroom on the right,” not “Well, it’s bound to take your life.”

  346. Until I was about 22 or 23, I did not understand why you were not allowed to follow construction trucks (the ones with the “do not follow” sign on them). I thought I was supposed to change lanes when one of them would be in front of me on the road because I couldn’t follow it.

    My mother is cheap and never buys hangers so we always use the wire hangers from the cleaners. Until I went to college I didn’t know that people actually bought (or even could buy) hangers. I didn’t know what people did before they brought their clothes to be cleaned and began to accumulate wire hangers…

    When my sister was little she thought that old people changed their names when they got older. She, never having known a Gloria, asked my Grandma Gloria what her name was when she was little.

  348. I used to think lingeree was pronounced LING-GER-EEE until I was about 30.

    I also once got really mad at my dad for “Drinking and Driving” —- we had gone through a drive thru for breakfast while going on vacation and he apparently had orange juice in cup. I think I was 12. 🙂

  349. Until I was about nine, I used to speculate about the person who invented M&M’s, and how his name must’ve started with an E since all the M&M’s had E’s on them.

  350. Was reminded of a few as I was reading all these comments.

    1- I also thought the “No Outlet” signs meant that there were no power outlets allowed in the houses in those places. The neighborhood I grew up in at the time had loads of families with young kids and we all played out in the street on all the various dead end streets. When I was around 5-6 for some reason there was an upswing in traffic trying to use our neighborhood as a cut thru. So the HOA got the city to put up “No Outlet” signs on both entrances. When I saw them for the first time I got very upset I was going to miss my saturday morning cartoons when they cam and took away all the outlets in our house.

    2- The AC/DC song. When my youngest brother was young and heard that song on the radio he was convinced that the line was “Dirty Deeds and Dundo cheats”. He thought Dundo was a guy that the band knew that cheated when playing board games and they were warning everybody.

    3- When I worked at a movie theater myself and a few other employees pulled an old gag on one of the guys that worked there. We convinced him that the drinking fountain was fed by a tank that was in the wall and it had to be periodically refilled by dumping buckets of water down the drain. After about half an hour he asked if it was full yet. I told him it was probably enough to last a week or so. So every thursday for the next month and a half he (without being told to do it) would get a bucket and fill the drinking fountain for around half an hour. Finally one thursday one of the other managers was working instead of me and asked him what the hell he was doing. When he explained the drinking fountain needed to be refilled the manager laughed for at least 10 minutes. The guy was like 25.

  351. My husband thought until college that the Monkees song lyric was “to a daydream believer I’m the homecoming queen” and thought they were quite progressive for the time.

  352. When I was a kid, I thought the line in Psalm 23 “and surely mercy and goodness shall follow me…” Was taking about three Angels named Shirley, Goodness and Mercy.

  353. My grandparents took us to the racetrack quite often when we were kids. The first time I picked a winner, I thought I got to bring the horse home. I was sad that my parents hadn’t thought to bring along a horse trailer.

  355. I thought when they said ” don’t drink and drive” meant don’t drink anything and drive. I would get so mad at my mom for drinking her coke while driving!

  356. I thought local anesthesia came from my hometown and general anesthesia came from anywhere.

  357. When I was little, my parents said they were taking me to see the musical Cats. I was very confused about how they got cats to sing on stage.

  358. Ditto on the “Do not pass” signs.

    Along the lines of the controversial GunPoint, when I was a wee lass I thought “Pontius Pilate” was a place, under which Jesus was crucified. Talk about making the scariest thing imaginable even more horrifying… put it underground.

    Also last month I had to explain the difference between “sedentary” and “sedimentary” to my 55 year old mother, who thought that it was “sedimentary” because rocks don’t move much… I pointed out other types of rocks don’t move a whole lot either

  359. You mean Roy Orbinson isn’t blind and Christ wasn’t Jesus’ last name? And the blue sign totally got me confused now, too…

  360. SERIOUSLY???

    I have found my people. Especially Julie, who made me feel better only because she is just a little older than me and still didn’t know the MB song. Until two minutes ago I thought it was “Knights,” althought I thought it might have some connection to the Monty Python knights skit – doesn’t everything eventually end up at Python?

    The funny thing is, when I started reading the post, I thought immediately of the “Big Old Jet Airliner” (for me it was “Jingle Jan and Alina” (whoever THEY were ) – and just a few points down, there it was!!

    I feel much better about life now . . .

  361. Until my family ridiculed me for saying it out loud (when I was in my late 20s), I thought that if a hair fell out of your head it could root again in another pore on your body. So, if a hair fell onto your arm it could re-root and grow again. People just laugh and laugh when I tell this story, but I still mostly believe that could happen.

