What's the funniest belief you had when you were a child ?

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

That is such a funny mental image.

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

Russ and Oli Gark must have a hard time fitting in

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!

I now have the hilarious image in my head of a toddler giving their granny a pat down (image of one in case the term isn't familiar to everyone), thanks! 😂
- Unnecessary, I gave my grandma an ocular pat down the moment she walked in.
Love it.

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.

I remember thinking radio stations had bands constantly coming in and playing songs and leaving
- 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!

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.

Clarke's third law. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Quicksand thing is fucking stupid though.
Every kid from the 80s & 90s was taught* to believe that, so I don't blame you.
&nsbp;
*By movies & books & games and shit, not by teachers. Well, maybe some teachers...

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.

Christmas tree as extraterrestrial cargo cult ritual. Holy shit that's brilliant.
As a 53 year old man I’m going to START believing this. It’s awesome.
When I was a kid my dad would often pull up the NORAD Santa tracker on Christmas Eve, and that combined with seeing the film War Games at way too young of an age had me believing in Santa for much longer than I should have because "why else would the federal government devote so much money to tracking him?" I think it was specifically seeing the exact same animation of him being welcomed into a country by a pair of fighter jets for the third year in a row that finally killed that line of reasoning (because obviously the NORAD Santa tracker site is shot with television cameras or something)
Kid logic is wild
Santa Claus cargo cult

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.

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."

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.
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.
- 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.
I still don't get why it's called that.

That adults had it figured out.

That average people actually care about anything but themselves.

That there is justice in the world.

When adults said things like "In this day and age, nobody says please and thankyou any more", I misinterpreted "this day and age" as "The Stayan Age", which was our current age, which obviously followed on from Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.

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.

That the Empire State Building is a restaurant named Empire Steak Building.

Me ordering the ribeye.
Wait… wait… [chewing] he’s got a point
- Surely there’s a chain of restaurants or butcher shops in New York called Empire Steak, right?

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.

That kissing is how you become pregnant. No, really.

It's actually surprising how many people have believed this.
I remember believing this as well but specifically you had to kiss in a bed.

When I was a young lad I thought milk was cow pee and was super confused by the world.

There’s a highway that formed a loop around the city where I grew up and we used it pretty regularly, but mostly only the western half (since we lived on the west side of town). My parents explained the concept to me that it had “belt” in its name because it circled around the city like a belt goes around a person. This idea intrigued me and I eventually asked my parents if someday we could drive all the way around it. My dad seemed kind of surprised but said we could sometime. I got excited and started planning for things we would need, like a tent and food, since it would obviously take a long time.

The highway’s only about 25 miles/40 kilometers long.

- I remember my Dad teaching me about highway numbers back when I was a kid, so I know that the 4 means it's part of a loop, being odd means it runs mostly N/S, and being a low number means it's on the west side of the US.
  The Dewey Decimal System is still a mystery to me, though...

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

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

This is why everytime we wanna do it we really mean it because it's a huge sacrifice /s /jk

I used to think that there was a country called Cyclopedia, that was full of all kinds of fascinating things. I had a book all about it called "In Cyclopedia".

Ok this is adorable.

I scraped my knee and thought that putting skin-coloured paint on it would heal it

are you a Warhammer's Orc?
I don't know quite why this is so funny but I laughed a lot. That's so cute.

That a bon fire was a "bomb" fire and therefore, very loud and very dangerous.

I used to call it a "bomb fire" too lol.
For anyone wondering
bonfire (n.)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bonfire#etymonline_v_15587
late 14c., bonfir, banefire, "a fire in which bones are burned;" see bone (n.) + fire (n.). The original specific sense became obsolete and was forgotten by 18c. The general sense of "large open-air fire from any material for public amusement or celebration" is by mid-16c. and that of "large fire for any purpose" from 17c. also from late 14c.

That cats and dogs were the same animal, the cats were the girls and the dogs were the boys

I was gonna add this one until I found this. So you weren’t the only one.
- ...there are at least three of us!..
I had a friend who thought sparrows were baby pigeons
- That's funny

That the world used to be black and white. I once asked how the people making The Wizard of Oz knew when the world was going to change, so they could film the movie correctly.

I thought propeller planes worked by spinning so fast that they temporarily moved the gravity out of the way so the plane could fly.

Someone needs to make this into an ms paint drawing.
Lemmy needs awards

I ran up to my mom once, completely serious and said, "Mom! I know why all fat people are short. They use up all their skin!"

I felt like a genius until she laughed so hard she fell on the floor and peed a little.

