Like kids everywhere in the English-speaking world, I knew the rhyme "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" from early childhood. Except to me the word 'twinkle' meant not only the light stars gave off, but also the sound!
I was living in the Caribbean, where there were treefrogs singing every night. Now, our particular variety of treefrog made a very pretty, high-pitched sound, just the sort of sound you'd think the word 'twinkling' described. They were also just small, dull grey splotches about the size of a child's fingernail, very very hard to spot at night; and they never came out and sang until after dark, when the stars had come out too. And since I'd never seen a treefrog...of course that was the noise of the stars. Why would there be a nursery rhyme about it otherwise?
Not only did I never question this as a child, I didn't find out the error of my ways until I was 16, when we moved to London. One day I moaned to my mother that you couldn't hear the stars twinkle in the city.... It took her ages to work out what I was talking about!
A childhood belief about outer space
others believed things like this
- I used to believe that the sound of crickets at night was actually coming from the twinkle of the stars.— Lily Fagioli
- I used to believe that stars chirped because they would twinkle simultaneously to crickets chirping— alex
- I used to believe that the sound of crickets at night was the noise the stars made when they sparkled. — Jane
- I used to think that the crickets chirp at night was the stars twinkling.— James the Great
- At night I would hear the chirping crickets and thinking it was comeing from the stars in the sky!— delana
- when i was was little i thought that pop stars were stars in space would pop— roman honytoast