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.

  487. Oh, I thought signs that said “Ped Xing“ were in another language. But in my defense that is a fucking X not a cross. ;P

  488. That’s okay, I spent of a lot of last week yelling about Rick Perry, too. And I don’t even live in Texas.

  489. I thought the states were different colors until I flew across country.

  490. Possibly because I watched too much Emergency! and Adam-12 too young, I got arrest and cardiac arrest mixed up, so I thought when police arrested people, they threw them to the ground and performed CPR on them.

  491. In Taylor Swift’s Song “22” I was sure that the first line was, “Dressed up like hamsters” as in the TV commercials for KIAs where fun loving hamsters ride around in cars. So much more fun to think about dressing like hamsters than dressing like hipsters.

    Knights in White Satin. I refuse to believe otherwise.

  493. I have a friend who knew the word ‘pup tent’ and misheard the word cupcake as ‘pup’ cake. Ergo, ‘pup’ is the proper prefix for anything that is a small version of the object. Pupcake = small cake, Pupbike = her small bike, Pupcat = kitten. She said that even after her mother explained it to her she didn’t believe it.

  494. I used to thing that juice boxed said “Serve child” like you could only give them to kids. Turns out they say “Serve chilled”

    Also, get caught shoplifing? You’ll get prostituted, as opposed to you know, prosecuted.

  495. My son was about 5 yrs old when Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed. His response to the news reports: “wait, what? I didn’t know whales had a princess!”

  496. I haven’t decided if these made my morning or ruined my life.
    In the Lord’s Prayer, Give us this day our daily bread, I believed that the Wonder bread delivery truck brought the bread and Deliver us from evil, meant that the UPS truck was responsible for this.

  497. Put me down as another one who thought it was “Knights in White Satin,” up until yesterday when I read this post. In my defense, however, my first boyfriend told me that the song was actually a veiled account about the KKK. He’s white, I’m black, who was I to argue?

    K.

  498. I spent a summer in Washington DC at American University. I had several classmates convinced that (because I was from a dinky West Texas town) everyone rode their horses to school and that the 4H kids took care of them for class credit.

  499. As a child I thought that if a recipe called for egg whites you put the shell in the bowl. My son used to sing Jack fell down and broke his crayon, but better my daughter thought the B-52s were singing “hurry up and bring your juicebox money” to the Love Shack.

  500. I spent my entire vacation hating Rick Perry. I was hoping you’d write about Wendy Davis. I have a massive girl crush on her now. And you. Just a little. That’s not weird.

  501. My mother once encouraged me to stand on my toes for a balloon that was out of my reach. I looked at her like she was crazy. She insisted, so I plopped one foot on top of the other and reached for the balloon again, showing her just how stupid she was.

  502. I used to think that if you needed money you just went and bought something at the store. You gave them 1 bill, they gave you back a bunch more. *sigh* If only… LOL

  503. As a child in the 70’s I would enthusiastically shake my foot under the table to KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty”. Friends continue to be stunned that there was a time I did not know what “booty” meant. Also, The Police song “King of Pain” was an angsty adolescent fave because I thought the lyric was “bless my soul I’m weird” and I was, indeed, weird (for the record, it’s “that’s my soul up there”).

  504. My husband apparently never thought some thing incorrectly as he hasn’t found this nearly as funny I I have. And by funny I really mean, oh, I totally see how they got that. I thought I was the only person who even KNEW the Mares Eat Oats song because my grandmother sang it to me. I had never really thought about how pineapples grow, and went and looked it up. Eye-opening! Kenny Rogers did have confusing lyrics–400 hundred children & crap in the field as well as islands in the STREET.
    My husband is disturbed that there are more people like ME in the world. I think we just know how to make life fun.

  505. I refuse to believe that I was the only one who threw cosh into the wind.

  506. @Andi 449,
    You may or may not be delighted to know that in Iliad Book 22, Achilles kills Hector by spearing him through the throat, but that Hector can still talk because the spear passes “right by his larynx” (para ton aspharagon). As a former Classicist, I swear on my Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon that I am not making this up.

  508. Until college, I thought the Journey song ‘Open Arms’ actually went like this: So now I come to you/With broken arms. Somehow, it made it even more romantic since, you know, he’d broken both of his arms but was still struggling to be with her. I imagined him like one of those people you only ever see in movies who have both of their arms in casts and they’re up parallel with their shoulders and supported by posts running down to their torso. I used to picture him lurching toward her with his arms perpetually open to her (ironically), just begging for her love. Super, super romantic.

  509. I thought all girls had “PeePees” and that when they went through puberty, it turned into a “Vagina”. I mentioned being afraid of “growing a vagina” when I spread this “truth” to dozens of my early elementary friends.

  510. I thought everything stopped when I turned the television off- all the shows went off. It was dark for everyone.

  513. WHen I was a kid, I believed that the radio worked exactly like a tape player. If you turned it off right as your favorite song came on, you could turn it back on whenever you were ready to listen to it (you just couldn’t rewind it – my confusion only went so far…) I can’t count how many people I yelled at for messing up my “stored songs”.

  514. These things I just found out today weren’t true:

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

    I’m 25.

  515. I used to think that a radio worked much like a cassette player. You could turn it off just as your favorite song came on, and it would still be there, stored, for when you wanted to listen to it later. (I did not think it could be rewound – my delusion only went so far). I can’t count how many people I yelled at for messing up my “stored songs”.

  516. I thought the signs on the interstate that say “Illegal to cross median” said “Illegal to cross Meridian.” To get to my grandmother’s house, we had to go through a city named Meridian. My dad would tell me that we were going to risk it and to “watch for cops.”

    My sister also told me that if you flushed the toilet while you were sitting on it, you would have to tinkle all over again.

  518. I used to believe cows married horses… and dogs married cats. Made sense to me as a child and STILL KINDA DOES. I love the tribe comment. I saw that one on Twitter. A coworker recently used that term to describe a pod of people she can trust with her relationship stories and shared interests, myself included. It’s an honor to be part of someone’s tribe. I am part of your tribe, too, Jenny, from the moment my husband gifted me your book… all through my laughing till crying about the cow and your arm stuck in her vagina… and to now. I told my husband you taught me not to fear writing real truths about oneself. We hear your unique voice. You continue to inspire with all your irreverence, wit, and the rays of you bursting between words. Rock on, Bloggess.

  519. I thought my mother’s eyelids were blue until I was old enough to wear makeup myself.

  520. Huh. So I just learned that it’s NOT Knights in White Satin. I’m 45 years old. And I flipping HAVE that album.

    Also, my Aunt Eola? thought she was Auntie Yola until I was a teen. Seriously, who’s named Eola?

  521. OMG, Jenny… You are awesome! Now get out of my head.

    Are you sure you’re not my Sister-from-another-mister? 😉

  522. I also thought that the song, “Forever in Blue Jeans” was “The Reverend Blue Jeans” and that he was like…this cool reverend, who was really hip to the kids of today, and wore blue jeans. I always imagined he’d be hot.

  523. Last week I learned that birds don’t live in nests throughout their lives–just when they’re hatching eggs and feeding their babies. I’m 50 years old.

  524. I was watching Celebrity Apprentice, and in disgust I said about Lou Ferrigno, “What nationality IS he?!” because of his speech… My fiance looks at me and says, “Deaf. Lou Ferrigno is deaf.” I had no idea.

  525. {“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…}

    MIND.BLOWN.
    Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.
    Gawd I love this tribe.

  526. This is great. I probably should have compiled my posts better. I also thought it was “Knights in White Satin” (In fact, I looked it up just now, to make sure that it really wasn’t). I also thought Roy Orbison was blind…pretty much until just now (although my husband told me that he wasn’t once, I think). I also have the need to define “few, couple, and several” and I pretty much define them as the poster above does. I’ve also spent a lot of my lifetime believing that birds always live in nests. I learned they don’t sometime in my 20s.

    In the feminine hygiene department (hope this isn’t too much info), my mom did a bad job of explaining a tampon to me, because she hoped I wouldn’t use them. When the time came, I bought one at school and looked at it with momentary confusion before deciding that it should be taken out of the wrapper…and the applicator…then I decided, “Okay, I guess I just put this in my underwear, then?” And I did. Needless to say, it wasn’t particularly effective.

    Misheard lyrics from myself or my friends:
    Orinoco Flow: Instead of “Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away” I have an ex who bellowed, “Save the Whales! Save the Whales! Save the Whales!” I still can’t hear the song without hearing the wrong lyrics.

    Runaround: Now, this one is odd, but my stepsister used to hear, instead of, “What’s yours and mine, the fishing’s fine” she heard, “What’s yours and mine…think she farted.” And, even though it doesn’t look right when you type it out, listen to the song. You’ll hear it! You really will!

    Kyrie Eleison: Someone once told me about their misheard lyrics. Instead of “Kyrie Eleison down the road that I must travel,” they heard, “Carry a laser down the road that I must travel!” And…well…why not? It would help you see things and ward off evil, wouldn’t it? I sing it all the time, now.

    When I was about 16, my mother heard me mispronounce the word “faucet”, saying “flaucet”. She told me I was wrong and I told her that I didn’t care and I liked my way better and I was going to say it that way. (Secretly, in front of everyone else, I began to pronounce it correctly, but in front of her, it was always “flaucet”. Now, I just avoid the word in front of my mother altogether, lest she be right.)

  527. My aunt believed – truly and honestly believed – she was adopted until she was 22, even though she looks EXACTLY like my mother, because my other aunt told her so when she was 6 years old.

  528. My reaction:

    Hahaha, that’s hilarious, so silly. Hahaha, that’s hilarious, so silly. Hahaha, that’s hilarious, so silly. Hahaha, that’s hilarious, so silly. WAIT, ROY ORBISON WASN’T BLIND?

  529. Also, I thought when the kids toys said “You put it together” they meant you the child.

  530. My husband & I were both early avid readers, and loooooong before we met, as early teens, each of us did the same thing to our fairly conservative mothers. We asked to be taken to the “ADULT BOOK STORE” because that’s where the more interesting books are sold.

  531. Up until about a year ago, I thought MC Hammer sang “To the jet, to the jet real quick” NOT “too legit, too legit to quit”. I never understood why getting to the jet was so important.

  534. When I was young, I thought that the fuses in the fusebox were like batteries and the electricity was in THEM, not in the fusebox itself…until I stuck my finger in and touched the copper connection where there was a fuse missing. The lights flickered, my hair stood on end and my arm buzzed for a long time afterwards. I now have a very healthy respect for electricity! lol

  536. Um, cemeteries aren’t alphabetized? And my son called his elbow, his ARMBOW, until he was at least 3. I refuse to comment on the Roy Orbison thing. Where have I BEEN?!?!?!

  537. I was well into my 20s before it dawned on my that there is not a skin condition known as “the heartbreak of psoriasis.”

    Also, my best friend believed well into adulthood that ‘north’ was whatever way you were facing.

  538. Totally thought Roy Orbison was blind, slugs were snails needed homes like a hermit crab, and it was Knights in white satin…

    Just recently learned ibuprofen is generic Advil….I thought it was its own brand

  539. Things I didn’t realize until an embarassing-ly older age

    – Pancakes and cupcakes were literal translations of the things they are & not just arbitrary names; this blew my mind
    -I once covered a letter in a shit ton of stamps b/c I thought it would reach it’s destination faster, my parents still make fun of me for this.
    – Just last week I googled “Where do all the bugs go in the winter”, for which I felt great shame and embarrassment.
    – As a child I thought the ‘Black Market’ was a literal place where lots of salacious transactions occurred.
    – I thought that term to ‘take something for granted’, was ‘taking it for granite’ – not sure what my excuse is there.
    – When I was little I thought I could take on the hereditary traits of anyone my parents dated – When I found out I wasn’t part Native American just because my mom’s boyfriend was, I cried.

