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This is a question What nonsense did you believe in as a kid?

Ever thought that you could get flushed down the loo? That girls wee out their bottoms? Or that bumming means two men rubbing their bums together? Tell us about your childhood misconceptions. Thanks to Joefish for the suggestion.

(, Wed 18 Jan 2012, 15:21)
Pages: Latest, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, ... 1

This question is now closed.

one of my class...
...is utterly convinced that the Queen of the Iceni was called Boobicca.
(, Wed 25 Jan 2012, 0:02, 2 replies)
They are, you know. Really.
When I was a small boy (and I was a small boy - third smallest in my year in Fourth Year Juniors), I believed that the cast of CHiPs was really British, and were putting on the accents.

Imagine my surprise when I read in Look-In that they really were Septics. Go on. It doesn't take much.

So that's my first post. How was it for you?
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 22:28, 1 reply)
The Ghostbusters are real
It's true, because I've seen them in live action on the TV. Not the cartoon, but actual real people. I even considered pausing the video at the moment where you see their telephone number, I needed them to come over with their lazer guns and kill my step dad because he was a cunt.

Maybe that could be my new business. Ghost and step dad exterminating with the use of lazers!
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 21:49, 3 replies)
bloody mary
If you said it 3 times in the bathroom mirror she would appear and kill you. I was 25 and drunk before I got up the courage. Mumbled it though, so probably doesn't count.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 20:55, 4 replies)
I once got thrown out of art class, without realising why until later on in the day.
The teacher asked "What is name of the technique used for using your fingers to smudge pencil/paint? As demonstrated of this painting? [a picture of women, but I can't remember the name] by [artist name] ?"

My arm shot up. Mr Big Bollocks here knew the awnser, and the teacher was in her late 20s, so some brownie points never went a miss.

"I know miss ! It's fingering ! [Artist Name] has fingered [lady in the photo] in this painting".

The class errupted in laughter and the teacher threw me out for the lesson. I had no idea what I had done wrong, ok, so I got the wrong awnser, that's no reason to thow me out though. When the bell went for the lesson to end, the teacher called for me to come in, and could see that I was quite shocked, not knowing what I did wrong, she said to me "Do you really not know what you did wrong here?",
"I donno miss, it was just a guess, using your fingers to smudge the paint, fingering sounded like an arty thing".
She then went completely red and said "Ok Paul, I'm really sorry, go and ask [one of my more maturer friends], and he'll tell you what happened. I'm really sorry, I thought you were being rude".

When my mate Dan explained it to me, I was horrified at what I said. Oddly enough, people only took the piss out of me for a few days, it didn't really catch on as something to tease me about.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 19:34, 8 replies)
True story,
I used to believe the world was black'n'white before they invented colour telly, I truly believed colour was only invented in the 60s or soo.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 19:16, 5 replies)
I wasn't fooled but he was.
Let me take you back into the mists of time.
I was 13. There was this child in my class called Ben.
He must have been at least 3 stone lighter than the rest of the class and 18 inches shorter.
We were all nice to him, but he was a permanent cunt to all and sundry. He was cruel, abusive,
loved playing mind games and grassing. Several times when the teacher left the room, he would suddenly stand up, shout,
scream and make himself cry, and tell some bullshit story that would get whole groups in detention. He was a repulsive, puberty allergic, palefaced poisoned dwarf and wore thick rimmed glasses, but all the staff used to believe his lies from sympathy.
On the last day of school, we all got him back good and hard, but that is another story.
On penultimate day, during a science lesson, Ben excused himself to go to the loo. He sat at the opposite end of the science room to me.
The lesson involved burning some sugar cubes as a practical.
I had an Idea, and also went off to the bog. There, with 2 sugar cubes smuggled out the classroom, I quietly washed my hands until the cubes were the consistency of spunk, and cleansed the solution all over my palms. As Ben came out the lav, I beckoned him over and whispered in his right ear.
"Guess what mate? I have just had the most brilliant wank and I cummed loads of jizz all over my hands. So Ben, WOULD YOU LIKE SOME OF MY LOVE-JUICE?!" (I shouted the last part in a high pitched voice)
And with that I grabbed the Scrawny little fucker by the neck and rubbed my sticky wet hands all over his face and hair, and quickly shoved my middle finger right in his gob to the back of his throat. After the 10 second assault was over, Ben screamed like a banshee and sprinted panicking down the corridor whist crying and spitting the "semen" all over the floor. He later informed the headmistress who didn't even bother giving me a detention or calling mum as I was off to another school in 2 days time anyway. AFAIK Ben was never told what the substance was so I hope to this day he still thinks it was my bloke-custard.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 17:38, 8 replies)
I worked for a charity
Many moons ago which Gary Lineker and Phil Collins endorsed.

