When I was about 5, I managed to misinterpret the concept behind "cents-off" coupons. If a coupon said "save 15 cents", I was certain that it meant you had to pay ALL your money except for 15 cents that you were allowed to SAVE, when paying for that product. And i really could not undertand why anyone though that was a good thing...
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2,178 beliefs in this area
When I was little my dad used to take my younger sister and I to the Rose Garden in Marquette Park in Chicago. We'd roll up our pants and jump into the fountains, collecting quarters that my dad pointed out which mysteriously seemed to keep appearing in whatever direction we were walking. We believed the people who ran the city of Chicago put them there for our benefit, because they knew our family needed the money. I remember once feeling incredibly charitable by offering my dad a couple of the quarters I'd found. It wasn't for years until I realized he'd been the one dropping them for us.
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I used to believe that price tags in stores were what the store paid to get them from the manufacturer; they paid their employees from the sales tax
When my dad and I went to the new supermarket (in Canada) I asked him why one door had "IN" and the other door was marked "TUO". He said this was french for "in". He was a highschool teacher and spoke a little french and I believed him.
i used to think that catweasle( crap tv show lived in a water tower near where i grew up........don't ask me why!
When my mother and sisters would leave the house on errands without me, I would always ask, "Where you goin?" and my mother would always reply, "Crazy."
I used to believe Crazy was an interesting store on the eastern border of my hometown that I was never allowed to go to.
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I know someone who's parents told them that when the ice-cream van had the music playing it had run out of ice-cream!
When I was little I believed that you had a limited number of words and a limited number of steps that you could take in one day. The limit was 100 of each (because 100 seemed like a very big number). If you went over the limit then you wouldn't be able to speak or walk until the next day when your limit was renewed. I remember being in a department store and trying to keep my sentences as short as possible and to walk only when I had to!
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As a child, I was terrified of tailors dummies lit up in shop windows after dark....
I was also scared of men with beards - and no moustaches. Weird?
Sometimes as a child in Ireland if I did a silly thing my parents would tell me that I needed to get some "cop on".
To "cop on" is Irish slang for "to understand" or "to get with the program." It is also used as a noun meaning "common sense."
They began to enrich this admonishment by telling me I needed to "go over to Mrs Conaty the Chemist [pharmacist] and ask her for half-a-pound of cop-on."
Sometimes they would even put a few pennies in my fist and send me on my way, only to call me back as I was going out the door.
I really came to believe that this magical cop-on stuff could be bought in the Chemist shop and that it would make me more intelligent, less clumsy, less forgetful, etc.
As time went on I did notice my parents trying to supress smirks as they told me this. And I finally realized that they were just sharing a joke at my expense.
when i was about 3, i can remember an ice cream van coming down our road ever so often... it used to play greensleeves, and it scared me silly! i used to hide in the house and cry. it still sends shivers down my back.
When I was 5 I believed that large birds would grab you with their talons and fly off like in the cartoons, so whenever I was outside and saw one I would grab onto something. I was somehow convinced that the birds were actually bigger than me.
I lived in a town where there were ditches at the side of every road. On the way to and from school, sometimes kids would fall into these ditches and get soaked. Cars would have accidents and crash into the ditches too. I used to believe that, before you became an adult, you would at least ONCE fall into the ditch. Some sort of rite of passage or something. And I truly dreaded when it would be 'my turn' to fall into the ditch.
I never did fall into the ditch. But in my dreams, 25 years later, I still have nightmares about death and ditches.
I beleived that if you saw an ambulance or a fire truck going really fast with the siren on, you could save the person who was in trouble by touching something red. I'm 24 now and I can't stop doing it (just in case)
When I was very small, my brother and sister (both older) used to tell me that I was ordered out of a "Montgomery Ward" department store catalog. If I misbehaved or pissed off Mom too much, she would simply return me for a better model.
when I was a kid, I used to hear the trash collecters come by in the middle of the night. The screech of the metal and crash of the recepticles on the concrete would always wake me up. I was convinced that dinosaurs must be pillaging through the neighborhood, and I was the only one awake to hear them.
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I used to believe that writing a check simply showed the store that yes, you did have that amount of money in the bank and that was sufficient to buy something.
Now this is really embarrassing but when my husband Dave was a boy of about 4 he watched a baptism where the baby was sprinkled with holy water and 'blessed'. Afer the ceremony, he sneakily dipped his hand into the holy water and licked it and from then on, he believed his wee was holy. BUT for years after when he went swimming, he would wee in the pool in the belief that he was blessing all the swimmers.
When I was little and went to department stores, I always would jump off the escalators at the end because I thought they'd suck my toes under when it got to the end. To this day I still get nervous about escalators because of that childhood fear!
Once when I was about 4 years old we drove past a Burger King restaurant, and I asked my dad what the "Home of the Whopper" sign meant. He told me it meant that they make the Whopper sandwiches at home. So until I got old enough to understand what "Home of the..." meant, I thought that the workers at Burger King made the Whoppers at home and brought them to work. My dad was such an ass.