  362. My dad told us growing up how creamed corn was made: they take cobs of corn to the old folks’ home, have the old people take out their dentures, gum off the corn kernels, kinda sorta chew, and then spit it into a can. I was done with creamed corn then.

    Gramps also told me that the raisins in cinnamon raisin bread were actually dead flies. It kept me from eating his favorite bread.

    I’m 31 years old and can’t stomach either of these foods still.

  363. I used to see the little memorials on the side of the road and think “huh, isn’t it curious that accident victims all seem to die on the SIDE of the road.”

    Duh, they don’t mark the literal spot, otherwise we’d be running over bouquets of flowers in the middle of the road 🙂

  364. I thought that Neil Diamond song was Revered Blue Jeans – and I thought he sounded like someone I’d want to hang out with. I have a times felt a distinct calling to denim.

  365. I had to google The Moody Blues too. And even though I know it was Secret Agent Man, I’ve always sang it secret Asian man. But my personal experience with misheard lyrics was when I was little. I thought Kenny Rogers was singing “You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille, with four hundred children and a crop in the field.” I remember thinking, “That’s a lot of kids… I would have left too.”

    Unrelated to music, I used to work with a girl who sincerely thought that a germophobe had a fear of Germans.

  366. I always thought it was a countculator…because there’s numbers on it, duh. I was a teenager before I realized is was a calculator. I still think my interpretation makes more sense.

    And I totally thought it was “Knights in White Satin” and “Wrapped up like a douche.” Yeah, I’m 35 and had no clue.

  367. When I was three, my parents got me a jigsaw puzzle of the US and started teaching me the names of the states. I could never get Utah, though.

    Mom: This is Utah.
    Me: I-tah.
    Mom: No, it’s UUUUUU-tah.
    Me: Yes, Mama. IIIIIII-tah.

    I didn’t get it until I learned the alphabet.

    Oh, and my Aunt Bridget, who is only a few years older than me, convinced me that tapioca pudding was really just fish eyes in glue. I ABSOLUTELY refused to eat it until my mom threatened to ground me. It turns out a REALLY like fish eyes in glue, I mean, tapioca pudding.

  369. When I was little, I thought a divorce was a big deal because you had to invite all the same people who came to your wedding. There would be a whole ceremony and at the end you got to stop holding hands. Like a wedding in reverse.

  370. I used to think that there was a laboratory on airplanes that you weren’t allowed to smoke it. Totally crushed to learn it was lavratory (sp) was just a fancy word for bathroom.

  371. You have no idea how many times I’ve called my mom (who knew that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind, just thought it was funny that I did so ‘just never told me’) to list of names of people who thought so too.
    I don’t know what I’ve accomplished there, but it kinda feels good.

  372. My favorite realization- the moment I realized why they called them “freeways” and “tollways.” I actually shouted out loud, “Freeway, free! Tollway, toll!” This was sometime in my 20s.

  373. Ok – I posted about Foilage earlier. Now I have been educated:

    1. I didn’t know Roy Orbison wasn’t blind.
    2. I too thought it was Knights in White Satin (I thought it was about romantic Knights) until I just Googled it.
    3. I had no idea Snails weren’t slugs with shells. I still have to go confirm this in Google for myself.
    4. I didn’t know Pineapples didn’t grow on trees until just this very minute.

    I am 42 and have a Master’s Degree. I teach Children. Sorry people. How did I get through college
    (twice) not learning these things?

  374. I thought chocolate milk came from brown cows until I was in elementary school.

  376. My best friend once asked me “how do they paint the lines on the football field so fast.” I laughed for a good 20 minutes before I could tell her that was only on TV.

  377. Wait, I’m still not convinced that slugs aren’t just homeless snails. Is this actually true?! Wow… You really do learn something new everyday…

  378. When I was young there was storefront we used to drive by that read Venetian Blind Laundry. I thought it was a laundromat staffed by blind Venetians.

  380. This is THE BEST.

    I used to think that “flying” somewhere meant you strapped wings on your back like Icarus and Daedalus.

    I also thought, until I was in college, that Eeyore was an elephant. (He’s fat and grey!! wtf??)

  381. I had no idea that people believed that the stories in the bible were true. I thought they were just stories, like all of the other books my parents read me at bed time. As for church I thought we just happened to go to the church that talked about Bible stories. I didn’t like going to church and had decided that when I grew up I was going to the church that talked about Dr. Seuss stories.

  382. I thought when contestants lost on a game show they were given “partying gifts”, like thanks for playing this game on our fun party of a show!

    I also thought when I kicked the soccer ball out of bounds that it had gone “out of bounce”. Makes sense, it was no longer bouncing around the field.