    Hilarious post Jenny!

  540. When I was little and heard about how Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier, I pictured a black man breaking through a rainbow in left field. This is still the first thing that comes to mind when it comes up.

  541. I thought the song “Rock U Like a Hurricane “was actually Raunchy Like a Hurricane…I found out about 15 years later that it was not…but I still sing it that way…I like my version better.

  542. I thought the song “Rock U Like a Hurricane “was actually Raunchy Like a Hurricane…I found out about 15 years later that it was not…but I still sing it that way…I like my version better.

  543. When driving out west for my first time, I kept seeing “Frontage Road” and I thought, “Man. That is one lond-ass road. I wonder who Frontage was?” Then it dawned on me.

  544. When movie commercials said “coming to a theater near you” I assumed they meant the theater around the corner from my house. I also thought that “I brake for squirrels (etc)” meant that they loved them so much it broke their heart. And I thought (until I was 18) that a “set of drawers” was pronounced and spelled “set of draws”. Thanks Long Island accent.

  546. It wasn’t that long ago that I was shocked to learn Roy Orbison was blind.

    Now I have to unlearn it.

    This sucks.

  547. I’ve been told that when I was a little girl, I informed my father that peanuts were made from peanut butter.

  548. OMG – My People!
    1) It’s “I believe in Malcom” – not “I believe in miracles.” I always wondered who Malcolm was.
    2) I was playing Barbie dolls with my little sister and she asked me to “pass her a clo” — clo being just one of a group of Clothes.
    3) Same thing about oranges – a section is called a “Reenge” because when you put them together they make an “O-Reenge”
    4) I lived on a cul-de-sac and the sign at the entrance said “No Through Street” — I thought that meant that no one was allowed on it. I was always worried about what “they” would do to us if they found us on it.
    5) I thought those little appetizers were called “Whores dee oo-erves” and my sister thought they were “Whores de Vors”
    6) I read a book called “Pride and Pre-Jew-dice” but talked about being preh-je-dissed against black people.
    7) I was showing my daughter Charlotte where I went to school — in Charlottesville, VA. My youngest asked “Where’s MY Vill?”
    8) My older sister went to the University of Virginia – UVa. When I was little I was so confused – I knew that the U stood for University and the V stood for Virginia but I could never figure out what the A stood for.

    Jenny – don’t ever change.

  549. On the first day of kindergarten, I proudly declared to the other kids telling their birth dates, that “my birthday was the day I was born”. I was different than they were, you know.

    I thought my Dad was Jesus, he looked so much like the pictures.

    My parents had me convinced that playing with fire before bed (camping, candles, etc.) would make you wet the bed. Of course, they never told me that eating before bed can make you fat.

  550. The movie “The Ten Commandments” plays every year around Easter. When I was growing up, with only the three network channels and one public broadcasting channel, that made it a big deal and it became a very entrenched part of Easter for me–like “A Christmas Carol” or “Miracle on 34th Street” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” are part of Thanksgiving and Christmas. As I grew older, it struck me that it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the resurrection, but I still thought of it as an Easter movie. I think I was in college when I finally realized it’s about Passover. Still to this day feel a seasonal need to watch that movie, and a tiny, utterly ridiculous spark of pride at having figured out the Passover part all on my own….

  551. I admit to “OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR” taking way to many years for me to understand.

  552. Thanks to “Chucky” and “The Puppet Masters” I treated all of my dolls and stuffed animals like royalty…until I was near adult age. I REALLY didn’t want to tick them off.

  553. When I was really little, before I was able to read, my parents used to keep me in line on road trips by telling me those “Adopt a Road” signs with the pictures of forests on them indicated a “Child Spanking Area.”

    For the longest time I had this horrific image in my head of a places in the woods where lines of bare-butted kids were being spanked by their parents outside their cars. O.O

  554. my son who is ten asked me- Where is the black market…you know where you buy guns and drugs!!!!! and Roy Orbison…really…no idea

  555. When I was really little, before I was able to read, my parents used to keep me in line on road trips by telling me those “Adopt a Road” signs with the pictures of forests on them indicated a “Child Spanking Area” ahead.

    For the longest time I had this horrific image in my head of places in the woods where lines of bare-butted kids were being spanked by their parents outside their cars. O.O

  556. Hahahaha – thanks for the laughs. And the nods. I am 43 and thanks to you now know the Moody Blues song is Nights in White Satin and not Knights in White Satin, too. Changes my whole childhood imaginations of the song.

  557. Also, when I was little, my friend lived with her grandmother whose name was Joan. So when we went to Jones Beach it thought that it belonged to her

  558. Oh…oh..my sister thought “Down at the Sunset Grill” was “Down at the Sausage Mill”.

    And yes, we still laugh about it.

  559. Regarding “Jet Airliner”: I thought it was “Big ‘ol Jed had a light on” I’m warming to the Chad idea though

  560. For 30 yrs, I thought a line in Seals & Croft Summer Breeze lyrics were ” and you’re waiting there without a cat on the wall” instead of “and you’re waiting there, not a care in the world.” I just got this last year & always wondered what in the hell the cat on the wall had to do with anything. Yay tribe.

  561. In the Our Father I used to think “and lead us not into temptation” was “and lead a snot into temptation,” because I’d heard bad kids called “little snots” and figured God was leading them into hell but delivering the good ones from evil. I also thought “genitals” were called “gentles” because it hurt if you got kicked there.

  562. One more thing. If it makes any of my tribe feel better? I’m 52 & didn’t know about the NIGHTS in white Satin. Until a couple of days ago.

  563. I thought “sensitive” meant you had good sense, so when I asked my mom, “am I sensitive?” and she said “not really”, I was crushed!

  564. My husband grew up thinking there was such a thing as “Chester drawers” (chest of drawers)

  565. I had trouble with calvary and cavalry. I wasn’t sure why Jesus had troops on horseback around at the crucifixion.

  566. I thought the reason my parents hated driving downtown with all of the one-way streets was that you HAD to turn in the direction that the one way sign pointed, like in one of those mazes in Highlights magazine. I was shocked at how they would break the law, even right in front of a police car.

  568. Until I was in my early 20’s I thought Cat Stevens was signing “..come and BE STRANGE” instead of Peace Train. I’m still pretty freaked out about NIGHTS in White Satin – I had always somehow pictured the song about something having to do with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and assumed they were the knights on the horses.

    Also, every morning in the traffic report the guy referred to the “depressed section” – naturally I assumed he was referring to the poorer areas of town – I learned (again in my 20’s when I got a “real” job) that its where the highway goes below street level downtown.

  569. I thought the “State of the Union” was a speech the President gave about the Best State in the U.S.A. When I first heard about the “State of the State” address I figured that the counties were like little states when you were the governor. This was all cleared up when I finally was watching the State of the Union with Dad and I asked him which state he thought was going to “win” this year. I was 14.

  571. I was 25 years old when I found out that “rotating tires” didn’t mean raising the car and making sure the tires would spin properly.

  572. I used to think eggs were considered dairy because, you know, Milk and Eggs. And that the objects in “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” are IN the mirror and I could not figure out why anyone would care.

  573. I used to think ‘Hidden Drive’ signs meant that there were driveways that were really well-hidden, like with jungle branches obscuring them and stuff . . .turns out, not so much

  574. I thought that signs saying “Pedestrians Only” meant that the crosswalks could only be used by people of the Pedestrian religion, like Episcopalians only more walking involved.

  575. I thought they stopped making kids cereal (Cocoa Puffs, Cap’N Crunch, etc) because I never saw commercials for them after age 14.

  576. I thought the lyrics to the Bruce Sprinsteen song My Hometown were “I was 8 years old and running with a diamond mine” instead of “dime in my hand.” I like my version better.

    And lest I chalk up misunderstood lyrics to long ago songs I misheard as a kid:

    I thought the Black Keys song “Act Nice and Gentle to Me” was about the Duke boys’ car, “Act nice, General Lee.”

  579. Wait. So Smooth Operator isn’t about a telephone operator?!? huh. On anotehr song related note… I was in my 30s when I found out that Michael Jackson was singing “thriller thriller thriller” and not “get up, get up, get up”. I hate it when my husband is right about things.

  580. I was certain for many years that Kenny Rogers was claiming that Lucille left him with “four hundred children” and a crop in the field. When I realized it was a measly “four hungry children” I decided Lucille wasn’t quite the witch (or whore) I originally thought she was.

  582. I had my sister convinced that I was a witch with a very powerful plastic ring, and my brother wouldn’t drink “cow’s pee”…poor kids.

  583. The irony of George Strait’s song “Ocean Front Property” was completely lost on me, and screwed up my understanding of US geography for years. I was probably at least 12 or 13 when I realized that Arizona is not, in fact, on the ocean. And ditto on thinking eggs were dairy- I’m 29, and I just figured that out about 2 years ago during a conversation with my lactose-intolerant husband.

  584. I thought it was Knights in White Satin, until I just read this now…. Doh!

  585. No one believes me, but I swear Michael Jackson is singing about Microsoft in “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

    (seriously love this list because it makes me realize quirky thoughts are embraceable)

  586. When my wife was a kid, the local priest, Father Harold (Hal) Lloyd, moved to another parish. Her slightly younger sister was extremely confused about why the the prayer they said every day would *not* be changing (“Our father, who art in heaven, Hal Lloyd be thy name”)

  587. The first time I watched “Beverly Hills Cop” was at a sleepover when I was in middle school. I thought for years that the main character’s name was “Asshole Foley”.

  588. I got very excited when I learned a few years ago that a tanooki was a real animal. To be fair, I’m pretty sure that goombas and koopas aren’t real. But as it turns out, you CAN get your very own tanooki suit (if you get a raccoon dog coat).

  589. Many years ago, I watched the movie Stigmata and a coworker asked me what it was about. I started telling her the plot and she interrupted me in a confused way and asked what the big deal was about having stigmata. She had it and so did a lot of people she knew. I was taken aback and asked, “so, you all bleed from your palms and the tops of your feet?”. She was horrified and said that they just had blurry vision. Stigmata and astigmatism are different.

    I also had to google Nights in White Satin today. Damnit!

  590. I used to think that babies came out of your belly button and that the reason I have such bad eyesight was because I sat too close to the TV.

    My husband, until just a few months ago, thought that it was “Rock the cash bar”.

    Jeanie Tortoisefly- I have a serious earwig phobia because I thought the same thing! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

    “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.”
    This made me LOL!!

    “I used to think blowjob meant you blow on it. I could never figure out why boys thought it was so great.”
    TessaLeFae- me too!!

    I’ve learned a lot today, including the 2 facts below that seriously blew my mind:

    -Pineapples do not grow on trees
    -Lou Ferrigno has a hearing impairment

  591. Until I was in college, I thought oral sex was the same thing as phone sex…

  592. I apparently had problems with fonts and logos. Ross for YEARS looked like IZOSS and someone had to patiently explain it to me when I was a teenager. I also thought the Disney company logo was confusing with a backwards cursive G instead of a D. My sister explained that one.