My daughter recently asked me "ladybugs are good? Because they eat orphans?" And after a moment of stifled laughter and thought I said "aphids. They eat aphids and yes that makes them good because aphids will eat your plants"

There was a park near my house where often cops would sit to catch speeders. Driving past one day, I didn't see a cop and I told my parents I was surprised by this. My folks told me that they were there, just undercover. I asked where, and they pointed to a woman walking a dog and they told me it was an undercover speed dog. For years I'd point out suspected speed dogs when we'd drive places. I am not a smart man.

that my grandparents remembered middle ages or even the dinosaurs

My grandmother was born in 1940 and told me when I was little about when her family first was going to get a TV she thought it would be like a radio with a little screen on top that you'd wander over to and peek into for a visual when you needed one for the radio drama you were listening to. As I got older I second guessed my memory of her telling me that (because she's old but she can't be that old!) and then she told me the story as an adult again and it all makes so much more sense now

I used to think those coins in the fountain at the mall were just money people wanted to get rid of. One day, little me tried getting away with a skirt full of coins and got in trouble.

I mean, to be fair, a coin on the ground is fair game, and they don't make these "unspoken rules" clear enough, so I couldn't imagine a coin in a fountain not being free to just pick up.

Tigers are female lions.

they aren't‽
- interrobang spotted
The "dogs are boys, cats are girls" one is a very common answer to this question on reddit.

Wedding rings were there to show who was married and who was available. Once you wanted to get married, you just found a friendly person who didn't have a ring, and then you asked if they'd marry you. I mean, that IS what happens I suppose, but my 8 year old brain played it out like someone asking a nice stranger for the time.

This is hilarious. "Hello random ringless person, want to spend the rest of our lives together?".

My grandmother told me England was not part of the European continent. I got an answer wrong on a test because of that. She refused admit she was wrong even after I showed her in my text book.

England is not a part of the Eurasian continent nor a part of Continental Europe. It’s on the Isle of Great Britain, which is an island, not a continent. She refused to admit she was wrong because she was right and your textbook was wrong.
- Well, at least you share a tectonic plate, so that's nice.
- It is right there on the Eurasia map at the link you shared, and on the list of Eurasian territories, so OP was correct.
  The thing is that "continental Europe" is not the same as the continent of Europe, which does include the islands. Mainland Europe is a less ambiguous name.
- Common reference maps all include The British Isles in with Europe, as well as Iceland.
  The wikipedia page on Europe also includes them as part of the continent.

I was always phlegmy and coughing as a kid so I became convinced I had diphtheria and would die soon, and thought it would be terrible to let my parents know this sad fact. Turns out it was because 1980s parenting meant smoking anywhere and everywhere at all times and cigarette smoke makes me ill.

Wow. When I started doing theatre in 1983 smoking was becoming evil. Restaurants were required to have nonsmoking sections. The drama instructor quit and was a militant anti-smoker.
- Yes there was starting to be some pushback and health education, but most people still smoked at home, and literally everywhere in the home. Your child's bedroom was fair game. It's a terrible thing to be in the car in the winter with the windows rolled up and your parent chain smoking away until your eyes swell shut. I know an older nurse who used to work at the pediatric hospital, and she would follow the pediatrician on rounds with an ashtray as he rounded on these children, trying desperately to keep the ashes off the children.

That we have cables instead of veins inside.

That before I was born cars had the exhaust pipe on the front (in fact I used to draw cars that way).

At some point I also believed that we were born as monkeys and we evolved as we grew up.

E: replied to wrong person, oops! 😂

The 'H' signs to indicate a hospital was indicating there was a helicopter pad.

Most humans have good ethics and beliefs. The more I grow, the more I'm disappointed in our society.

Premises:

My family watches the news for [weather] and [ye local murder].
My friend says: his dad says: "the news lies."
Parents are trustworthy, and cops can't lie to the news.

Conclusion:

They lie about the WEATHER!?

They frequently do! Like when they report on catastrophic flooding by finding a stopped up drain and standing in it ankle deep and shouting about how awful it is as cars drive by behind them on the slightly wet roads.

That bonzai was Japanese for "fire", and therefore you should never shout "Bonzai!" in a theater.

Yeah, I'm not sure what I was smoking either.

In the 80s when i was a child there were billboards with PSAs saying don't drink and drive. I'd promptly scold my parents if i caught them taking a sip from their soft drink after hitting the McDonald's drive through.

"Drink" is such a weird word in how it has both a general and specific meaning, but no other word for the general meaning is commonly used.
"Drink your milk! No drinking until you're 21!"
- you're milk
  No; you are!

There's a park in Brasilia that has a "little rocket". I refused to enter it when I was something like 4yo, because "What if it launches while I'm inside?"