  383. I’ve tweeted these but they are things I actually believe when I was young.
    When I was about 6, I moved into a 3-story house. I kept asking to hear the stories and no one would tell me. ?#disappointed?
    For awhile, I thought hawk was spelled H A U U K. I was told it was H A double-U K. Me: But I put 2 U’s in!
    I believed my mother’s best-friend, whom I never met, was named Hoosie, because she was always saying “Hoosie down the street said …”
    What do wood bees have that is so valuable? Wood bee thief arrested!
    When I started first grade, I thought a car pool was a swimming pool you drove around. In hot weather that might be OK, but getting wet in cold weather going to school sounded like a really bad idea. How silly of me. It’s a pool for cars!

  384. My husband also asked me once to make him cupcakes, so I sent him to the baking aisle to pick out a mix. When I found him there a few minutes later he said “there’s all these cake mixes, but none for cupcakes”. HA! I asked him “honey, where to cupcakes come from?” and he stormed off. He’s actually a very smart professional man, and it made it all the more hilarious.

  385. When I was very young I wanted to be a Girl Scout. For some reason I thought G.Scouts had tattoos, that looked like badges. So while my parents were in another room I drew badges all over myself with permanent markers.

  386. Ok, one more because no one’s mentioned it yet, and I know of at least one of my friends who thought the same as me:
    The ditty “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” was always “Marsey Dotes and Dosey Dotes and little Lambsey Divey” in my head… I always wondered who they were and why people sang about them. I think I finally figured out what it actually said a few years ago. I’m 33.

  387. When I was about 5 or 6 and we would fly to visit my grandparents, I would eagerly look out the plane window to see the angels that lived on top of the clouds – since obviously that’s where heaven is. I really wanted to wave at them.

  388. I thought for the longest time Madonna was singing, “I’m a Cheerio girl.”

  389. I replied yesterday on Twitter but for some reason none of my replies to your posts seem to show up. I am starting to think I am Tweetarded.

    For years we have teased my husband’s best friend Wendy about the fact that until they told her in her mid-twenties that Alaska was actually attached she had no idea. She honestly believed it was an island like Hawaii because of how Alaska and Hawaii are shown on a lot of maps. Our mutual friend Lee added insult to injury by asking her if she really believed that the Army Corps of Engineers was so skilled that they managed to make one side of the “island” of Alaska perfectly straight.

    Whenever we would get together this funny story inevitably came up. We all just thought Wendy was moderately special until a few years ago when we had a party at our house with some new friends of my son’s and some of my co-workers. It turned out that there were two more women at the party, one in her late forties and one in her late fifties who thought the exact same thing, until that night.

    When my son was very young we attended a church that was very into street preaching and all of the pastors liked to shout, a lot. They also all used handheld microphones and would pace back and forth on the stage. Somewhere along the way we bought him a blue, red and yellow plastic microphone. For months afterwards he would get up on the coffee table in his diaper and preach a sermon just like the pastors would. He would walk back and forth on the table, waving his hands and telling people to get saved. When he was done he would start singing in a very serious voice, with his little eyes closed and waving his hands like all the adults did at church. He always sang the exact same song “Amazing Grapes…” 🙂

  390. I thought that super unleaded gas was soup and lettuce as a kid. And I also thought the holiday was “forch” of July.

  391. Bugger me – Roy Orbison wasn’t blind…huh, you learn something everyday!

  392. I used to think brussel sprouts were baby cabbages and couldn’t get enough of them. Until I was corrected, suddenly they became unappetizing.

    And that sharks would come out of the drains on the bottom of pools. Still don’t like swimming over them.

  393. I used to the the lyrics were “what’s love, Dr. Do, Dr. Do with it”, rather than”what’s love got to do with it”.

  394. I used to think Ralph and Rafe Fiennes were brothers. Both actors of course.

  396. I used to think that the water from the bath drain recycled up through the showerhead… That was why mom said not to pee in there, right?

  397. Hee Hee! SO GLAD I READ ALL THESE!!!

    Here are two more.. one was my Mom’s, and one was mine…

    As a small child my Grandfather needed to keep my mother busy, and told her she had to feed the snapdragons so they wouldn’t die. You did this by pinching their “cheeks” to open their mouths, and inserting a bit of bread… she fed them for hours.. more than once…

    Mine: I was very tiny as a child, my best friend was MUCH taller than me. I asked my mom why, and she replied that it was because my friend had tall genes. So I went over and borrowed a pair of her jeans so I could be tall too. 😀

  398. My girlfriend thought the president’s name was Obama Biden because of all the campaign signs (before he was elected but still…giggle!).