  594. I loved reading these.

    When I was very little my brother told me the middle finger of the Statue of Liberty was a mile long. It wasn’t until we started studying measurements that I realized this was false.

    My son sang “Vivian Killed the Radio Star.” And must have thought Vivian was a very evil woman.

    My daughter argued with me that tortillas were different from Fajita Buns. Our entire family now calls them Fajita Buns.

    There is a warehouse sized store here called “Strictly Feathers.” I was completely confused as to why anyone would need that large a selection or variety of feathers. It wasn’t for quite some time that I learned it is a bird and bird supply shop.

  595. I used to think that Ben Affleck and Ben Stiller were the same person. THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.

  597. Love this!

    And crap – reading these comments I’ve been screaming out me too! I always thought that the people on the TV waited for my TV to turn on. They didn’t live in my TV; but they knew when I turned it on so they would start playing the show for me. The commercials were prerecorded but the show was waiting for me to start.

    In hindsight; that should’ve been a screaming signal to my parents about the crazy that was lurking; but I’m good now.

  599. I was watching Celebrity Apprentice, and commented on Lou Ferrigno with disgust, “Just what nationality IS he, anyway?!” because he is so hard to understand. My fiance looked at me and said, “Deaf. Lou Ferrigno is deaf.” I had no idea.

  600. I just busted out laughing at this post at the same moment my boss came in to talk to me about computer updates. He said he wasn’t sure what was so funny about updating computers. Then he gave me a piece of chocolate and waited for me to calm down. I love my job!!

  601. I thought that Deepthroat was the movie sequel to All the Presidents’ Men.

  602. I thought putting cream in ones coffee was a sin. My parents were fundies. BIG time fundies. They did not drink, smoke, or swear. We went out to eat every Sunday. The waitress would ask if they wanted cream in their coffee. They would shake their heads ominously and say nooooooo. Apparently, I took this to mean that cream was a sin. One day, I was 12, we were out to dinner with my father’s side of the family. This was rare as they were Mormons and my mother did not like hanging out with them. My favorite uncle took the cream for his coffee and I burst into tears. My mother said, “what in the world is wrong with you”. I said that Uncle Dude was going to hell for putting cream in his coffee. The room went silent. My parents looked at each other and asked why in the world I thought that. I told them that cream was a sin. I told them that they NEVER took cream just like they didn’t drink, or smoke, or swear. Of course, everyone there thought this was adorable and hysterical. I was mortified.

  603. I thought Hall & Oates was “Haulin’ oats”, which was a really lame band name. Why would anyone name their band after a giant wagon full of grain? Also, that the Allman Brothers were “All Man Brothers”, which duh (!) they’re brothers, of course they’re all men!

  604. For awhile my impression was you drove a wooden steak through a vampire’s heart to kill it. No wonder they are so hard to kill.

  605. @ Liz 192…. OMG I don’t know how many years as a child I sang that jingle and my mother would bust out laughing. I thought I was being amazingly funny. Then at some point I asked what was so funny. After that I refused to sing the jingle and would turn bright red every time the commercial would come on because my mother would sing “Pussy Cow”.

  606. Until my early thirties I thought they separated the baby chicks from the edible eggs by shining a light through the shell to see what was inside. Thanks Porky Pig!

  607. Here in the UK we have laybys on the main roads that signpost public loos as ‘WC’. This means ‘water closet’.

    I used to think it meant ‘Wee Chamber’. Right up until I was 25.

  608. I am still convinced it is Knights in White Satin. People, don’t you know not to believe everything you read on the internet? Nights in White Satin is obviously wrong.

    I also thought my dad invented the word “situation”. I was completely shocked when I heard a non-relative say it — I didn’t realize my dad’s word was that well-known. I also believed my dad when he claimed to be 29 — even though my oldest sister was 22 at the time.

  609. you know on The Price is Right where they say “contestants not appearing on stage will receive the following items” and then they’d show a blender and some rice a roni and other consolation prizes? well, I thought that meant EVERYONE in the world that doesn’t appear on the TPIR stage was going to get those prizes and I kept waiting for a big truck to arrive with all of our stuff. but it never came. sigh.

  611. I used to think the word “Balcony” was actually “Valcony,” and I still kind of like it better that way.

  612. I grew up in Dodge County and until I moved away for college I thought that the phrase “Get out of Dodge” referred to Dodge County. I assumed that in other Counties you would say things like “Get out of Washington” or “Get out of Union” (whatever county they happened to be in).

    I have a friend of a friend who, in her mid-twenties, asked if unicorns were extinct or just endangered. So my friends call these kinds of realizations “unicorn beliefs”.

  613. A little more embarrassing:

    Someone told me when I was little that thunder was just the clouds bumping together. I believed that; or, more accurately, never questioned it; until about a year ago when I told my son the same thing and my husband fell out laughing. He still teases me about it.

  615. Ha! These were all great! I guess my embarrassing confession is that I always thought the lyric to the Jimi Hendrix song was, “Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.” Even more embarrassing, I didn’t know the truth until I was 30…

  616. I thought a profoundly ugly little boy lived in my Grandpa’s shop because every time my Grandma would take me there, she’d first say, “Whatever you do, don’t look at Weldon. You’ll go blind.”

    She was saying “welding.” 🙂

  617. When I was little I thought every football player HAD to play football because they were born with shoulders like that (I had no clue about all that padding they wear!).

  618. Jenny, you have really tapped into our collective childhoods. I keep thinking of these things. Remember the song “The Witch Doctor”?

    “Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang, Walla walla, bing bang…”

    I thought it was “Walla walla bean bag.”

  619. I used to think that sex ended with the man peeing in the woman. So I made my Barbie get peed in by Ken. A lot.

  620. Jesus Harold Christ! I’m 37 and I just learnt it is NOT knights in white satin. Thanks @ottawagrrl.
    I always just thought they were gentle and good knights and the white satin was a metaphor.
    A bit shocked I could create a metaphor about it but couldn’t just drop the K!!

  621. I am making this my home page so I can learn something new everyday. Today’s lesson was on thunder and lightning…

  622. My 10yo asked me if we could go visit Farmer John. I asked who that was, and she said you know, Farmer John’s cheese… that we put on our pizza. I’m still not sure if she believed me when I told her it is Parmesan cheese.

  623. I thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s husband…My mother recently cleared this up for me. I’m 25. She now reconsiders her decision not to take me to church as a child…

  625. I always thought the car KNEW when you were turning and turned the blinker on for you. How convenient right? It wasn’t until I started driving that I realized that in fact was not the case. I had a friend who similarly thought that the car knew when to switch gears, and the first time driving with her mom, she backed out of her driveway and her mom kept telling her to “drive” in an increasingly louder voice, until she floored it and they ended up in the yard across the street. She quickly learned why the car didn’t switch over from reverse to drive.

    Along with the song lyrics, I thought for so long the song was “we built this city on rock and road” that I still can’t help but sing it that way even though I know the error of my ways.

  626. Holy crap.
    1. Roy Orbison was NOT blind?
    2. My sister thought it was “I hurried through the grape farm” instead of “I heard it through the grapevine.”
    3. My sister also thought it was “every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you.” Which may explain why she likes to hide the salami, if you know what I’m saying.
    4. My nephew thought we start out as cartoons before we’re born into real people.
    5. My best childhood friend thought the Material Girl line, “If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk a-way-yay” was actually, “If they don’t give me cup of pennies, I just walk a-way-yay.” She was a cheap date.
    6. Off to Google “knights in white satin”, because if that’s not right then…???

  627. Wait – Slugs and Snails are different?? Are you sure? I have to Google this. Also when did Google become a verb?

  628. I just googled the lyrics to “Blinded By the Light” because I didn’t believe the lyrics *weren’t* “wrecked up like a douche.”

    Also, I had a science teacher in high school who thought that “elbow grease” was a cleaning product.

  629. The tragic part for me is, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with “Knights in White Satin” – even after my husband said, “Like evenings in white satin”…so I googled Knights in White Satin. I did not feel better after google showed me results for ‘nights in white satin’. Not. At all. Better.

  630. When I was little, I thought there were animals/monsters who lived in the toilets and lived on what I flushed down there.

  631. Wait, Roy Orbison wasn’t blind? Seriously? (I’m 29 and just went to wikipedia for confirmation).

  632. Until I was I my 20’s, I thought the mother from “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was just a cheating whore. It never occurred to me that it was the dad in the Santa suit.

  633. I always wondered how “they” got the seeds out of seedless grapes without smushing the grapes until I walked by a seedless watermelon at the grocery store a couple of years ago. Major lightbulb moment.

  634. I thought H&R Block was a hair salon. Not sure what made my brain make that connection.

  637. It wasn’t until my Junior or Senior year in High School that I found out Alaska was not an Island. I really believed it was because of how it is boxed up on the map like Hawaii. When people talked about driving there I thought that *they* were the ones who needed more education. Sigh.

  638. Growing up, I lived I zip code 54911…so as a kid I though that in an emergency you just dialed the last three digits of your zip code.

  639. I love most of these, but I (sadly) question the veracity of some of these.

  640. You mean the Moody Blue’s Song ISN’T Called “Knights in White Satin”?? WTF *runs to Google to find proper name for song*

  641. when i was little i thought that the super bowl was a big bowling tournament

  642. OH HELL! It’s NIGHTS not KNIGHTS. Well damned, don’t I feel stupid!

  643. As a New Orleans native, it took me until well into high school to realize that Mardi Gras isn’t a national holiday.

  644. I thought rhinos and hippos were the same species, Hippos were the girls and rhinos were boys.” @oreo_borealis <- they aren't? omg. i never even questioned it. ha.

  645. I always thought God lived in light bulbs, cause everybody was like, “God is the light…”

  646. When I was younger I thought the song “Smooth Operator” was actually “Smooth Doppler Radar.” I never got why she was singing about the weather

  647. @Brianna & @Hanna – never realized it was “Nights” until tonight! I read that and immediately googled because I couldn’t figure out the issue!

  648. Um, I only found out reading this blog post that Roy Orbison wasn’t blind. SO y’all have nothing to be ashamed of. (Unless it’s Rick Perry. People should be ashamed of Rick Perry, since he won’t do it for himself.)

  649. Oh god. It’s “NIGHTS” in White Satin. Not Knights in White Satin. Holy shit. I never thought about this. I’m 41. I’m so ashamed. hahaha

    P.S. I was yelling ALOT about Rick Perry last week, too. It was the first time I thought I was glad I didn’t live in Texas anymore. And I moved away nearly 20 years ago.

  650. My cousin used to mishear lyrics all the time, the greats include:
    Droolin’ on a Sunday Afternoon (Groovin’ on a Sunday Afternoon)
    There’s a bathroom on the right (Bad Moon Rising)
    Diarrhea Jane (Diary of Jane)

  651. Ok … I’m cheating here. This isn’t something I believed, but it is something that my husband’s EX believed. She thought that there were really bodies buried at all those road side accident shrines you see all over Texas.

  654. I thought the line in “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid said, “pregnant women, sick of swimming, ready to stand.” Until my husband pointed it out to me a few years ago. “Bright young women” makes much more sense.

  655. I grew up in a city near a Frito Lay’s Factory. When I was quite small, I thought mashed potatoes came from the steam that came out of the plant – my Mom would never make mashed potatoes for us, except on Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I assumed they were more expensive because they had to go through the whole plant process.
    Apparently, clouds confused me a lot: I also thought, based on Bugs Bunny, that dead people’s souls went up escalators made of light. So, anytime there were clouds with light streaming through them, I assumed people were going to heaven – you couldn’t go if it were cloudy or dark (I didn’t logic out that they went to hell – I just figured they waited in line patiently). And, this meant that heaven was literally on the clouds – I’d often wave to my grandfather or other dead relatives when there were big clouds around us.