Honest.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 17:28, 2 replies)
There was this joke
Must have been in junior school when I heard this joke:

Q: How do you get down from an elephant?

A: You don't, you get down from a duck.

I laughed, as you do, thinking it was one of those non-sequitor jokes, like: what's the difference between a fridge? One side's green and the othe side's also red.

It was many years later that I finally twigged, when I found out how an eiderdown got its name.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 16:53, 22 replies)
Space...
When I was a kid, I was told that by the year 2000, there would be a colony on the moon. I'd be able to stay in hotels in space for my holidays. Sadly I'm British so even as a kid I knew I could never be an astronaut (is it me or does cosmonaut sound much cooler?) due to our complete lack of anything even close to a space program. Does anyone here even remember Black Arrow?
Still it seemed we'd be out in the wide solar system by the time I was 30. This week, NASA published their space exploration roadmap for the next 25 years. www.nasa.gov/pdf/591067main_GER_2011_small_single.pdf

All I can say is there is a startling lack of space hotels and nothing further than Mars for actual human beings. As a child I used to dream of floating among the stars seeing our planet spinning below me. Of distant worlds with strange life and unfamiliar skies. Looks like I might get to see some priveledged septic plant his flag on Mars in HD or possibly 3D if I'm lucky.

Where's my hyperdrive?
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 14:32, 1 reply)
that is was normal for dads to perform regular prostate examinations on their sons
using their penis
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 13:03, 9 replies)
I'm ashamed to say that this goes way past 'as a kid' and well into the realms of 'as a middleaged man who should know better'.
Peppercorns, yeah. They're black aren't they? No other colours of pepper corn would be necessary and therefore do not exist.

It is this logic, and I use the word incorrectly, that lead me to believe that 'Pink peppercorn' was a slang term for the clitoris.....

Until I was about 32.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 12:48, 3 replies)
The Long Elephant
As wee nippers my little brother and I used to call the Runcorn - Widnes Bridge, the "Long Elelphant".

No idea why.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 12:41, Reply)
I believed that whether or not I enjoyed a film as a child
Could be used as a practical benchmark by which to judge later prequels to the film.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 11:56, 29 replies)
For a long time, I believed...
... that everything disappeared as soon as it was out of my eyeline / earshot. I basically considered myself the centre of the universe and the rest of you to be mere figments of my imagination.

I'm still not wholey convinved I wasn't right...
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 11:38, 12 replies)
I must have been asking awkward questions at a young age
because my parents decided to buy me one of those 'how the body works' illustrated books, one Christmas, when I was far too young for it to be appropriate - perhaps about 4 or 5.

There was lots of interesting stuff in there, about digestion and white blood cells and lungs and the like, but what is really burned in my memory are the pages about sex.

"When a man and a woman love each other" it began, "they sometimes give each other a very special type of cuddle." There was a drawing of a naked man planking on top of a naked woman. Neither looked very happy.

"They use their special man bits and special lady bits to make each other feel good." (This is honestly word for word.) Underneath this was a picture of a big hairy bush, which I recognised, and a fully erect penis, which I did not recognise.

'What's this Dad?' I toddled over to him, book in hand, pointing excitedly. I knew it was something important. But at the last minute, my Dad's nerve must have failed him.
'That's a nose, son. That's a man's nose'.

For several years after, I found sex to be a very strange and confusing issue, which was confounded on the day I accidentally saw a Red Triangle film on Channel 4 with a gentleman performing cunnelingus. Suffice to say, my imagination was a very strange place when I was young.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 11:19, 19 replies)
"Get down on your knees and blow"
Said by the Jack the Lad of the class to the girl everyone fancied. He was genuinely baffled as to why everyone was laughing at him for a full minute afterwards.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 10:59, Reply)
C30, C60, C90 - No.
You kids might think you invented illegal downloads, but way back in the 1970s we had our own version. Every Thursday evening, the yoof of Britain would be poised in front of the TV as Top Of The Pops aired, with their trusty cassette recorders armed and ready to catch all their favourite pop songs. OK, so you tended to miss the start of the song, and your mum could be heard calling you in for tea in the background, but it was FREE!