  399. I’m one of those parents that told their children things… like that the round hay bales were ‘cow cocoons’ I still laugh when I think about them getting excited in the car when we saw any! Many times they had hatched… you would see cows & calves around them 😉

  400. I thought Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs. Robinson’ went, “she’s a slutty Mormon you will know” instead of “Jesus loves you more than you will know.”

  401. At a restaurant with about 10 of our friends, my best friend admitted that she used to think the lyrics were, “You’ll never be my pizza burning” and she was so glad when she clued in that the actual lyrics were, “You’ll never be my pink Suburban.”

  402. When I was a kid, I always thought the “Pass With Care” signs on the highway meant that you should try to think kindly about the people you were passing. Like the highway department wanted us to empathize with each other more, or something.

  403. I asked my mom what a “dawnserly light” was. You know… “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light”. I thought it was a type of light.

  404. When I was a kid, I thought Lynda Carter was the president’s wife.

  405. Oh my God! What *are* the guards in Wizard of Oz chanting?????

  406. I thought “shoplifters will be prosecuted” meant they would be “executed.”

  407. I thought my Mom’s youngest sister’s name was Annie Annie instead of Aunt Ann, and furthermore could not understand why Gradma gave the rest of her daughters “Ant” as a first name. Because bugs were gross.

  408. When I was little I thought the song, “Man Eater” by Hall & Oates was “Band Leader”.

    “…whoa, whoa here she comes, she’s a band leader…”

  409. I have two:
    My parents are named Howie and Carol and I thought our faucets had their initials on them. And the medicine commercials on tv always said “use as directed”. But then they didn’t give directions so I didn’t know how anyone knew how to take it.
    Also, when I tolfd my sister about this blog, her first words were “you have found your people”! Very glad I did.

  410. I thought “park and rides” were amusement parks that had rides – and didn’t know how I was missing so many amusement parks!! I realized this wasn’t the case about 4 or 5 years ago…when i was 25/26. Oy.

  411. I used to think a cardigan was a purse because someone said she’d lost one and “good thing there was nothing in it”. I thought the Autobahn was a race track, which was spelled Audubon.

    In high school my friends said the way to check if spaghetti was done is to throw it against a wall. I asked, “How are you supposed to eat it if it’s all against the wall?” After they stopped rolling with laughter they said, “Just one piece!”

  412. Yesterday at a festival, I overheard two girls reading the sign in the bathroom that “This is a no smoking FACULTY” and one of the girls said “Hunh, I never knew a bathroom was called a FACULTY” and the other said- “See, you learn something new every day”. And I SO wanted to point out that it was actually a FACILITY and that what they should learn was to read, but I try really hard not to be an asshole to children ( well, teenagers) they have enough problems!

  413. I used to think that the 80s song Break My Stride was sung by the Tatooine era Luke Skywalker…

  414. I have visited a website called iusedtobelieve.com, which may or may not still exist.

    My favorite quote on that site was under the category of religion: “When I was a child, I used to believe that the entire universe had been made by a great white-bearded man who lived in the sky, and that all he worried about, day in and day out, was what I was doing with my penis.”

  415. When I was little I thought the Eddie Rabbit song was I Love a Maniac instead of I Love a Rainey Night.

  416. Wow – 43 years old and a trivia buff – and I’ve just been enlightened as to Knights in White Satin and Roy Orbison!

    When I was 10, I ripped off my mattress tag that was bugging me. I barely slept for a week, waiting to be hauled away.

    When I was 22, I was completely convinced my best friend was lying that she had made some maple syrup – I was actually searching her garbage for the empty bottle. Neither of us could believe the other was serious.

    Until I was 30, I couldn’t understand the signs in MN that said “2 person car pools only” for lanes. Why couldn’t a carpool with 3 or more use it? It seemed so unfair!!

    Finally, no one else in my life has appreciated how funny I find it that we have “Jiffy Lube” and its competitor – “Rapid Oil Change.”

  417. occasionally a reception would list “crudites” which I would read in my head as “crude-ites” I was always curious what it was but am always late for things and would only see a veggie-and-dip platter. I imagined they were toasted bread and a topping, like crostini (which Google just informed me is NOT crustini as I have thought until this very moment).

    I had also always heard the word “Crew-dih-tay” and had no idea what it was other than a fancy appetizer.

    Six months ago I put it together: crudites (crew-dih-tay): a veggie tray.

  418. Until I was 23 I pronounced gestures “guess-tures” because of the game “Guesstures” which we played pretty often in my family. I would never had know that I was pronouncing it wrong if my boyfriend hadn’t asked me if I was “being cute” or if I truly didn’t know how to say it. To this day (and I’m 30 now) I still have to think really hard before I say the word and will usually avoid it all together in conversation if I can.

  419. I used to think that people who spoke foreign languages (as their native language) always translated it to English in their heads. Which made me think “What’s the point?”

