the law

I used to believe opening a fruitsnack package from the wrong end will send you to jail.

Lunarmoon

As a kid I didn't realize the severity of getting arrested. I though it was like time-out but for grown-ups; so I figured pretty much everyone went to jail at least once in their lives. I was shocked when I asked my parents if they had ever been to jail and they said no.

c

I used to believe that there was something called the grammar police and if you say a lot of things wrong(like saying axe instead of ask), the grammar police will come to your house and give you a ticket for bad grammar. I got scared and tried not to make a mistake while speaking!

Anon

I used to believe that, if you did ANYTHING which was not allowed (for instance, if you touched something at a shop which had a "do not touch" sign), the police come to get you, and you'd spend a long time in jail just because of that.

Anon

I'm from Spain, and here in my country we have a "Civil Guard" (which is a kind of police that takes part in militar-related stuff and mostly helps out people at the countryside), and there was also a Civil War, which took place a bit before WWII. As a kid, I used to mess up both terms (since they sound very similar in Spanish, too), and I used to think that the Civil War was just a time when the Civil Guard was so busy all the time.

Anon

When I was seven, I had the notion that if you cried too much, the social worker would come to your home and take you away from your family. They would put you in military school, I thought that all bad kids were sent there to do militial training.

Michael