11mo ago

So like, what absolutely ridiculous thing did you take to be fact when you were a kid?

As a small child I was absolutely convinced that people in the olden days lived their day to day lives in black and white, and that they walked slightly faster than we did today (assuming a frame rate thing?).

I'm gonna put this one down to my understanding of how TV worked as a ten year old. Everything before colour TV was black and white... therefore everything was black and white. Makes perfect sense.

What about you?

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I have no middle name but my younger brother does. When friends at school asked why, I spoke to my Dad and he told me it was because they didn't have much money when starting out as a family but had saved enough up by the time my brother was born. I dutifully reported this back to mates who must have assumed I'd lost the plot but didn't bother telling me.
I asked my Dad about it many moons later and he said that he and my Mum had decided to dodge convention and not give us family names (despite intense pressure from my Dad's mother to name me after my Dad and his father and his father). It all went swimmingly until my brother was born and then, immediately after his birth Mum declared he was getting her father's name as middle name and Dad didn't think it was a hill worth dying on. He did say I was welcome to change my name to include a middle one but I didn't think it was worth the hassle. In hindsight I should have agreed and said I'd have his name as my middle name. Ah well.
- Saving up for a middle name has to be the best way to convey how much they struggled financially when starting out I have ever seen. Absolute gold humor as well.
  
  We call it humour because we can afford the extra "U"
  
  I assume I thought it was like a football shirt where they charged by the letter.
- Getting your official name changed to xxx "Middle Name" yyy as a joke...
  
  Or have two middle names: yyy xxx. So, when you say your full name, you get to say "so good they named me twice. It'd be immense hassle as every form you fill out would get queried and passport control would pull you over.
- It's not too late. There's no real procedure to changing your name, you just have to start using it.
  Yes, the whole "deed poll" thing is needed for getting a passport changed/updated, but that's just a letter that declares you're no longer using the old name, for which free legalese style templates are available online. A couple of signatures from people you know that can vouch for the change and job's a good'un.

I had a small toy dinosaur, which was god. I don't think the toy itself was god, but more likely it was a model/toy of god, who was a full-sized dinosaur.
Retrospectively, my best guess on the reasoning for this thought process was that one adult had told us that dinosaurs were really, really old, before there were any people, then a different adult had told us that god was really old and he created the people - and therefore I came to the conclusion that if god was really old and created people, he must have been there before people, and if everything before people was dinosaurs, god must be a dinosaur.
I picked my most "noble looking" dinosaur and decided "this one is god".
- Objectively awesome kid logic.

I believed it to be an absolute fact that all cats are female and all dogs are male. I had no idea how reproduction worked at this point, so it just made sense to me.
Then one day, a classmate was talking about her cat and how "HE" had done something funny. I had to clarify, "Your cat is a boy?!?" and my entire understanding of animals was shattered that day.
- I've heard a whole lot of people say they used to think that exact same thing when they were kids! At least you're not alone :)

I didn't believe in dinosaurs. I thought evolution meant "things got bigger," so the idea of these roaming giants was completely unbelievable.

I grew up in Mexico. We had a kids songs tape, kinda like the chipmunks or something. In one song they talked about sugar being expensive, but using the analogy “sugar is high up in the clouds, and I have no airplane.” I used to think clouds were made of sugar.

I used to believe that only women drank tea and only men drank coffee (owing the the fact that my Mum only drinks tea and my Dad only drinks coffee).
I was a bit weirded out when I first encountered a friend's mother drinking coffee.

I used to believe that the DJ on the radio sung all the songs as well.

As a small child I was absolutely convinced that people in the olden days lived their day to day lives in black and white, and that they walked slightly faster than we did today (assuming a frame rate thing?).
Oh shit... for me, it was "sepia tones" because I would see photos on the walls of my grandparents' houses and most of them were sepia toned.
"Actors on TV, weren't acting like somebody else when they were on a show. They were just themselves but reading lines from a script." Its weird that I remember understanding that the actors were not actually in a war zone or that a house on a TV show was just a set, but it took me a long time to figure out that an actor might behave like somebody else when playing a character. Doubly weird that I don't remember applying this consistently because I would never think that an actor playing a "bad guy" was actually a bad person but I absolutely would think that an actor playing a "good guy" would behave that way in their real life.

I thought it was dark at night because of very thick clouds, and stars were just gaps in the clouds. Probably because I saw a very cloudy sky on a summer night with light peaking through.

I thought the moon was made of cheese. I think after watching Wallace & Gromit's "A Grand Day Out" when I was 2 or 3.

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