  420. My dad told me that Soy Sauce was made of squished bugs and that’s why it was black. We still call it bug juice to this day. Doesn’t phase me until I go somewhere for supper and ask if they have any bug juice!

  422. I once blogged about my son screaming at us that it was his ami… Not Miami … And sure as shit not his sisters ami… Bahahahaha I’m still not sure he figured it out.. He is going on fourteen

  423. Until a few years ago, I thought the Police song was about “rock sand”.

  424. I’ll share one of my best friends’, since I can’t think of my own.

    When she was younger, her dad used to tell her that the ice cream truck only played its music to let people know when they were sold out of ice cream. She could never figure out why they always seemed to run out before they made it to her street.

  425. When I was little, my family mainly listened to NPR on the radio. Since we always heard the same voices, I thought the broadcasters were tiny and lived inside our car.

  426. I thought ATM’s gave you free money until I was about 8 and asked my mom why there were homeless people if you could just get money out of an ATM.

  427. I could never understand why my friend Nicole Beveridge and her family weren’t allowed to to enter any high school gym?!? “No beverages allowed!”

  428. When I was in grade school, back in the last century, we had Kotex machines in the bathrooms at our very small country school. During PTA meetings the kids were allowed to roam the school, play in the gym or playground, unsupervised (People did that in the last century) My friend Patty and I decided to find out what exactly was in those white boxes hanging on the wall, went into the PTA meeting and asked our Moms for the nickel needed –I guess to get rid of us, they gave it to us and asked no questions. The machine dispensed this oblong box– and when we opened it them, we decided these cool pads were knee pads for the volley ball players and excitedly took them into the PTA meeting to show our Moms! I can still see the look of utter panic on my Mom’s face as she grabbed the sanitary napkin from me and stuffed it in her purse!

  429. I thought that a couple was three, a few was two, and several meant seven or more of something.

  430. When I was in elementary school, I thought the the “Merge Left” signs meant that my beloved Aunt Marge was somehow along the left side of the road. I always looked for her and she was never there, so just figured that I looked out the wrong side.

    I attribute my persistent left/right confusion to this.

  431. I loved reading these.
    My stories:
    I have a good friend named Lad, who lives in Seattle.
    After i returnef from a long weekend visit to see Lad, my daughter, four at the time,
    asked me “did you See your friend “Attle?” Poor kid.

    My own – when I was in fourth grade, my BFF and I loved the song Abracadabra.
    We thought the line “black panties with an angels face” referred to the design of the underwear and thought it was SO gross.

  432. When I was little my dolly had two of those disappearing bottles, one with milk and one with juice. This led me to believe that women’s breasts were the same, one producing milk and one juice. My mom was so confused when I asked her which of hers was for juice.

  433. When I was a kid I thought my babysitter’s boyfriend Al was named “Owl”. I didn’t figure it out until years later when I met an Al & thought, “Gee, that sounds like Owl’s name… oh. Um, never mind.”

  434. Yay, I thought of one about a childhood friend named Erika. We were watching ‘Rosanne’ one day and Rosanne said, ‘God bless America,’ (like in a tone you would say a curse word) and Erika was all, ‘Oh my gosh, how in the world did that saying catch on so that even Rosanne is saying it on TV?!’ and I’m all, ‘What?’
    Then through some conversation the following was revealed: Erika’s mother used to always say, ‘God bless America,’ in that same cursing tone, but Erika though she was saying, ‘God bless ’em, Erika.’
    So I could understand her confusion.

  437. When Marineland first opened ‘Friendship Cove’ and played that horrible commercial nonstop my best friend thought the lyrics were: friendship CALLED Marineland…instead I’d friendship COVE Marineland. To this day I tease her about our long lasting Marineland.

    Also, when we were little my brother thought the ‘no outlet’ signs meant that all the people who lived in that street didn’t have any outlets to plug in their electronics. He told us he felt so bad for those people and couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live there.

  438. For the longest time, I thought the first line of Brown Eyed Girl was “hey, Roderigo.” I also thought that the line later in the song was “gunnin’ down the old man with a transistor radio.”

    When I was little, we had an album of traditional/patriotic songs. I thought the first verse of Battle Hymn of the Republic was:

    My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
    He is trampling out the village where the grapes of wrath are stored
    He hath loosed the faithful lightning of his terrible Swiss sword

    To this day when I hear or sing this song, the visual in my mind is of giant man wearing robes and a long white beard stomping Godzilla-like through an Alpine village, carrying a huge sword that has lightning coming out of the blade.

  441. “I thought there was some central location where people monitored traffic and switched the lights from green to red.” ~ @barbaramcthomas

    There isn’t?!