    I had a student this year, a junior in high school, discover, to his shock, that chickens laid eggs that were not fertilized, which are the eggs we eat. As he pondered this idea, he actually said out-loud, “then, how do the other eggs get fertilized and what happens to those eggs?” I replied (being his American History teacher), “Chickens have bird sex and those fertilized eggs make new chickens. Do you need more information?” At which point, the entire class cracked up – fortunately, they were my tribe and it was not any more embarrassing than any other story/discussion/question we had together. Thanks for a very good laugh!

  656. @Brooke – I always thought it was a Tankooi suit. I still call it that even though I Know better (tan-koo-ey).

  657. There was a billboard charity campaign in the ’70s that said Lick Cancer, and pictured someone licking an envelope. I thought it was a kind of cancer one could get from envelope glue!

  658. I always thought “tear him a new asshole” was “tear him into an asshole” and “for all intents and purposes” was “for all intensive purposes.”

  659. Oh, and I believed for many years that the the lyrics to “All Star” by Smash Mouth said “She was lookin’ kinda dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an ELF on her forehead.” I wondered How she learned to make her hands look like elves.

  660. I thought it was WAR WAR, not World War, until high school, AND I was an honor’s student……joke’s on them!

  661. I am insanely embarrassed to admit that I was quite old when I discovered dinosaurs were extinct before people existed and that they never lived at the same time 🙂

    I thought miner’s couldn’t buy lottery tickets…not minors . I couldn’t understand why they were being discriminated against through the lottery system!

  663. @Judy B – say WHAT NOW about birds?!?!?! HOW CAN THIS BE?! WHY HAS THE WORLD LIED TO ME FOR 32 YEARS!

  664. Until I was twenty year old, I pronounced the dark pink crayon MAG-netta. Not until my college roommate laughed hysterically at me did i know how to say magenta.

  665. I thought that turkeys were only raised on farms, regardless of seeing them in my friend’s back yard as a teen. I didn’t find out that they roamed free until my boyfriend (now husband) told me he was going hunting for them. I was really not impressed and asked what the sport was in hunting a turkey that they kept fenced in. 12 years later & I still haven’t lived that down.

  666. Wait…..its not “Knights in white satin”?? And the guards on Oz aren’t saying “Oreo”????!?!!? Mind = Blown!

    One of my good friends in college thought the octane ratings for gas were actually the year the gas was pumped out of the ground. She couldn’t understand why in 2003 we had such high gas prices, “since we were still using gas pumped out in 1992”

    Oh, and when I was a kid I thought that the city changed the stop lights to red and green just for the Christmas season. You know, to be festive. I was also CONVINCED my uncle was John Denver! I mean, they looked the same, they both played the guitar, my uncle lived in Boulder, CO where I thought John Denver lived. CONVINCED!

  667. Omg, thank you Kit for the number 652 comment because I am 33 and I still thought it was ‘for all intensive purposes.’ Also, thank you for having the same name as the car on ‘Knight Rider,’ because that is just awesome.

  669. Until I was 25 I thought that ‘make ends meet,’ was ‘make ends meat,’ like as in: In the end, you want to be able to afford to put good food on the table, and in my mind, if you had enough money to buy good meat, you accomplished ‘making ends meat.’ Does that even make sense? I wonder if anyone else ever thought that was what it meant…..

  670. I used to think that you had a child name and then got a new name when you grew up. (Sort of like baby teeth and adult teeth.) I reasoned this out by the fact that I knew absolutely NO kids with my parents’ names and happened to know no adults with the same name as my classmates. (I might actually have but just called them Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones instead of John or Jane.) I assumed you were just assigned a new name and had no control over it. I wondered what name I’d get when I was an adult. (Wait… does my blog name “TechyDad” count? Maybe I was right after all!)

  671. When my son and nephew were around 3 they liked to sing to my 1 year old daughter in the car to keep her happy. One day I noticed that my nephew was singing about an “Itchy Bitchy spider” going up a water spout. No matter what I said, he was convinced that my version of the “Itsy Bitsy spider” was wrong. O.o

  672. 1. Growing up Catholic, I never could understand why we were praying for our scissors (…pray for us, Sinners, now and at the hour…)
    2. I thought “the Boondocks” was a place like New York or Arkansas because we would always practice driving in the boondocks.

  673. It took 34 years for me to realize that in the Xmas song “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus”, that she was really kissing Daddy, and not some stranger dressed as Santa.

  674. Um yes on the reindeer thing. Only recently did my husband explain that YES there are reindeer, but NO they do not fly.

    I thought that football fields grew that way. In high school I saw some coaches “chalking the field” and asked what they were doing, they told me and I was stunned. I literally had just never thought about it and figured those numbers and such grew out of the ground and that is where football fields were born.

  675. My son just asked me if the world was black and white when I was a kid too. I chuckled a bit at the absurdity of it, but now I realize that I should have been offended that he thought I was that old!

  676. For years my best friend’s mother would sing along to Marvin Gaye “get up get up get, let’s make love tonight, I can’t wait for you to ovulate”

  677. My friend’s parents led his older sister to believe that the ice cream truck was just a music truck. She always wondered why the local kids liked that one song so much.

  678. When I was about about 3 years old I was visiting relatives in New York with my family and they kept asking me if I wanted to go to the kiddie pool and I got so excited and couldn’t wait to go. As soon as we got to the pool my face fell with disappointment, because there were no kittens in sight. My little girl brain thought they were saying “kittie” pool not kiddie pool. If I wasn’t terrified of goats (at the time) I would have been more pissed that weren’t baby goats there either. harrumph.

  679. When asked what my European background is I answer that I am 99% German and the other half is Polish. My mother so ingrained the answer that I didn’t get the joke until my late 20s. ….. I am a mathematician.

  680. When I was four, I went to kindergarten where I encountered my first non-white person. She was the school secretary/nurse and she was black. I didn’t understand how anyone could have skin like that, so I came up with the conclusion that she must have a disease that made her look that way. And then I decided it was contagious. I was terrified of the poor woman. I obviously didn’t live in a very diverse area.

  681. Until college I thought that “Jay walking” meant crossing the street naked. (“Naked as a jay bird…”) I never could understand why someone would want to do that in the first place…

  682. Up until I was in the second grade, I knew that thunder was made by the sound of a sleigh with four men in it wearing top hats, sliding across the clouds. No one ever told me this (and I never told anyone, either) I just knew it. I’m not sure I believe that stuff about lightning. I like the sleigh better.

    I didn’t know until my twenties that the La Jolla I saw written and the La Hoya I heard about were the same town.

    One day when my daughter was young, she was obviously searching for something. I asked her what she was looking for and she said, my clo. Turns out, clo is the singular for clothes, and she was only looking for one item.

  684. I thought the Neverending Story literally never ended. I thought we humans couldn’t see it the rest of it because we were in the wrong dimension.

  685. My first 6 months in New York City, I thought the subway announcer urged to ‘stay away from the platformage’. It wasn’t until I read an article about how someone was ‘pushed off the platform edge’ that I figured that out. I laughed for an hour straight.

  686. I gutted and stuffed creek chubs with tissue, then sewed em’ back up with a needle and thread,. Then wondered why they stunk so bad. My first and only foray into Taxidermy…

  687. My husband always thought the song Fancy by Reba McEntire was about her becoming a rock star – not a prostitute. He was late 30s before I told him.

  688. I belong to a medieval/renaissance re-creation organization (the SCA) and used to be one of the people who organized demonstrations for the general public. We’d march in parades, show off rapier fighting, sing madrigals, do calligraphy, etc.

    I must have talked to hundreds and hundreds of adults while I was in this position. Every so often…I’d meet up with someone who assumed that all our medieval paraphernalia was REAL ARTIFACTS that were made in pre-1600 Europe and kept in like-new shape by our dedication. You could tell the believers because they were UNBELIEVABLY impressed at every gown, pen, rapier, etc. they saw, ooohing and aaahing and talking about how it must be extremely expensive to play this game. I started off disabusing them of this notion, but sometimes it was easier to just let them believe.

    This type of person would get awfully confused when I would mention “eating real medieval food”, though!

  689. What a minute…! You mean its not “Knights in White Satin?!”

  690. I thought it was Knights in White Satin until I red this now I have to go look up what it really is! UGH! I had to book mark this because today was an extremely crappy day until I read this and just had to laugh!! I am apparently the only village idiot!

  692. I just read a book set in Rhode Island so I google mapped it and found out its NOT an island, it’s three islands plus mainland, I’m 43, guess its time to master forth grade geography!

  693. Used to think the lyrics to the Jimi Hendrix song went “Hey Joe, Where you be going with that gum in your hair”. Took me years to figure out I was wrong….. lol!

  694. I also totally forgot another village idiot moment in my life………. I will preface this with I am a natural blond but I thought for years you had to change you oil only when the light came on in the car! I have since married a mechanic and even after 26 years together I still can not live it down!

  695. My Mom called my brother “vacant” for years as he never seemed to be listening or complety “there” in family conversations. After years of this, my brother finally looked at her deep in her eyes and said….”Mom’ why do you always call me Bacon”?

  696. I think there is an entire generation of Pacific Northwesterners that have sang of Cal Worthington’s beloved Pussy Cow. I always imagined it was a cat sized cow that was really cute… still can’t sing Go See Cal… 🙂

    After the Knights revelation… (get ready for more mind blowing reality). You know in that ELO song they aren’t singing “Don’t let me down… BRUCE”? I just found out this year they were saying gruuuuse… A made up word. 35 years I had wondered why Bruce was expected to screw up so bad they had to sing about him. Now I have no clue what the song is about at all.

  697. My Manfred Man understanding was simiar…wrapped up like a douche, you know the rumor in the night.” I mean, EVERYONE talks about “those girls”!

  698. I used to think “Gaper” was a location in the city I live in. I would listen to the radio and it seemed an obvious solution, some reconstruction needed to be done at Gaper. I told my mother, (I was 28) it was clear, there is always a “gaper delay” being reported during rush hour, why not just fix Gaper, vwherever that is?! She laughed so hard at me!

  699. I thought that your hair would only grow when you were a kid and that when you became an adult it would stop growing. That was why most grown ups I knew had short hair and there were so many bald men.

  700. I thought Dusty Miller (the silver plant) was Reindeer Moss, because it was shaped like antlers. Until I was in my twenties.

  701. The one about Aunt Yvette was hilarious. I used to have an Aunt Elaine, but I had always thought her name was Auntie Laine.

  702. I thought NO PASSING signs meant you had to stop and not pass that point. I thought if I wrote to the little girl I saw in the Shirley Temple movies on Sunday morning TV and told her she would get breast cancer when she grew up, she could avoid it by taking precautions. I thought color film was invented while The Wizard of Oz was being filmed so they switched as soon as they could.

  703. I thought blow job meant when someone was really mean to someone and was giving them the cold shoulder. My now husband corrected me when I used it in a sentence at a party trying to describe how mean this one woman was to the other woman. I was 21-years-old at the time.

  704. I thought Ice Blue Secret was perfume, so I gave my mom some for Christmas. I even had the lady at the drugstore wrap it for me….

