When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.

  • 🇨🇦 tunetardis
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    626 months ago

    I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.

  • One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan

  • @wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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    496 months ago

    That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.

    English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression “search all nooks and crannies”, but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.

    Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!

  • IninewCrow
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    6 months ago

    I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

    So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

    What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

    I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.

      • @AquaTofana@lemmy.world
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        86 months ago

        This is always my answer to this question. I thought radio stations must have been the busiest places with all those bands coming and going!

  • BananaPeal
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    406 months ago

    That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.

    Bonus: My kid doesn’t believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.

    • @erusuoyera@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Clarke’s third law. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Quicksand thing is fucking stupid though.

  • @HandwovenConsensus@lemm.ee
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    366 months ago

    My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.

    So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

    I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

  • @ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    296 months ago

    I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

  • @erusuoyera@sh.itjust.works
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    276 months ago

    That every time people had sex, the woman became pregnant. I thought that every sex scene in a film meant the film had to be stopped for 9 months until the actress could give birth.

  • z3rOR0ne
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    266 months ago

    That a blowjob involved the act of physically blowing air on the penis. When I found out it actually involved sucking, I was like, “Oooh…yeah that sounds much more pleasurable.”

    • @suodrazah@lemmy.world
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      116 months ago

      I was so confused, I couldn’t imagine why people would enjoy that more than a “suckjob” or “headjob”. Turns out people just say whatever they want and it can mean anything.

    • @schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      66 months ago

      In my language the expression is “jemandem einen blasen” (to blow one to someone) and I remember reading a long time ago about a story where a teenage girl (?) actually injured her boyfriend when she blew into the penis. Seems not to be a very good idea.

      • WIZARD POPE💫
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        6 months ago

        In our language it’s to ‘pull’ someone ot better “jemandem einen ziehen” as we are civilised and have grammatical cases such as dative. So I hope nobody got it confused and ripped of someone’s penis.

  • @Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    256 months ago

    That adults had it figured out.

    That average people actually care about anything but themselves.

    That there is justice in the world.

  • 3 dogs in a trenchcoat
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    246 months ago

    Not me but really funny - when my mom was little she thought white people weren’t real. She thought they were made up for tv

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    6 months ago

    When I was little, I thought that “cash back” meant that the clerk literally just handed you money out of the register if you wanted it.

    I assumed that most people were honest and only took the cash if they needed it. I didn’t know that it came out of your checking account lol.

  • db0
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    226 months ago

    That male orgasm was painful. I got this idea from seeing their o-face somewhere and assuming it indicated pain.