  443. When I was 3 or 4 my grandmother died. I was upset that the polar bears had not arrived by the end of the funeral. Apparently Pallbearers and Polar Bears are two different things.

  444. When I was a kid I thought the lyrics to Ramblin Man by the Allman Brothers Band were “lord I was born in Bethlehem” I was about 10 when my parents finally figured out what I was singing. We didn’t go to church so who knows where I got my lyrics from but 15 years later we all laugh whenever this song comes on. I don’t think I’m ever gonna live it down.

  445. Am I the only one who thought it was “I believe in mail call” instead of “I believe in miracles”?
    My dad had me convinced they were saying the name wrong on TV, & it was “Bullmoose the Winkle” instead of Bullwinkle the Moose.
    Also, due to faulty attention, I have been offered the chance to watch & do the “MST3K” thing on mouseturd movies of the cheesy variety.
    Brother in law had one grandson convinced there had been dinosaurs called “suckasaurus” that lived in the Puget Sound region, & they had webbed feet.

    Of course, dyslexia has a lot to answer for, as any dim blub can tell you.

  446. O dear God….this is the best way to start a Monday morning! 😀

    I can not stop laughing about Mr and Mrs Floyd….

    When I was in the fourth grade, my friends told me that girls get pregnant, if boys touch their necks. Not kidding.
    Becoming a teen became traumatic after that. 😛

  447. You know those bumps they put in parking lots to slow you down…. “speed bumps?” My grandpa use to call them dead policemen… and I swear he once told me that it was because that was where they buried policemen when they died so they could still stop traffic…. Totally believed him for years because…well… he was awesome… I miss him 🙂

  448. I used to think when someone said, “Don’t take it for granted” they were actually saying “Don’t take it for granite.”

  449. Cam-Totally with you in the Marsey Dotes. I was in my 20’s before I figured that one out.
    My husband’s aunt (in her 50s at the time) called my mother in law one day and asked how to prepare “buh-nels.” It had to be explained to her that BNLS was an abbreviation for boneless.
    My husband, when he was younger, really believed that TJ Maxx was “never the same place twice” and couldn’t figure out how they could switch out a whole store that quickly.
    I am guilty of the knights in white satin thing.
    I’m a pre-K teacher, most of my students begin the year thinking elemenop is a letter. Sometimes they get really mad when the can’t find one specific symbol for it on the alphabet chart.

  450. @tyler_kavin my cousin thought his Aunt Ann (my grandma) was Ann Ann until he was 20.

    I’m 28 and I still sing “take the back right turn” instead of “paperback writer” along with the Beatles sometimes. I didn’t know the real words until I was a teenager.

  452. When I was little I used to call the living room the “riving loom” and, if extremely tired and out of sorts, will still catch myself saying that by accident.

  453. Also, until the age of 8 I thought my mother’s widows peak was just a way of cutting the hair. I attempted to recreate this “style” on my own head. It didn’t end well.

  454. Ok…so when I was growing up, we used to spend the summer with my grandparents in Spain. I tried to learn Spanish but I think I was hindered by the fact that until I was about 8, I was convinced that everyone really thought in English, and the people in Spain just spoke Spanish as a sort of secret club thing…

  455. When I was dating my husband, who was in the navy reserves, he told me whenever he was standing guard he had to salute the phone because they didn’t know who was calling. He let me think that for a whole year.

    He also tried to convince that you could get your driver’s license at Sears. He couldn’t quite get me to believe him but I have to admit he almost had me.

    Last but not least he got some safety glasses and told me they were his new glasses and let me believe that until I told him I wouldn’t go out with him unless took them off.

    He was and is an ass on occasion.

  456. I love your readers’ comments! Hilarious!

    When I was about 5, I thought everyone had a maximum number of words they were allowed to speak in their lifetimes, so I was very quiet as a child since I didn’t want to use up all my words before I died.

    At the same age, I also thought that if I could see people on the TV, then they could see me — so I would change clothes behind the couch.

  457. Wait..it’s not knights in white satin?! Wtf? What is it then?
    And I once told a friend all stop signs with white borders were stoptional. She believed me until a cop corrected her.
    While married to my ex I managed to convince him all black skunks were the skunk version of albino. I’m not sure if there are all black skunks. I’m pretty sure for the next week he was calling black cats albino skunks though.

  458. I thought it was Knights in White Satin too 😀 I thought it was some 70’s disco thing.

  459. One day I came home from school proudly proclaiming that I didn’t have any feelings. My mom was horrified at what my teacher was teaching me and thinking that I would now have to spend years in therapy. It wasn’t until later that night when she was cleaning out my backpack that she found a notice that we had had a visit from a dentist. I guess when combining Texan and 5 year old, some things get lost in translation.