  705. I used to think “Exit Only” signs meant that if you exited there, there was no way to get back on the highway.

  706. Until I saw American Werewolf in London, I thought that the Creedance Clearwater song lyrics said “there’s a bathroom on the right” …

  707. I thought that the way the doctor tied off the umbilical cord determined whether a baby would have an “inny” or an “outy” belly button. During my first pregnancy,when I asked my ob to essentially “give mine an outy”, she explained the truth while my husband cracked up.
    I thought “Frontage Road” was a really common street name until I was in my 20’s.

  708. @ Jenny Neff # 162 – I always thought that those oil spots were where rainbows had touched down until about 12 or 13 years old.
    I thought a classmate’s parents were dwarves, (I was completely facinated by the idea) until I met them, turns out they were divorced.
    My song lyric blunder is “It’s a long way to the shop, if you wanna sausage roll”.

  709. I used to think that “necking” was where one person lies on their back and the other person lies facing down, at right angle to the first person, intersecting with their throats touching.

    I used to think there were windshield wipers on all of the car windows, but that I kept looking at them at the wrong time and missing them in action.

    I used to think Tampax had something to do with Tampa, Florida, where I was born.

    I used to think that only men drank beer, and was shocked… SHOCKED, I tell you… when I saw my next door neighbor’s mom popping a beer open.

    My mom’s parents told her that steak tasted like liver (apparently so they wouldn’t have to share their steak with her). She didn’t find out otherwise until she went on a date with a guy in college who ordered steak. She said, “Ew, how can you eat that?” He responded by offering her a bite, which she bravely took. Her mind: blown.

  710. When I went to the roller skating rink I got up to the food counter and asked for “one hot, fresh delicious popcorn.” Because of the advertisement, I actually thought that was what it was called.

  711. When I was younger, when I heard some one had an olive complexion, I thought they meant the outside of the olive. So I was constantly looking for green people. Then, when I was older, I figured people were just insane with that comparison of olives to skin color. Lol.

  713. 1) in the Laverne & Shirley theme: “this time, there’s no stuffy nose…” instead of “no stopping us.” and 2) mispronounced “segue” — frequently — while trying to sound cool, discussing Phish show set lists and 3) thought The Fonz was a real guy.

  714. Oh, & I didn’t get the jokes “hi, Denise, where’s DeNephew?” and “black and white and read all over” until I was about 20.

  715. I thought “Via Satellite” was the brand of satellite they were using. All the way up to my mid twenties.

  716. Until I was about 7 I thought the word “badly” was another word for poo. Whenever I was out with my mum and I said, “I need to go to the toilet,” she’d ask, “Do you need to go badly?”

  717. When my friend got her driver’s license in high school, she declined to be an organ donor because she thought that meant they’d confiscate your organs whenever somebody needed one.

  718. Ok someone is going to have to explain the innie / outie / belly button / umbilical cord thing now. This is the second or 3rd time I’ve seen that mentioned and I’ve always thought innies and outies were all about the doctor’s technique! If they clamped it too close, there wasn’t enough to poke all the way in so you got an outie, and if they clamped it too far, then you got a really deep belly button, but the really good doctors knew where / how to clamp it so that after it healed it got poked in “just right”. That’s NOT the way it works????? I’m not sure which is more traumatizing — this, or the pineapple thing!!

  719. When Smokey the Bear would come on TV to announce that “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” I literally thought he meant only me. I worried so much that I wasn’t doing my job, and what would happen to me if a forest fire happened?

  720. I used to get totally confused when my parents said we needed to “run errands” because I thought they were saying “run Erin’s.” I embarrassingly admit that I was in my teens enforce I fully figured it out.

  721. And by “enforce,” I mean “before.” Autocorrect and nighttime Xanax do not mix.

  722. I thought “misled” was pronounced “Mice-eld” and was a separate word from “mislead”. I also thought Cyndi Lauper’s name was spelled Cyndi LauPIS and was so convinced that I bet my stepmother that it was. (We drove to the record store to prove it. I think the stake was a piece of gum.) I still pronounce “aspartame” to rhyme with edamame, even though I know better. If we’re going into mondegreens (http://www.kissthisguy.com/), I thought the last line of the chorus of “Billie Jean” was “the chair is not my son” and was very confused. I also thought “Flashdance” was saying “Take your pants off / and make it happen” which made more sense than the original but seemed very racy to me at age 13.

  723. Oh! I also thought “bother” was “father” and would say “Don’t father me!” to my little sister when she was annoying me. When I learned I was wrong at like age 6, I blamed it on her and said she was the one that thought that, not me. It was so mean because I seriously tried to gaslight her into thinking it was her, but luckily she was never fooled.

  726. I thought that figure skaters were judged by the designs they made on the ice, not what they did in the air.

  727. I thought you got a baby at the end of wedding, since clearly you had to be married to get one. I was disappointed at my first wedding when I looked up and Mom in the reception line and asked when does the baby get here? She simply said “we’ll talk later dear”.

  730. In my 30’s I finally discovered that I did not need to yank the plastic deodorant seal off with my teeth.

  731. When I was a kid I once saw a beetle crawl out of an old raisin box and thought if you left raisins too long they turned into bugs. So I stopped eating raisins for years because I wasn’t sure if I could eat them before the “expiration date” and they all turned into beetles.

  732. When I was a child I used to think that jets brought out the clouds because of the white trails that were always behind them.

  733. I thought that when you died, you went to Detroit. Because when my first pet goldfish died and we flushed him, I asked my Dad where he went, and he said “Detroit.” Which was true, because that’s where the waste treatment plant was.

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

    Just learned something. Mind blown.

  736. I knew a 4-year old who thought you added “Katherine” to someone’s name when you were irritated at them, because her middle name was Katherine and it was only used when she was in trouble. One day her dad wouldn’t let her stay up late and she very sternly looked at him and exclaimed “Daddy Katherine!!”

  737. When a former boss got married, her husband was so nervous at the altar that when the minister started with the part where he says repeat after me, husband DID say, “to be my awfully wedded wife.” We all started laughing!

  738. Remember that commercial back in the day “if you have a phone, you have a lawyer”? I didn’t know what a lawyer was when I was younger, I just thought it was something that came with your phone.

  739. I used to think Omaha was a country because of Mutual of Omaha commercials.

  740. When I was young there was a TV talk show host named Morton Downey Jr. I was convinced he was Robert Downey Jr.’s father.

  741. Oh my. I’m 50 and I just learned from HERE that it’s not “Knights in White Satin”. Red face for rest of day.

  742. I kept asking my grandfather, what time EXACTLY was “the mean time”. People would always say “in the Mean Time” and I needed to know exactly when that was so I could avoid everyone. 4pm? 2:24am? WHEN?!?!

  743. I thought that Warren Buffet sang the Margaritaville song and I couldn’t figure out why everyone was so keen on taking financial advice from a lush.

  744. I thought that the Underground Railroad was like a subway tunnel that was no longer in use.
    I didn’t find out this was not true until I helped my daughter with her Harriet Tubman project..

  745. Wow, love these comments… So much fun to read and nice to know we’re not alone! lol!

  746. My friend’s son recently asked his mother if it’s OK that he likes girl cheese sandwiches, even though he’s a boy.

  747. My husband thought Jet Airliner was, “big ol’ Jed had a light on, don’t carry me too far away”……..cos that makes sense….

  748. I used to think that Quarter Horses were miniature horses….because they were 1/4 the size of regular horses…. My family still has fun giving me a hard time about that one…

  749. I always thought that Windchill was actually Windshield and that they figured it out by how cold it got when the air hit the windshield of your car.

    In addition…there were these garbage cans on the side of the highway in Manitoba (Canada) called Orbits. I always thought that after you put your garbage in there, it would shoot your garbage into space…into orbit.

  750. I had a little cousin who, when she wanted to confide in me whispered, “phrough, ssss, shoo shoo shoo, phrough, ssss, phrough, ssss, phrough, ssss, shoo shoo shoo, phrough, ssss, phrough, shoo shoo shoo.” Instead of saying the actual words. She thought that was what it meant to whisper because that’s all she heard when other people did it. Ah…

  751. My best friend (a guy) thought until high school that when women burned their bras back in the day they were still wearing them when they set them on fire (whoa!) and had to try to rip them off just before they got hurt, and that it was a protest against the Vietnam War. We discovered this when we were studying for an exam and he very seriously said “I don’t blame Jane Fonda for not wanting to burn her tits.”

  752. For those of you curious, it’s NIGHTS in White Satin, not KNIGHTS, as in night time not medieval armored fighters.

    When I was really little I thought tiny stick people lived in the radio and played the songs and talked.

    When I first saw the movie “Airplane” there was a gag where the guy takes a glass of booze and tries to drink it but instead spills it all over himself and says “I have a drinking problem.” It took me YEARS to get the joke.

  753. Couple and my husband and I were out to dinner. This was before DVRs were really widespread and the man was talking about “appointment television” – you know, a show you had to watch live because everyone would talk about it the next day at work. The phrase struck me very odd at the time, maybe it was the beer, and all I could picture was a very large tv at a dentist office saying he was here for his appointment – even though I knew what my friend was talking about. I could not stop laughing. For 15 minutes. I couldn’t even explain why I was laughing because it was too damned funny. To this day, no matter my mood, I even think the phrase “appointment television” and get the giggles – in fact, I’m having a hard time typing now.

  754. I thought the Neil Diamond song was Reverend Blue Jeans, and I thought what a cool church to let their pastor wear blue jeans.

  756. the yellow signs on the side of roads with a black deer on them? well, many moons ago i asked my mom about the jumping deer signs. she said, “they are deer crossing signs.” i asked if it was just a photo of the deer because deer couldn’t read and wondered OUT LOUD how they convinced the deer to only cross at the signs.

  757. This is definitely my tribe, too. I’m proud to be a member.

    I think I was 15 when I saw a roofer putting shingles on and realized they don’t start at the top of the roof, put the first row on, and then carefully slide the next row underneath so they overlap.

  758. Related to the kneepit/armpit tweet by @joannerjoanner: earlier this year I came up with “legpit” while talking to my wife about the back of my knee. She pointed out that it should probably be kneepit, since the legpit would be my butt.

  759. I thought Led was Mr. Zeppelin’s first name. When I worked at a record store (yes I am that old) I moved all the albums and cassettes to their rightful place under “Z”

  760. When I was young, I would get terribly irritated when I asked someone to say my name in Spanish and it sounded almost exactly the same way I said it… I was expecting a different word altogether.

  761. For a long time, I thought that if something was languishing, it was relaxed and happy and stuff was good. I didn’t realize until the last few years that that actually meant suffering. I always heard of animals languishing in captivity and thought they were doing great. D:

    Also, I had a really hard time figuring out how the penis was attached to a man’s body, until I got a boyfriend and inspected it for myself! Woo, now we’re married! XD

    Kneepits is SO much easier to say than ‘the backs of my knees’. I don’t know why this isn’t a standard part of our vocabularies! I think I’ll use that, now!

  762. My 30-year-old boyfriend, walking past “Bird Dental” on Bird Avenue: “Wait, birds don’t have teeth, do they?”

  763. I thought there was a tiny room under each traffic light, with just enough room to stand, but the person in the room somehow had a view of the street, so they could change the lights when needed.

    I also thought graham crackers were Green Crackers until my 20’s when I first tried to buy some.

