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

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    4 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.

  • @Tuxman@sh.itjust.works
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    104 months ago

    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!! 😅

    • @Camille@lemmy.ml
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      34 months ago

      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?

  • @Zachariah@lemmy.world
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    264 months ago

    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.

  • Theo
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    84 months ago

    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?

    • @tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

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

  • Fox [he/him]
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    294 months ago

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

  • @fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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    374 months ago

    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.

  • @HandwovenConsensus@lemm.ee
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    494 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.

    • @Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      84 months ago

      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

    • billwashere
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      134 months ago

      As a 53 year old man I’m going to START believing this. It’s awesome.

  • @jqubed@lemmy.world
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    314 months ago

    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.

  • @pixelscript@lemm.ee
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    84 months ago

    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!”

  • @waggz@programming.dev
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    184 months ago

    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.