Stupid things you thought as a kid - we were all dumbasses when we were kids

[Owen Grady]

I didn't know it wasn't okay to use the world midget until I was an adult.

When I was about twelve or thirteen I was hanging out in church with a friend one Sunday morning between services. We were talking with each other and leaning over the second floor railing that overlooked the front entrance, watching people enter and exit the building. At one point I noticed somebody enter who I recognized.

"Oh hey, look."I said, in a completely inoffensive manner. "It's that one girl from school. The midget."

My friend gave me a deadpan look and I wondered what I had just said that had irked him. "Come on man, it's not nice to say midget. She's a little person."

He did not explain to me why the term "midget" was supposed to be offensive or just how in the hell this new term "little person" was not even more offensive and condescending to this particular people group. To this day, nobody I know has.

There is literally nothing wrong with the word midget. It's a term that has been in use to describe people with dwarfism for just over two hundred years now and as a matter of fact, now that I look it up, the word has almost always, since its inception, been used as a term of endearment and respect by the rest of society. It is only recently that certain politically correct members of the midget community have, I suspect, personally decided that they find it offensive because they want their own slur to claim victimhood and oppression with.

TL;DR You can use the word midget, fam.

 

[TiggerNits]

I used to think nurses were what they called female doctors.

Same here, I got corrected by a very amused female dentist when I was 8

 

[Mrs Paul]

-Sex meant kissing while you were naked.
-Until I was about 4, my parents had me convinced that "shut up" was a swear.
-When I was 3 my mother and I were watching "Guiding Light" and I asked her what happened to one of the characters, and she said the actress was fired. I thought that meant they literally shoved her into a fire.



When my cousin was 4 and saw my aunt feeding his brother, he thought that one breast produced regular milk and the other chocolate.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

I thought if you flushed the toilet when you were sitting on it, it would suck out your intestines.

I thought if you went without food for a really long time, you'd turn black. I blame that one all the "There's children starving in Africa," shit my mom would pull when I wouldn't eat my dinner. Thanks mom, you made me a racist and a pretty fucking weird one at that.

 

[Sadcake]

My grandpa once told me that noah's son turned black after seeing him naked. So thats where i thought black people came from, and it made sense there were so many black people in africa because everyone is always naked.

 

[A Hot Potato]

My grandpa once told me that noah's son turned black after seeing him naked. So thats where i thought black people came from, and it made sense there were so many black people in africa because everyone is always naked.

THAT ISN'T WHY?

 

[Thelostcup]

I thought the noises from the pipes underneath the bath were souls crying out from hell and it scared the fuck out of 4 year old me.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Those bumps they place on the side of the highway for drivers who veer off too close to the side? My dad explained to me that they were for blind people to know where they’re going when they drive.

My dad called them "idiot strips" and called me stupid for accidently hitting them when I was first learning to drive.

 

[Zaragoza]

I was too scared to jump in a open body of water alone when I was a kid because I thought the lochness monster would get me.

 

[Figuratively Stalin]

I thought men peed like dogs do, you know, raising one of their legs.

I also thought you could go to jail for farting too much. In my language the word pedo means fart, so I thought a pedophile was someone who farted too much. My family still pokes fun at me for this.

 

[Lurkette]

I was scared to sit on the toilet too long because there was a toilet monster that looked remarkably like Randall from Monsters Inc before that was a thing that would slither through the pipes to pull you into the sewers and drown you in poop water.

I imagined he'd often poke his head out of the toilet seconds after I left the room, only to sneer in frustration and slither back down.

No, I don't know where any of this came from.

Oh, I also thought Slimer was going to eat me alive after watching Ghostbusters. Funny thing is I was mildly freaked about him DURING the movie, but fine after that until bedtime came and I started wondering if parts of the movie could actually happen. Vividly remember staring at my open bedroom door in terror, waiting for a hotel trolley to roll by or something.

 

[Count groudon]

back when I was like 9 years old and going through my chubby phase my health class teacher told me that when you hit your growth spurt, you'd lose some of your baby fat and slim down a little. In my sad little mind, I took this information to mean that once I started growing I'd completely loose all my body fat and I'd have a lithe athletic body that all the girls would want. Sure enough a few years later when I was about to turn twelve I hit my growth spurt, i actually did slim down a a bit but I was still pretty stocky. I then came to the horrific realization that no, my blubber wasn't going to go away on its own, I'd actually have to work it off.

 

[BroccoliBrain]

I thought cows were all female and/or sexless because udders looked like dicks, and that male cattle were a separate species.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

I thought voting would be fun. I didn't give a shit about driving and all that other adult crap, voting was what I was stoked about. You get to pick the PRESIDENT! That's awesome! Little me was around during the 2000 election and strongly supported George W. Bush because I thought George was a good name.
What's funny is that my parents cared so little about our local town and state elections that they would let me fill out their voter forms for them. I carefully read the voter packet as well as 8 year old me could and had fun picking the people I wanted running our state.
So next time you wonder how the hell some people made it into office, consider the fact that small children might be voting them in.

 

[Ilovecum]

I used to believe during the winter corpses walked at night...
I believed that the clown from it existed.
I believed that cats really had magical powers.
That vampires are real
was prone to fanciful imaginations...

When I was younger I never understood the concept of death. I just thought dead people kept living...at night.

 

[Mrs Paul]

I remember confusing the Resurrection with everyone's death -- I thought everyone "rose from the dead" eventually, and when I got older, I'd get to meet all my relatives. Granted I was like three. It wasn't until I was watching the episode of Sesame Street where Mr. Hooper dies that I finally really understood what death actually meant. (And my dad's a funeral director -- you'd think I'd have understood better!)

Whenever we'd be at the grocery store and I'd ask for a coloring book, or a candy bar and my mother would say, "Not today I don't have enough money", my reply was usually, "Well, then go to the bank." (I'm guessing I'm not the only kid who thought of the bank as just one big source of money. )

 

[TheFinalBoss]

Well off the top of my head, the younger me thought..

'Suck' was a swear word
Chocolate milk came from chocolate cows
I was part cat because I had sharp canines and could climb trees well
My stuffed toys were alive, but they would only move around at night, so I made them all face the walls in fear before I went to sleep every day
God was real

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

In Polish, speedbumps are nicknamed "sleeping policemen". When I was like 5 I thought they literally have cops who are employed to get under them and take a nap as cars drive over them as their day job.
Also my grandparents would scare me that if I eat too much McDonald's I'll get Mad Cow Disease.

I used to think teachers lived at the schools they worked at.

That was true in the countryside up to the 19th century.

 

[Titty Figurine]

I thought rust on cars meant they were dying and got really upset about this in public on a number of occasions.

 

[Count groudon]

Once when I was about 8 I stayed up past my bed time to watch "adult" tv. While I was channel surfing I ended up stopping on a rape scene from one of those crime shows where a guy grabbed a girl's head and forced her to go down on him. My young little mind had trouble wrapping itself around this since I didn't know what sex actually was, so for the next few years I thought that rape was when a man stuck his weiner in a girl's mouth and peed in her.

I was a very fucked up little kid.