We had one of those in Southern California and we would go up in it to smoke weed in college. Good times.
- Well, yall did take off...

I thought that you would get your grandparents by just going into a train station and picking some random (preferably older person) to be your grandparent.

I was convinced that my parents had done that for me, and that's why I had grandparents.

We live inside the earth. Dogs say barf.

These are both subjectively true.

Not sure what age I was, maybe 4. I thought the music on the radio was live, that the musicians went to the radio station to sing and it was broadcast from there.

Yo thats so real. I thought music videos were people literally singing live while the beat just played in the background or something. I always felt something was off or that it was too hard to be legit, but couldn't figure out what was really up😂

The semaphore homunculus lived in the stop lights at intersections.

In my Superman onesie (w/ cape), I could fly, but was never brave enough to launch from a high enough step on the stairs. I knew I was flying, but...

That there were little gnomes inside the doors of the cars and that they were in charge of raising and lowering the windows, especially in the automatic cars.

that i was a boy

I thought every song on the radio was being performed live somewhere

I used to think radio stations were run from inside of the broadcasting tower, like how the CN Tower and Space Needle have decks near the top.

New York city was the size of the whole state. Like the entire thing looked like manhattan.

That God exists

- God is just Santa for adults. Think about how only the good children get gifts in the winter of their life.

The USA was the moral leader the world. But I watched CNN as a kid so...

Been French, thought that. The propaganda is/was huge on this one

I remember knowing that knives will cut you and make you bleed, and that when people were shot in movies they would bleed, therefore bullets must be shaped like little blades.

I thought adults were smarter than me

They are if you think the exact opposite. Everyone has their niche, no one is a jack of all knowledge

I thought those crosses or flowers on the side of the road were where they buried the person who died in an accident.

Pretty common belief among stupid 7-year-olds, I think; humans couldn't see colour up to the mid-60s.

I believed this. You are the first person I've ever heard whose had this same belief.

I thought that I'd die of cancer because that's my zodiac sign and nobody could convince me otherwise.

I'm gonna sound so stupid, but I thought checks just gave you free money. I thought my parents were wasting a check by writing such a small amount, and ask them something like why not write a bigger number?

Then they explained that you need money in the bank to work. I was too young to even be embarrassed, I was just like ok cool, didn't even realize how dumb I was.

In my defence, I was like 9 and I just arrived in the US and never heard of a "check" before.

I think u being a Lil too harsh on yourself, when I was a kid I thought bank receipts could be turned in to get money😂

Americans/Canadians made out while they undressed before sex, like in the movies. English people calmly undressed in front of each other and then began having sex in a dispassionate and business-like fashion. I think some other kid heard an adult say it as a joke then passed it on as a learned truth.

That’s basically the Wanda/Otto vs. Wendy/Archie scene in A Fish Called Wanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_MsW0IURzA
Monty Python sketch

Actors are dying... for real.

in that same vein, i believed that if actors kissed they must have been married or in a relationship in real life
I remember thinking they probably just found actors who wanted to die anyway

I believed a kid who told me that every 4th of July, former US presidents who were still alive - which I somehow imagined was a large group - stood in a circle around the statue of liberty and held hands singing, "He's got the whole world in his hands."

I believed I was an adopted alien from outer space before I realised my face is like my father's but prettier.

Thats a sentence I never heard and believe noone has written it ever on the internet
- That's my way to prove I'm not a bot (:

Can I'll cheat a little and use my teen years.
When let's plays where the new hot thing, I thought a blind let's play literally meant, eyes closed

I had to go to a private Christian school in third grade - not because we were religious, we were not, but because gang violence was getting serious in my town and the private school was seen as the safe option my mom decided on for a year even though we couldn't afford it.

Again, not religious, but Christian school meant we had to go to "Chapel" every day - Sing bible songs and get the typical religious indoctrination. Anywho... In the chapel, there was a giant rectangular speaker box suspended up at the center of the ceiling. Not sure how but with all the talk of Jesus dying for your sins and everything, I became convinced that that speaker box was his coffin. I thought he was there, suspended above us, every day at Chapel in our little school

I thought that the Michelin tire company was headquartered in Michigan, USA and not France. In my defense, most of the US auto industry is based in Michigan, and they sound similar.

Also: I will never accept the "fact" that the Michelin Man is named "Bibendum"

I thought the "Gulf War" was in fact the "GOLF War" and was happening at a golf course near our home.. like … halfway to see uncle Peter!! 😅

Either I'm stupid or I'm right and relieved, but in French, I think, they're the same words which led me to not understand why the "golf war" until quite late (early 20yo I think). I didn't think it was about golfing or anything but... what golf are we talking about lmao?