    I also thought the actors on TV were really cartoons, just well drawn. It wasn’t until I saw Barney (the deputy, not sure that was his name now) from the Andy Griffith show, on some other show that I realized he might just be a real person.

  764. My husband learned when he was little (like you do) that #1 was pee and #2 was poop. One day he wondered what #3 was, and decided it was birds. And that #4 was butterflies. He never saw the need to take it farther than that.

    And in the 80’s I happily sang along to ‘Do You Want to Ride Me, I’m a Sadist”, never knowing it was about a nice lady with a nice German car.

  765. I thought it was always cold in Germany; you know, because of Hogan’s Heroes. Why was it always winter there?

  766. Oh, and I thought it was “when I needed suction on my brain” in “I’m a Believer” (Monkees)

  767. I wonder if Google is scratching their collective heads wondering why “Knights in White Satin” is trending.

  769. One of my sister’s recently confessed that when we were kids she successfully convinced our other sister that milk was made by chewing cheese really really well and then spitting it out into a receptacle. She got hers though when I convinced her that if you chewed gum for a long enough time, it would get smaller and smaller and eventually melt away. She got yelled at by our mom when she refused to spit out her gum in order to brush her teeth before bedtime.

    P.S. to Lizzeh: There are many many varieties of olives. Some olives have a gorgeous bronze color to them (on the outside, yes) not so unlike a skin complexion. Rock your World?

  771. I thought Walter Cronkite lived at the TV Station in Odessa, TX. I assumed there was a cot somewhere out in the hallway where he slept.

  772. I used to think the song by Bon Jovi was “Our Love is Like Fried Venison.” True story.

  774. I thought that the Underground Railroad was actually underground until I was a sophomore in college. I literally thought that Harriet Tubman forged the way tunneling through the ground with a shovel. You can imagine my embarrassment.

  776. I used to think when an animal was spayed, the operation had something to do with a shovel (spade). It sounded really horrible to me, and I didn’t even know the part about removing reproductive organs.

  777. When I was young I saw stores that were said they were open 24 hours and wondered how you knew when the 24 hours started.

  778. There is an award-winning rewrite/cover that actually *is* Knights in White Satin by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff; totally cracks me up. (I don’t know if links work here, so I will leave you to google and giggle.)

  780. OK, I’m 56 and I still thought it was Knights in White Satin… I had to fuckin google it (ok, I really used Ask, because I like it better). For the few who still thought it was Knights, it’s Nights… kind of sound the same lol.

  781. I’ve been reading these comments for days because there’s so many and I had to stop periodically to stop crying from laughing so I’m a little late to the party:
    My best friend is shall we say “vocabularily challenged” (and spell check tells me I made that word up) and during a conversation one day I used the phrase Coup d’etat, several more minutes of conversation went by when finally I noticed the bewildered look on her face and she asked what a vegetable platter (crudites) has to do with anything.

  782. I convinced my younger cousin that the tag she ripped off her pillow that said, “Tag may only be removed by consumer, under penalty of law,” meant that she had to eat it or she’d go to jail. I confessed after she spent a few minutes chewing on it. …and had started crying.

  783. Haha, SO many here that I used to believe. My mom is a big Moody Blues fan so even though I knew (from reading the liner notes) that it was Nights, not Knights in White Satin, I always pictured medieval knights on horseback.

    @Cam et al, you actually are not wrong about that song. It is supposed to be funny that way – the song is called “Mairzy Doats” and is written “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and little lambsey divey, a kiddledy divey too, wouldn’t you?” so that it looks like gibberish, but when you sing it you realize it’s “Mares eat oats…”

  784. My mom told me that it was illegal to use pen on math homework when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. I believed her (and that I would be arrested if I did it!) until about 8th grade…. I realized in the middle of class one day. I’m STILL that gullible….

  786. @Rebecca – I am SO glad someone else has thought that Bob Dylan song was about biblical stoning! For a while, I thought he was singing about going on a murder spree, and then I realized he was talking about it as if it was a good thing, so I asked my parents “wouldn’t that hurt?” They were really confused.

    On a road trip with my family when I was little, my older sister said something about “breaking wind” and I got excited because I thought she had some power like Jesus – she could stop wind or something. I was quite disappointed when the real meaning was explained.

    During the same road trip, we drove from Virginia to Colorado because my brother wanted to visit colleges – and we went to Duke as part of the trip. It wasn’t until I was in late high school that I saw a bumper sticker that read “Duke – THE university of North Carolina” and mentioned to my mom that it didn’t make sense. I learned that Duke wasn’t “out west somewhere” like I always thought it was.

    Also, my mom and aunt were in a horrible car accident before I was born, and were both burned really badly. They recovered well, but had burn scars. I thought burn scars were part of being a mother – that somehow when you had a kid, you got scars. A friend asked me how my mom got the scars, and my answer was “She has them because she’s a mom.” My friend replied that no, that wasn’t the reason – her mom didn’t have scars. We fought, and she took me to her house to see her mom to prove it to me. My mind was blown.

  787. One of my friends thought the phrase “it just dawned on me” was spelled “don donned me” until a month ago….she’s 29.

  788. I used to think “Don’t drink and drive” meant don’t drink ANYTHING, and I’d get really upset when my mom would drink pop in the car.

    I was also really sure that Chicago was pronounced Chicargo, and all the adults were just messing with me by saying it wrong.

  789. I laughed for hours reading these wonderful comments…and of course the great blog that started it all. Never have I had a better start to a morning. Thanks for the laughs!

  790. I used to think that “Cosmopolitan” was a pornographic magazine. The woman on the cover was always in a sultry pose, and most of the articles seemed to be about sex.

  792. I among my own kind. At least two of those were true for me. And all of them had me nodding “yeah, I can see that.”

    I think my favorite in the Jesus middle name is Harold one. Maybe I’ll teach that to my kids. It’s important scar them in fun ways, too.

    I was in high school when I realized that my aunt’s names was Antonetta, not Anetta. I’d always wondered why her siblings called her “aunt.”

  793. Well. I’ve now learned that Ming the Merciless wasn’t real, there isn’t a song about knights wearing white satin (I thought they were taking time off to be all romantic and stuff; hard to be romantic when you can’t even bend your arms all the way, amirite?), and that the French Foreign Legion is apparently NOT for French people.
    I’m 35 years old. Hey, you always learn something new!

  794. I thought lingerie was pronounced ling-ger- rie because my Mom used to jokingly call that. You should have seen the shop assistants face when I asked for ling-ger-rie.

  795. when I was a little girl I thought my daddy was going to be president of the united states because of his important government job, so anything my daddy said was GOLD as far as I was concerned. I asked him when I was about 9 or so if there were Jews everywhere… and he said to me “everywhere but Kansas” I I believed him for so long I can’t even remember when I realized it was not true. The saddest part for me was when I told him this he does NOT remember telling me that. Oh the things our parents do to us….

  796. Related weird “why did I think those were the lyrics??” issues growing up:

    ~ Electric Light Orchestra: “Evil Woman” (obviously, I didn’t know it by title, just by hearing it on the radio”. I totally thought they were saying “Medieval Woman”
    ~ I too thought “Secret Agent Man” was “secret asian man”
    ~ Bee Gees – thought the lyric was “bald headed woman, bald headed woman to me” which really makes no sense… versus “more than a woman.” Duh.

  797. I thought all bank advertisement disclaimers “Member FDIC” were telling me to “remember” FDIC. I always wondered who the heck FDIC was and why do I have to remember him?

  798. I was 4 & hearing about the Green River Killer on the news.
    I thought women were SO STUPID because they kept going to the green river & getting killed.
    Me: “Daddy, I just don’t understand why women keep going back there if everyone gets killed there.”
    He also told me that he used to be in the Marines.
    Me: (eyes welling up with tears) “Did you DIE??”

  799. In High School I dated a guy who was 6th in our class of over 600 seniors, so a smart guy, which makes this story even worse. He took me to a French restaurant for dinner and brought up Marie Antoinette and her famous line “let them eat cake”. I’m not sure if I looked confused or what, but after a few minutes he asked me if I knew who he was talking about. Of course I knew who he was talking about! I responded, “She was a Mouseketeer” (Annette Funicello). Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last.

  800. My husband was told by his mother (when he was little) that cows in the field were sitting or laying down because they were getting a dry spot before it rained. He was in his 20’s when he found out that wasn’t true by casually mentioning to a friend on a sunny cloudless day that it was going to rain…….and why he ( or should I say the cows) knew. Well you know……. I thought that the cows were pretty smart in that regard. Lol

  801. Until I was in the 8th grade, I thought your belly button held your butt on…and that’s why it was called button.

  802. OMG Amy I thought it was “remember FDIC” too! This is the first time I’ve heard anyone else confess that.

  803. When I was a kid I thought a carpet store was a place to buy a pet you kept in your car. I really wanted one.

  804. When I was young and would see To Be Announced in the TV Guide I thought it was the name of a news/politics show because that was what was on anytime I turned there.

  805. I still call the backs of my knees “kneepits.” I also have “boobpits,” and in the summer they sweat like hell.

  806. Up until some point in my twenties (possibly even later), every time I read the word “misled,” my brain pronounced it as “mizzled” (rhymes with grizzled). It had a distinct meaning in my mind, almost synonymous with misled but with shades of hoodwinked or swindled. It just dawned on me one day, and man did I feel dumb. Not to mention that I also thought there were 2 different deserts, one pronounced “Mohavee” and one pronounced “Mojave.”

  807. I read these to my mother and she told me some that I’d forgotten, and a couple that I didn’t even know.

    1. When she was little, she thought that people who had parents of different races had bodies that were literally half black and half white. She was excited to meet someone like that, and was sorely disappointed to learn that it doesn’t work like that at all.

    2. Well into the 80s (when her children were nearly grown), she thought that the muppet frog’s name was “Kermithy” because (to her ear) he always said “Hi ho, Kermithy Frog here!”

    3. When I was little and my older brother was in high school (he’s 10 years older than me), I heard him talking about the various classes (freshman, sophomore, etc) and concluded that “senior citizens” meant people who were about to graduate from high school.

    4. When my brothers were little and the tv station would put up a placard that said “Please stand by”, they thought they literally had to stand next to the tv so it would come back on.

    5. When my niece was little, she thought that “mistaken” was an informal way of speaking like “walkin'” or “eatin'” so when she disagreed with someone she always said “I’m sorry but I think you’re mistaking.”

    6. The funniest one, which I didn’t know until like 10 minutes ago: My mother once had to explain to my extremely-intelligent, well-read, double-doctorate father that “siblings” didn’t mean “parents”. He was middle-aged when they had that conversation. (I suppose it might be explained by the fact that he was an only child, but still. That’s hilarious to me.)

  808. When my son was about five, he ran into our bedroom in tears and said he’d had a bad dream. When I asked him to tell me about it, he said, “It was MOMMIES! Mommies were chasing me! They were trying to kill me! There was a bunch of them! They wanted to kill me!” Of course I was thinking, what the hell kind of parenting mistakes have I made with this kid that he’s having nightmares about killer mommies?? Then he said, “Their bandages were all coming off and you could see they were dead inside…”

    Ah. Not mommies. MUMMIES.

    Also, he told me last month (he’s now ten), “I would like to be a vegan. Vegans are stronger than other people, right?” “Um, I guess maybe healthier,” I said. “And they are really smart,” he said. “Well, I don’t know if they’re smarter than anyone else, honey,” I said. “Oh yes they are,” he said. “I want to be a vegan, and fly in a spaceship and do that thing where you pinch the guy’s neck and he falls down.”