I was one of those kids with my microphone shoved up against the TV speaker. Then one day I had a brainwave. This was going to change the world! Fame and fortune were mine! A few minutes work with a stanley knife, some sellotape, a spare TV cable and the wire from a broken microphone, and I'd done it. I now had a cable with an aerial connector on one end, and a cassette jack on the other. I could now connect the aerial on the roof directly into the microphone socket on my cassette recorder, and Bingo! I'd invented the VCR.

Amazingly, it didn't work, though it was some years before I understood why...
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 10:29, 13 replies)
Swivel on it, punk…

The present Mrs Pooflake is a remarkable woman. Not just for the fact that she heroically puts up with a mongo-dongboil like me every day, but during her worktime she busies herself looking after ickle kiddiewinks at our local school.

She’s a teaching assistant – and only yesterday she had to deal with a cheeky young lad in her class who whilst playing outside, had bumped the tip of his finger. (Not quite in a ‘Paul Daniels’ way, you understand, but still…poor lamb.)

Anyhoo, after his ‘oops-a-daisy’, he bravely kept the tears in and did the right thing by immediately approaching my missus and requesting aid. This is all innocent enough, but the child in question had bumped his middle finger – the one I think we all know is quite commonly used as an insult when extended as a gesture amongst certain folk. Yet, with a gritted enthusiasm, this boy ran up to my missus, promptly ‘flipped her the bird’, and exclaimed: ‘Look at this!’

Thusly, with the saintly tenderness of a young Florence Nightingale, Mrs Pooflake exclaimed “Pffffft! Ha Haaa!”, before regaining her composure and checking that everything was ok. However, once the child was on the mend, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to share. “Sid, could you please tell the teacher about how brave you’ve been?” She asked, and then quietly chuckled to herself as the boy gleefully bounded up to the teacher, shoved his chubby digit into her mush and squawked ‘”How about this, Mrs B!”,

“Pfffffffft!” inevitably snorted Mrs B with a dazzling professionalism. She then, quick as a flash, conjured up a plan so dastardly that it could be deemed an omen of the apocalypse. She continued: “…erm…I mean,…there there Sid! Well, it seems Mrs Pooflake has done a good job seeing to your injury, but I still think it could do with a ’spinning’ to make it properly better…”


You can see where this is going…


The boy then quite reasonably asked what the shuddering knacksticks this ‘spinning’ lark was all about. “Oh, don’t worry” explained the teacher. “…it’s a harmless medical treatment, and I think Mr J next door is an expert at it - let’s go and ask!”

Mrs B then took the young lad and escorted him to the adjoining classroom, before tapping on the door and stepping away. Mr J, the gruff, no-nonsense enforcer then approached the door and opened it, whereby he was promptly given the finger by a small child who followed it up by declaring: “Can you spin on this, please?”

Mr J, was initially quite dumbfounded, and was about to tear the startled little dude a new arse before he noticed a chortling Mrs B, nearly doubled up with mirth in a heap by the coat rack.

Not content with this win, Mrs B then approached the pair, apologised for the mistake, and with a ‘wink’ to Mr J, explained that she had just remembered that it was in fact Mr D, the deputy head, who was the school appointed ‘spinner’.

She then busied herself for the few minutes or so, taking the poor bemused child round half a dozen stunned members of staff, just so they could be subjected to obscene finger gestures and insults whilst she desperately tried to avoid pissing herself laughing.

Yep, that what your tax pounds are spent on folks...enabling hardworking educational staff and the like to utilise the injury of a small child for their own puerile amusement…makes you feel proud.

And of course, in the end, young Sid never did get the ‘extra treatment’ that the increasingly unsympathetic teachers neglected to give him. I wonder if he asked his parents when he got home?
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 10:16, 50 replies)


A chap in school firmly believed that as lads get a ‘Hard On’, women get a ‘Wide On’…

Female Classmates strongly disagreed…
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 9:42, 10 replies)
The following are things I believed to be correct/good idea – but…


Thought it would be quicker to dry the dishes with the hairdryer – results in large electric shock.