  460. I thought the secretary of defense’s name was Lee Onpanetta until very very recently (yesterday) when I realized it was Leon Panetta.

  461. When I was about 3 my dad babysat one afternoon while my mom went out. Dad’s version of “watching” me was to make sure the doors were closed. While he read the paper I asked him of he would play tea party? Sure, whatever. So I brought one of my tea cups of “tea”. After the third or fourth “cup of tea” my Dad started to wonder where the short person was getting the water. He followed my voice to the bathroom where I was dipping “tea” out of the toilet. He never played tea party again.

    He got even. When I was in kindergarten during show and tell I told everyone it was my Dad’s birthday. Teacher asked how old he was, so I told her what he told me…16. I was so angry when she told me that wasn’t possible. Like my Dad would lie to me.

  462. I still call the back of my knee the kneepit! It just makes sense.

    Also, when I was young I thought I invented toast. No one before me had ever thought to put bread in the toaster, I was a genius!

  463. When I was learning to drive (16 yrs old), my brother knew I didn’t understand cars very well and he loved messing with my head. I was asking him about the different windshield wiper speeds and he convinced me that the intermittent setting was actually counting the number of raindrops on the windshield before it would wipe. Brothers can be assholes.

  464. I agree, what else would you call a knee-pit? Or an elbow-pit for that matter.

    When I was a kid, there was this train sculpture on the wall of the room I shared with my brother. One of the train cars said “Pennsylvania” (as in the railroad line). I was learning to read at the time and decided that the word must be “penny- Sah-laa-vin-ah.” It took a few years to get it right, but I was the only kid in my class that could spell Pennsylvania when it appeard on a spelling test.

  465. When I was a kid, I had to leave home by “twenty-to” (meaning 8:40) to get to school on time… but I always heard it as “twenty-two”, and figured it was just some weird system of measuring time I wasn’t too familiar with.

    I remember once I was running late, and it was my parent’s fault this time… and I looked at the clock, counted up the minutes to see how late we were, and told my dad “we have to hurry up! It’s already thirty-six!” (Because it was 14 minutes after “twenty-two”).

  467. * It’s NOT Knights in White Satin? My world is now shattered. So much for a bunch of knights secure in their masculinity !!

    * I feel SO much better knowing now that the blinded by the light song isn’t really talking about douches!!! That has always bugged me, because he says it like eight billion times in that song!

    * Pineapples DON’T grow on trees????? Whaaaaat???? How the hell did I made it to 40 never knowing that?? I had to Google it just now, and still don’t quite believe it… LOL!

    * FINALLY, I now know who the hell “Marsey Dotes” and her friend “Lambsey Divey” are! That has always bugged me.

    * Personally, I think “Sexy Asian Man” is more fun.

    And one I haven’t seen yet… Until just a couple of years ago, when I finally forced myself to go look up the lyrics, I always heard “whisper ‘Anne Heche'” (instead of “whisper and hush”) in the song “Moondance”. I actually still hear it that way. Now it just makes me giggle instead of wondering how a song that old could be mentioning Anne Heche. LOL 🙂

    Another one I haven’t seen here yet… Many many years ago I saw a comedian do a bit about misunderstood song lyrics. Until then, I could listen to Purple Haze just fine. Now, all I can hear is “excuse me, while I kiss this fly”.

  468. Oh come on. I can’t be the only one who thought the song was “Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Star” and that you had to sing it on the toilet because it was potty language.

    I am SO not joking.

  469. My dad always thought the Katy Perry song “waking up in Vegas” was actually “that’s what you get for breaking up on Facebook”

    My Mom used to think that “Low Rider” was a PSA against drinking and driving: “don’t. Drive. Drunk…”

    And as for me, in addition to many things already mentioned above, I thought when counting past 100 you only had to get to 12 (like telling time) before moving on to the next hundred, like 111… 112… 200!

  470. I thought lyrics to the song Electric Feel were saying “shock me like an electric bill”. Like, they were just really surprised at how high the utility bill was in the summer…

  471. I used to think that tapioca pudding was made from fish eyes. (My mom jokingly told me that it was when I was little, and it stuck!) I’m 34 and I still can’t bring myself to eat tapioca!

    I used to think that earwigs would crawl into your ears. I still get really creeped out when I see one.

  472. For a while growing up, we had milk delivered (by Adohr Farms) in a little white truck. Occasionally, a brown delivery truck would stop next door. I thought that UPS was delivering them CHOCOLATE milk.

  473. My friend thought until she was an adult that an artichoke was an animal because once she came to our house and my mom was eating dinner and she asked, “What are you eating?” and my mom told her “the heart of an artichoke.” Also, I believe the lyrics are “Bingo Jet had a light on” for Steve Miller Band.