    Ah. Not vegans. VULCANS.

  810. I always thought that a convection oven was called a “confection” oven…because you know you bake confections in them…

  811. ‘Fessing up that as an early reader, I knew a lot of words on the page before I ever heard them in conversation. As a result, I mis-read “pubic hair” as “public hair” and was mortified that people would consider hair-down-there as “public”.

    These days my pubic hair only becomes public hair when I wait too long to trim the lady-garden.

  813. I thought the Moody Blues song Knights in White Satinn was correct..they had to commit to the ethics code and pray and all that before knighting so it was part of a ceremony see. Annd it Totally made sense. Until today I learned from this blog that its Night in White Satin. Which makes no sense at all. Maybe vaguely…but not really. So I will still think of it as Knights. As I have for oh the last. 30 or 35 years. See I’m 51.

  814. It never made sense to me when my mother would tell us kids to put on a sweater because it was getting “chilly” because to me, chile was hot.

  815. OMG! I thought it was “Knights” in White satin, until, like, right now….. Damn, I’ve been doing it wrong for 0 years!

  816. OK, I have to add that prior to a trip to Yellowstone, I commented that I was excited to see the ‘geezers’. You know, like Old Faithful. Nearly 25 years later my family still harasses me about it. I was 8, and had only seen it written down!

  817. When I was a child, I thought people smoked cigarettes to keep warm and never understood why people would smoke in the summer.

  818. This one is quite embarrassing, but I must share. When I was little I asked my father who was the president when he was my age. He responded, “Dwight David Eisenhower”. I guess I didn’t understand why he would have 2 first names because I asked “You mean there was a black one too?”

  819. When I was little, I used to run to the window when I heard a car backfire because I thought the back of it would literally catch on fire with flames coming out of the trunk. I figured I was too slow because I never actually saw it.

  821. Growing up, I also thought that smooth operator was about a telephone operator. I am glad I am not alone…

  822. I admit, I am 30 and I am just now learning from this article that it is not “Knights in White Satin” hahaha. I feel ashamed.

  823. Re: The Youth in Asia/euthanasia. I was in 10th grade in the early 90s and never heard of the term until my social studies teacher raised the question “What is ethically wrong with euthanasia (pertaining to human life)?” I raised my hand & innocently asked (as an Asian-American, myself) “What’s wrong with the youth in Asia?!” She then had to quickly explain what euthanasia was to me. I only knew of putting animals/pets to sleep!

  824. I’m laughing hysterically at “Knights in White Satin.” As I read the reply, I thought, “Well, yeah, that’s what it’s called, why is that on the list?” 1. . .2. . .3 . . . Oh, duh!!!

  825. These are hysterical! When I was a kid I thought that Epsom Salt was only for Jews because my non-Jewish friends didn’t know what it was and their parents never used it.

  826. We live near a hospital and outside near the road we drive on daily is an illustrated no smoking sign (a circle and line over a smoking cigarette). My daughter recently told us that for years she thought it was a “no magicians sign (a circle and line over a magic wand) because the doctors want to heal the people themselves”.

  827. I thought that crossings like ” Railroad X-ing” or “Deer X-ing” (think yellow diamond shape road sign) were pronounced ‘ deer zing’ or ‘railroad zing’. Like Xerox is phonetically “Zerox”. Had to say it out loud in front of a friend at 20 yrs of age before I was corrected.

  828. Oh shit. Forgot to mention that your site makes me laugh hard enough to accidentally get an ab workout. Which is good because accidental ab workouts are the only kind I can support philosophically (read: realistically). New title for your business card: “Incidental Personal Trainer”

  829. When I was little and they played that song on the radio with the lyrics, “Put on your high heel sneakers cuz we’re going out tonight,” I thought some people actually had tennis shoes with high heels on them.

  830. When my daughter was 3 she thought the song went “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the men!” We couldn’t convincer her otherwise, and we decided we liked it too much anyway.

  831. I thought “Advance Auto Parts” was the local parts store, because I grew up in a town called Advance (pronounced ADD-vance). Even though the local one was actually in the next town over, and not in Advance at all.

  832. i have so many that i actually just wrote an entire blog post.

    highlights:
    I was in my thirties before I realized that the short bus had an ELEVATOR, not a cage, in the back. My parents told me that it was a cage for really bad kids. My cousins were laughing hysterically at me when I confessed, and my brother looked confused and said, “Wait, it’s not a cage?”

    It was very recently that I discovered that “Duck Dynasty” was not, in fact, about ducks. I thought it was like that meercat show where they followed around a family of ducks.

  833. All the Friends references reminded me that Joey Tribianni is responsible for my husband no longer using the word “moot.” His reasoning for it being “moo,” “like a cow’s opinion” stuck in his head so much that he can never remember whether it really is moot or moo.

    I was in my twenties before I figured out the Monkees lyric was “not a trace of doubt in my mind” and not “it’s not a race, camped out in my mind.”

    My mother was in her forties when I explained the song “Que Sera, Sera” did not go “Okay, said I, said I.”

    Recently, at 33, I figured out Roxanne didn’t have to put on the red light (signalling she was open for business) because her boyfriend wanted her to stop being a prostitute and not metaphorically (stop, this relationship can’t get any more serious because I’m not gonna stop hooking for you).

    A few months ago, a coworker explained HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning). Blew my mind. I always thought it was just a special kind of air conditioning system.

    Around 11 or twelve, around the time my sister started driving, I began paying attention to signs. “NO PASSING” tripped me up. I confused it with NO CROSSING and thought people weren’t allowed to cross the street there, which seemed such a waste of signs because I always saw them outside of town where there weren’t any pedestrians and who would cross there anyway? Those signs were always on windy roads where you couldn’t see if a car was coming…

  834. Also, until first grade I thought Europe was an island nation off the Pacific coast of South America.

    My grandmother stubbornly refused to wear her seatbelt. When Mom got a new car, she convinced Grandma that it had a sensor that would not allow it to start unless everyone’s seatbelt was buckled. A year later my mom was distracted and did not wait for Grandma to buckle up before starting the car. Grandma was so upset that Mom’s car was “broken” already that Mom had to fess up.

  835. I second the Yvette thing. Only my great aunt was called simply “Y.” And I guess I thought it was spelled “Why”? Also we had a dog named Yves (pronounced Why-ves, as he and my parents were from Mississippi) and it never occurred to me to figure out how to spell his name. That’s some self-absorbed eight year old kid shizz, right there.

    Also, I don’t know if this counts, but there’s a place that advertises Hitches and Boxes on their sign (with the words stacked on top of each other) and I can’t read it without thinking they’re saying, “Hoxes, Bitches.” I don’t know what Hoxes are, though. Kind of like Horcruxes?

    Hope your surgery goes as smoothly as possible. I’ve had a couple of laproscopic surgeries and they’re minimally invasive, to be sure. Watch out for the left shoulder ache you can get from dissipating carbon dioxide as part of your recovery. Turns out the gas (what’s left of it in your body) goes up and to the left as you’re sitting upright the few days after surgery. Mostly it’s just an ache and it’s not bad if they successfully suck out all the gas before they sew you up. Anyway, good luck. xoxo

  836. It isn’t Knights in White Satin? And Roy Orbison ISN’T blind!!! My God, what else do I not know at 58?

  837. I’m with Edi and Lisa. I was always terrified that my family was going to get pulled over for repeatedly driving past the “Do Not Pass” signs with absolutely no hesitation or consideration for the law.

    I was also confused by the saying “Don’t look a gifthorse in the mouth.” for a long time. What’s a gifthorse? I assume he brings gifts. Does he bring them in his mouth? Does he not like people touching his face? Should I Just wait patiently until he hacks up my presents? Will he bite me?

    I think I was twenty five before I figured out that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth because if someone is generous enough to give you a horse as a gift, it’s kind of a jerk move to check its teeth instead of just being grateful you got a horse. (I’m scared of horses, though, so I really hope no one ever surprises me with one. That would be emotionally scarring.)

    Anyway, I hope I have kids someday, so I can tell them all about gifthorses and how they’re where you get endsmeat.

  840. When I was younger I thought McCartney and Lennon (of the Beatles) were the same at McCarthy and Lenin (of Communism/House Unamerican Activities Committee). They were not.

  841. My first day of kindergarten I was absolutely shocked to find out that we had to get off the bus and go into a building. Because, duh, SCHOOL bus.

    I was 18 when I realized that Jesus and “Haysoos” are the same person.

    In my 20’s, I lived in a city called University City for more than 5 years before I realized that it was so named because all the streets were named after colleges.

  842. Seriously – until right this second, I though Roy Orbison was blind. I, too, am 35. Whoops.

  843. It blows my mind how, thanks to the internet, so many people think it’s “walla” or “WA-LAA” (or other various permutations of the letters “w”, “a” and “l”), and have no idea it’s French and it’s “Voila!” .

  844. So here are a couple of mine to add:
    1. When I was younger and my whole family was driving through the Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado, I wondered about the signs that said “In case of Flash Flood, Climb to safety.” I asked once why would I want to climb a mountain in the middle of a rainstorm!

    2. My daughter the other day asked my husband (her step-dad) about the color of his skin. He’s mexican and kind of dark skinned, and she asked him if he gets really hot because his skin is dark and absorbs the sunlight (according to her logical thinking). She thought that because her skin is white (fair skinned), and going by the fact that white objects don’t absorb as much sunlight like dark objects, that she doesn’t get as hot as a dark skinned person. She’s going to be 20 in October. 🙂 When he gave her that “what?” look, she said that her cousin (who’s 10) wondered the same thing about an African American person earlier in the day. Yes, I call my daughter “Smoggy” some days, and attribute her blondness to the fact I was pregnant with her in California, and must have breathed in all the smog. One thing is for sure–she provides us with loads of laughs! 🙂

  845. Let’s see. I thought underwater basket weaving involved scuba gear.

    Took me until college to decipher “Big Ole Jet Airliner”, best I could come up with was “Eggo Chair Eyeliner.” And that was even after hearing it live!

    My baby sister always wanted a “grill of cheese” for lunch.

    Another sister wanted to know who “Wee Wee” was, in “Jingle Bells” (We, we got upsought). As for me, I wasn’t really sure what a Roundyon Version was, in “Silent Night.”

  846. After college I was at a wedding with my college roommate and we went and ordered drinks at the bar. Suddenly she said, “omg, I’ve spent the last 4 years ordering “Roman Cokes”…instead of Rum and Coke.”

  847. I used to think that tampons were pads that had been smashed into a convenient size that was easily hideable in your hand. I was seriously disappointed when I tried to unroll one.

  848. When I was little I thought the Police song “Roxanne” was about a woman who operated traffic lights (“you don’t have to put on the red light”). And it was my favorite song! Now I just wonder what my parents thought of that 😛

    Also, until I was in high school, I had only ever read the word “khaki” and thought it was pronounced “cakey”.

  850. 1. I thought you had to have a license to “drive” a shopping cart. The first time my mom asked me to push it, I was very concerned and watched for police.

    2. “No Drinking and Driving”–I thought you couldn’t drink anything at all while you drove. My dad used to drink diet soda ALL THE TIME. It made me cry because I was convinced he was going to jail.