That all adults are smokers.

Two that come to mind:

People would say that's an "old timey" car or something and I thought that was a brand name.

I thought the people who had really tall spiky mohawks had hair that just grew like that.

That tv programming would pause when I turned the TV off.

Not me, but I have heard that kids used to think 'olden times' were black & white, because all old films were before the introduction of colour. Like, it's only in the last 80? years that people see in colour...

It makes me giggle when modern movies use b&w to depict pre 21st century, or even 'flashbacks' are b&w

Honestly I have to remind myself of this myself. Yes, these are images of events in (say) 1938. No, things weren't actually black and white in 1938, people saw colors the same way, with the same sharpness, they do in 2024, it's just photographic technology that has improved since then.

Cthulhu is a Hindu god

that if we break tv's screen , tv charecters can get out of it and we can enter tv

This sounded like it led to an expensive life lesson.
- It didn't , thank god

That life would be better as an adult.

Freddy Krueger was two people. I thought it was like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. I thought it was Dr. Krueger and Freddy was the monster he created. When I saw the movie I was like where's his creator, the one that brought him to life?

I thought space rockets had to wait for. Ight to go into space. If they took off during the day whey would just go into the blue sky like planes do.

rice turned water into soil

I thought the glyph for "heated seat" in cars depicted a raised fist with the pinkie finger extended rather than a chair with heat waves eminating from it.

The Tea at the Treedome episode of SpongeBob SquarePants further convinced me I was seeing it correctly, and I since knew it as "the fancy button". In some regard, I wasn't entirely wrong.

"When in doubt, pinkie out!"

That all television, even live action, was just made by someone who could draw really fast.

…i thought little people lived in my parents’ radio and television who put on shows for us…
Very few cartoons are broadcast live, it's a terrible strain on the animator's wrists.
I actually had similar theories though in the end I concluded that a person definitely couldn't be doing it, but I did used to rack my brains how the machine did it so fast. I had to do a project on how TV worked and was invented when I was in the 6th grade and it didn't help at all, the whole electron gun thing didn't explain it to me at all because I was imagining the gun like, drawing objects like trees and buildings and people and none of the boring confusing stuff I read helped me understand how this gun knew what to draw and could do it so quickly.

That we would live in peace

that you're supposed to show a middle finger as if you were showing it to yourself

When my daughter was about 1.5 she would wave like that, waving so she could see her hand correctly.
Not long after that she'd dismiss people she didn't want to deal with with a little blown kiss and a wave. So at the doctor's office they had two nurses come in to give her some shots and she kept doing the little kiss and wave and they went "aww she's blowing kisses" and my wife said "no she's actually trying to dismiss you"

I thought babyback ribs were from ACTUAL Babies

This reminds me of the first time I went to see my wife's family long before we got married. There was a big gathering for Christmas and she had a kid sister looking totally distraught at the dinner table where a feast was laid out. "I can't eat this! That poor 3-legged lamb!!!" And she ran off.

I used to greet clothing store mannequins and thought that people who didn't were very rude.

My dad has this long running bit, that if I needed his help on something, he needed to go to the shop to get a "round tuit". I remember asking what store he had to go to, and how much it cost, and being annoyed at how he hadn't gotten a round tuit yet.

He must have thought I was really committed to the bit.

my stepdad had a round tuit. you can buy them!

I used to think a car direction indicator was a GPS guiding system, and not manually operated.

That we had to pay our employer to get a job.

I thought 'tomorrow' was a day of the week. So when my mom would say we'd go somewhere 'tomorrow' I'd ask her every day if it was tomorrow yet, and she'd say no, and I'd keep waiting.

I hadn't had "the talk" and assembled my own understanding about marriage = "the ability to touch each other's private parts."

I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house's upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and "tag" touch the groom's crotch and then pull her dress up, and... at that point I didn't really understand what she would "have" under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically "tag you're it" style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

I didn't have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn't associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

In kindergarden, when one kid was about to hit another, the other kid would say "if you hit me, you have to pay the health insurance!". None of us had any idea what that could mean, and I have no idea where that idea came from, but it worked, because to us, that sounded bad.

Some of my class mates thought that wrestling was real, and a few of them thought there was a place in the US where it was legally possible to kill a man during a wrestling match. They were quite offended when I told them how ridiculous that notion sounded to me.

I believed that for very small creatures (like ants) time was faster.

I think that is true in a way. Since information has a shorter route to get to their brain than larger creatures, they may react slightly faster

For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.

It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn't had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?

I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years