Tried to make alcohol using baking yeast, sugar and about 500ml of water in plastic beaker, gave it a shake and put on a shelf at the back of the shed. Went back to check 2 weeks later. To this day, I have no idea what I had created. The beaker went in the bin.

Tried to sew a spilt bike tyre with ‘crab line’ from one of the many crab fishing lines we used to have.

Thought the clouds stayed still and that as the earth rotated, it made the clouds look like they were moving.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 9:41, 3 replies)
Chicken Sex
Throughout my childhood and into my early adult years I was blessed with the knowledge that hens lay eggs without the contact of man chickens. This is correct.
My false factual knowledge connected to this was bestowed upon me by one of my parents at a local childrens farm. As part of the tour of the farm, each child was allowed to pick an egg from a chickens nest to take home. As a child I was worried that I might pick an egg with a baby chicken inside and asked my parents how I would know which one to pick. After all I didn't want to kill a little fluffy chick.
I was reliably informed by my parents that if the hens sat on the eggs and kept them warm they would turn into baby chickens, so don't take an egg from a nest with a hen on it.
Naturally I believed this but I started to wonder what cocks (the man chickens) did all day. So I asked my parents. Once again they reliably informed me that they were kept in with the hens to keep them in order and stop them fighting.
This sort of information doesn't come up in conversation very often when you live in the city, but at the age of 22 I annouced to all my new University friends that Chickens don't have sex they lay eggs no matter what. If the hens sit on the eggs they turn into chicks and the cocks are there to keep them in order.
I now know that the eggs have to be fertilised first :)
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 3:53, 10 replies)
Gasholders
A friend of mine was passing a Gasholder (those large cylindrical container things with the roofs that go up and down) and idly commented "They must be out of elephants", which drew a bemused response from us.

Further questioning revealed that years ago her father had told her that they were used to hold excess elephants for when the circus was in town and when the roof was lowered it meant that they had run out of elephants.
(, Tue 24 Jan 2012, 2:21, 2 replies)
Theyre coming to get you
As a wee nipper my older brother told me that the eery wailing noises sometimes heard at night from the dark back alleys outside were the ghosts of children from olden times wandering around and looking to grab other children to make into ghosts
And that I should never ever look out of the window because if you saw one and looked into their glowing eyes they would get you.
I spent a lot of my early childhood years never daring to look out of my bedroom window at night.
When I was about 9 I was given a torch and having then almost forgotten about the ghosts, I was shining it down into the back yard when suddenly I heard the wailing and 2 glowing eyes were caught in the torchlight .
Cue me screaming, diving under my bedcovers, crying my eyes out and fighting the scary ghosts that were trying to prise me out to drag me away.
That turned out to be my parents.
Once I'd calmed down and related my sobbing tale, they told me that there were no ghosts, the noises were cats fighting and my brother had just made it up
But what about the glowing eyes I blubbed ?
They then explained about cats eyes being reflective.
It was still a couple of years before that frisson of fear stopped whenever i heard cats wail at night
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 23:58, Reply)
I believed from when I was a child right up to about two hours ago-I'm now thirty- six- that
BODMAS meant you had to do the operations in that order. I've only just discovered that division and multiplication have equal precedence as do addition and subtraction.

How the fuck have I gone through most of my life not knowing that, and what were my maths teachers playing at?
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 23:41, 9 replies)
Big coins first
As a very young boy I remember counting my pocket money in different orders, thinking if I counted the big coins first and leaving the little ones until last i'd have more money.

It's nonsense I made up and believed.
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 23:34, 2 replies)
my uncle/dads/brothers finger
Needed to be pulled for them to be able to break wind.
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 22:41, 3 replies)
I used to believe the "To Let" signs were in fact signposts for a loo
and that someone had gone around nicking all the i's off them.

I once cried when the TV man took the back off the telly because I thought the tiny Rod and Emu who lived in the back of it would die.

I didn't eat pork pies for years because I thought they were made out of dogs (Growlers - you probably might have to be a northerner to get that one).
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 22:10, 4 replies)
For years
And I'm still not unconvinced now, I was convinced that giraffes have radar in their horns.
(, Mon 23 Jan 2012, 22:10, 2 replies)

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