  851. There’s a song called Rise by PIL. The refrain is “anger is an energy”. Thanks to my sister, all I ever heard was “hang a raisin in a tree”. I haven’t heard that song in years but will still catch myself sometimes just chanting “hang a raisin in a tree” for no apparent reason…

    And yeah, Roy Orbison. I’m embarrassed. 😀

  853. I’m a little late to the game, but when I was little I figured out that if a bitch was a female dog, then clearly a bastard was a male dog. I then thaught several of my classmates this.

  854. There are two reservoirs near where I used to live. Since I was little, I was certain that one was for hot water and the other for cold. I finally realized by my early teens that the water heater in the basement was for making the water hot.
    Also, parking meters, I never saw anyone collect the change. I thought that all the poles that parking meters are on came together under the street and all the coins rolled through a maze of tubes underground and went to city hall where the money was collected.

  855. Until I was 10 I believed that all city buses that ran on natural gas were powered by farts. I thought that the seats were covered in a special fabric and that there was tubing under each seat to carry the farts to a fart holding tank to power the engine. It certainly explained the way the buses smelled.

  856. I always thought that the Queen song ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was in fact an advertisement for our local radio station and that instead of singing “crazy little thing called love” I thought they were singing “Radio Avon” all drawn out and dramatic. I sang it that way until I was about 12!

    I also thought the Roy Orbison song ‘Only The Lonely’ was about me as a friend of my parents always sang it to me as “Toni Baloney” as that was everyone’s nickname for me. He was a musician so he would know right? I still hear it that way and I am 36.

    Oh and my parents also convinced me that there was a giant green Budgie (budgarigar) that lived down our toilet but despite the fact that we had two as pets I still pictured this creature in our loo as a huge green spindly spider and would watch like a hawk for any legs creeping around the s-bend whenever I needed to go. We moved out of that house when I was eleven and til the day we left I could never relax on the toilet. My parents were horrid!

  857. Late to the party (too busy sneaking to the computer and reading all the previous when I *should* be doing other things, lol), but I’ve got a doozy…

    When I was 6 (back in the day), everyone always referred to Wednesday as “hump day”, because once you were over the hump, you were more than halfway to the weekend. Because I knew that Alice the Camel had 4 humps (remember that song?!) and I couldn’t understand what that had to do with Wednesday, I asked my mother what “hump” meant. Imagine my surprise when she blushed bright red and started with “well, when a man and a woman love each other…”! I was so confused for about the next 10 years… are people only allowed to have sex on Wednesdays? And why are they bragging about it? And why is the radio reminding people that today is the day for sex and wishing them a “happy hump day”? Imagine my surprise when I found out you could have sex on other days of the week too!!

  858. Oh, and as I was reading some of your previous blog entries, my 6 year old came up to the computer and said “why haven’t I seen you in that picture before mummy? Is that a new shirt?” Apparently we look alike, which makes me feel ridiculously happy!!

  859. I thought that the soul was an organ of the body. and that during an x-ray, the doctor could find out if you were a good person or not based on how black it was. damn catholic guilt…

  861. So I’m a member of the, “You mean it’s not ‘Knights in White Satin’?” club but when I went in to tell my boss about this:
    Me: “So I was reading the Bloggess, and it was the post about things you got wrong…”
    Her: “Oh yeah, that one” (she reads you too 🙂 )
    Me: “And there was this one that said, ‘I always thought the Moody Blues song was, ‘Knights in White Satin’…”
    And as I’m saying this, I can SEE the same look crossing her face that crossed mine when I read that sentence in this post (“You mean…it’s not?”) and we were both hysterical.

    I used to think that “Will be towed at owner’s expense” meant that if your car was towed, you could pay whatever you felt was appropriate for the towing fee, not that you would have to pay whatever usurious amount the towing company charged.

  862. I thought the TV show “Wild Kingdom” was actually called “Mutual of Omaha” until I was in college. I was telling someone how we were not allowed to watch much TV as kids, but almost always were allowed to watched Mutual of Omaha every Sunday. Why I never even questioned such a name is a wonder.

  863. Okay, I’m jumping way to the end here to help negate anyone’s embarrassment about baby chickens and eggs. Because, you’all, you *do* shine a light on eggs to see which ones have baby chickens in them and which ones don’t. It’s called candling. You do it a few days after the egg is laid, to see if it is fertile or not. Also, the eggs you get from the store are, sort of, a special kind of egg that does not turn into a baby chick – they are unfertilized eggs. They will never turn into baby chickens, not ever. Even if you don’t eat them, or if you put them back in the nest, or whatever, they are still not going to turn into chickens.

    I point this out because I keep chickens, and am always shocked by how many adults fail to grasp the basic nature of the “birds” part of the “birds and bees” story. Many, many people tell me that they would like to have fresh eggs but don’t want a rooster, and refuse to believe that hens lay eggs whether there is a rooster around or not. I have also had adults tell me that chicken eggs are fertilized after they are laid; that eggs are ‘aborted chickens’; and that white eggs come from white chickens and brown eggs from brown chickens.

  865. I remember being very young and being told by my mom that we’re all human beings, and that god is just a being… but, of course, I heard “human bean” and “bean”. Most kids start questioning religion much later for very different reasons.

  866. My husband and I both thought high altitude baking instructions were for airplanes and we always wished to go on the airplane that baked. When he told me that I knew I had to marry him.

  867. The black and white and read all over joke… Totally thought it was “red” even though I knew the answer was newspaper well into my twenties. Also, until my mid-20’s I honestly thought galoshes were hat, scarves, gloves and mittens. Not the brightest. 😉

  868. I thought of one I had forgotten till just now. Until a few years ago, I thought most of the USA, especially the south, didn’t have any natural places left. Even though I’ve been to a bunch of states, I thought states like Vermont were the only ones with any green space or forests left, so if you wanted to go camping or own a cottage, you couldn’t really. I’m smart like that. 😀

  869. Way late to this party, but growing up, I thought there was a band named “Hauling Oats.” Farmers or cereal makers, right? Oh, Hall and Oates. Huh…

  870. Until an embarrassingly late age, I thought the word “specifically” was “pacifically,” and I said it all the time.

    I guess I was a very peaceful child (and teen. And young adult. Kill me now.)

  871. Oh, and I definitely thought Standing Room Only was the name of a musical or opera, and To Be Announced was the name of a TV show.

  872. I was in my thirties and was telling a friend about a dog we had when I was a kid, and how he didn’t work out but my parents sent him to live on a farm…. wait a minute…. WE lived on a farm…

    Yes, I was 30-something years old before I figured out poor Jacks went to the pound.

  873. When I was younger my dog would lay out side in the sun, and I’d yell to my parents “Look! Billie is sunbailing!!!”
    I learned from my best friend only a few years ago (I’m 17) that the term is “Sun Bathing”. I blame my parents COMPLETELY.

    Plus, the reindeer thing is totally me. Still not completely sure.

  874. I thought the ‘Do Not Pass’ signs on the highway meant you couldn’t drive past that sign. I couldn’t figure out why my dad was just blowing by them all the time.

    There was discussion about building a halfway home for sexual offenders in our town. Many signs saying ‘No Predators in Franklin’ went up in yards. My daughter thought that was people that were FOR the halfway home – that they were saying, “hey, we don’t have any predators here, send ’em over”.

  875. Dittoing the “Don’t drink and drive” applying to all liquids, underwater basket weaving requiring scuba gear, and the Pussy Cow song

    (related to the last, apparently there was one time that my sister was convinced that since you could get a used car for “nineteen ninety five”, that all she had to do was save up her allowance for a couple months until she had $20)

    When I was young, I heard people say that if you get your ears pierced but then didn’t wear earrings for a while, your earlobes would “grow together”. I imagined the lobes extending and stretching until they fused under your chin in one big ear-loop. (Probably not helped by the “Do your ears hang low” song.)

    I was convinced for a long time that “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” referred to the Trojan horse, and it meant that you had to check its belly also.

    I knew about Antigone long before I knew how that was pronounced, so of course it was pronounced anti, gone. Similar with epitome, and then after I got that figured out I was convinced that tome (as in a large book) was pronounced “tomay”. And then erudite…

    Similarly, it, er, wasn’t until reading this thread augh what that I realized “crudites”, as in vegetable platter, was not pronounced to rhyme with termites.

  876. *I refused to eat Duck Sauce at the Chinese Restaurant because I was a vegetarian
    *My dad once mentioned to me that I had to have my tires rotated. I said, “Um, don’t they rotate when you drive?”

  877. I thought that bachelors were bartenders, because Sam Malone on Cheers was a bartender, but they always referred to him as a bachelor…so whenever people talked about getting a bachelor’s degree, I thought they were going to bartending school. This was at least until I was in high school.
    I also didn’t know that Esquire actually meant anything until my second year of law school! I blame Ted S. Preston, Esquire for that (esquire means an attorney admitted to the bar).

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

    “I thought as a kid that braces were just paper clips bent around your teeth…so I tried it. They’re not.” ~ @Melflynn0
    This actually happened to me in first grade. I was running around the basketball court with my arms inside my coat and tripped over a basketball that rolled in my way and caught myself with my face. My two front permanent teeth got knocked loose and in order to “set” them, my dentist cemented an unrolled paperclip to my teeth like faux braces for a few months. Good as new :).

  879. I just saw this (timeliness? what’s that?) and it reminded me of British comedian Miranda Hart’s autobiography which is called ‘Is it Just Me?’ http://mirandahart.com/?p=604 — I thought you might like it, because I think you’re both very funny, and funny should be shared but perhaps more compellingly she did an ‘is it just me’ thing on Twitter (she’s @mermhart) and got similar batshit responses. So it’s not just you. And it’s not just me, either.

    All the best,

    Betts

  880. I felt superior to all the racist weather reporters who warned us of “Apache Fog”, as if it were so dangerous that it had to be described as Native American… then it dawned on me that they were saying “patchy fog” and that was dangerous and I was dumb.

  881. I grew up in a tiny town in Iowa and, having never heard of hummus, for about half my life I thought Genie’s line in Aladdin, “Genie, wake up and smell the hummus” was actually “Genie, wake up and smell the homeless.”

  882. Until just a few years ago, I thought that when I heard a Crate and Barrel ad on the radio, it was a store named after the founder, Creighton Barrow. Boy, was I surprised when I actually encountered a store and saw the name on the sign.

  883. I shall have to join the throng who only found out about “Knights in White Satin” from this post.

  884. I know this post is pretty old but I have an extremely vivid memory I have to share of being six years old and thinking “no passing zone” signs meant you couldn’t pass whatever the signs were in front of?

    Also one time I asked my parents what a “dee-pot” (depot) was.

  885. When I was in grade school, I thought bedraggled was pronounced bed-raggled and meant how you looked when you woke up in the morning.

  886. I thought the road sign “Slow Trucks” was an instruction to truckers, not a warning to automobile drivers.

  888. I thought the line, “tuppence a bag” in the song “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins was actually Tuppence Abag, which I thought was the name of the old beggar woman. The scene where she’s sitting on the bench saying “tuppence a bag” creeped me the hell out. I thought she just saying her name, and then “feed the birds” over and over again.

    I believed this into my 20’s.

  889. I used to think that Janet Jackson was singing:
    Ice Capades
    We’ll have a good time
    Ice Capades
    Leave your worries behind

  890. I was always afraid to eat pancakes because I combined “pancakes” & “patty cake” so that in my mind they were “PANTYcakes”

  893. The Knights, rather Nights in White Satin has just blown my mind. I can’t even wrap my mind around how I feel about it. There are no Knights in the song ? There always were in my mind and now I’m sad because I’ll miss them.

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