  474. I used to think the signs for ‘steep hill’ with the picture of a truck on a slope and no words, meant “Bandits ahead” – I thought the wheels were the eyes and the triangle for the hill was the handkerchief covering the mouth.

    Also, I don’t know the “nights in white satin” song but I keep hearing it as “Knights in white satin with blue satin sashes…”

  475. I used to think Queens Bohemian Rhapsody was ‘beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard’. And that’s what I would sing. Out. Loud.
    I also had a heated argument with my English teacher about the word crazy. I was convinced it was spelt Krazy. I brought my comic into school the next day to prove to her that her dictionary was wrong.

  476. Um. Two tall tales from my granddad: Sheep who live on mountains have shorter legs on the right hand side of their bodies than the left, so they can stand up straight. I used to worry so about what would happen if they wanted to turn round, imagining sheep rolling down mountains like giant fluffy bowling balls… Number two – who remembers Concorde? The world’s first ever passenger plane to fly above the speed of sound. Which meant that, according to my granddad, all the seats faced the rear of the plane so that they could hear each other speak. My curious nature meant that I spent hours daydreaming about how the pilot could see where he was going.
    And I have so many of the ‘what, it’s NOT that way’ stories. I recall as an 11 year old girl telling my friend that men’s penises worked like a biro pen – that the bit at the end was a ball which rolled round to let urine out. I believed it wholeheartedly. There are way too many of these! My favourite misheard lyric has to be from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen. I believed that ‘Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard free’. I shall go now!

  477. When I was young, since the only people I knew of who died were Jesus and the two thieves next to him (my family didn’t talk about death around kids), I thought that was how everybody went — your neighbors got sick of your shit and nailed you to a tree.

  478. I used to think that the sun and moon were the same thing.. The sun was on one side, the moon on the other.. Until one day, I saw the moon and the sun at the same time. It totally blew my mind. And I thought when selling a house, the person getting your house, gave you theirs. So, like a trade…

  479. 4 stories:
    I’m 36 and was absolutely certain that narwhals were mythical unicorn whales until last Christmas when my husband mentioned a friend wanted to buy a spear made of narwhal horn (while we watched Elf). My husband had a hard time convincing me they are real. I refused to believe such a preposterous creature was real until I saw actual video footage of living ones!

    My best friend told me when she was in Italy she told a friend: ” These kids are so smart, they all speak Italian!”

    My family was once leaving the airport from the fourth floor of the building when my sister saw the elevator indicators, which were round instead of arrows. The down indicator was on. She thought we needed to find another elevator because this one only went to the third floor…

    Lastly, I once felt compelled to call a radio station because all the morning show hosts were talking about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table like it was history. They thought I was the crazy one when I told them it was a legend. He told me he was looking at the actual round table on the internet and I had to explain that people made objects based on the legend and it wasn’t a historical artifact. I promised him it wasn’t real and I still don’t think he believed me…

  480. I thought the signs on corners were the angle of the corner and told my dad to slow right down cause we were coming up to a 90 degree angled one.

  481. I used to believe that lighting (specifically heat lighting) was the Russians taking pictures of us from space. I was 15 before I learned better.

    Also, I was 21 before I learned it was called a rum and coke NOT a Roman coke. I always wondered what the difference in taste was from a regular coke and a Roman one was.

  482. When I was 16 my boyfriend said something about Georgia’s coast. My response? “I didn’t know Georgia was on the coast. When did they move it there?” Yeah. I be smart.

  483. I just realized just last year (I’m 31) that the sound of thunder IS ACTUALLY THE SOUND OF LIGHTNING! Until then, I just thought thunder and lightning were separate things that happened at the same time during a thunderstorm. *facepalm*

  484. My daughters friend honestly thought that police cars were called “neenaws” until she was 14 years old because her mother used to say “neenaw” every time one went past with the sirens blaring.

  485. My granddad had me convinced of several things: the great wall of China was supposed to have a roof on it and they were getting the materials from Egypt but they fell out and the Pyramids are the left over bricks that didn’t get used.

    Spiders ears are in their knees which he proved to me by finding a spider clapping his hands and watching it run away then recapturing it pulling its legs off and clapping his hands, the spider didn’t run away because it couldnt hear the clapping, it took me a while to figure it out.

    Cats eyes in the road were turned on by a leprechaun running in front of the car and there was a second one riding on the back bumper turning them off, they took turns at running.

    I also thought crysanthamum was a really bad swear word. Don’t get me started on desecrated coconut

  486. “Siamese cats – that’s a such a shame. Like, two cats stuck together.”
    Actually said…but not by me, thankfully.