As a small child I was absolutely convinced that people in the olden days lived their day to day lives in black and white, and that they walked slightly faster than we did today (assuming a frame rate thing?).
I’m gonna put this one down to my understanding of how TV worked as a ten year old. Everything before colour TV was black and white… therefore everything was black and white. Makes perfect sense.
What about you?
I have no middle name but my younger brother does. When friends at school asked why, I spoke to my Dad and he told me it was because they didn’t have much money when starting out as a family but had saved enough up by the time my brother was born. I dutifully reported this back to mates who must have assumed I’d lost the plot but didn’t bother telling me.
I asked my Dad about it many moons later and he said that he and my Mum had decided to dodge convention and not give us family names (despite intense pressure from my Dad’s mother to name me after my Dad and his father and his father). It all went swimmingly until my brother was born and then, immediately after his birth Mum declared he was getting her father’s name as middle name and Dad didn’t think it was a hill worth dying on. He did say I was welcome to change my name to include a middle one but I didn’t think it was worth the hassle. In hindsight I should have agreed and said I’d have his name as my middle name. Ah well.
Saving up for a middle name has to be the best way to convey how much they struggled financially when starting out I have ever seen. Absolute gold humor as well.
It’s not too late. There’s no real procedure to changing your name, you just have to start using it.
Yes, the whole “deed poll” thing is needed for getting a passport changed/updated, but that’s just a letter that declares you’re no longer using the old name, for which free legalese style templates are available online. A couple of signatures from people you know that can vouch for the change and job’s a good’un.
I had a small toy dinosaur, which was god. I don’t think the toy itself was god, but more likely it was a model/toy of god, who was a full-sized dinosaur.
Retrospectively, my best guess on the reasoning for this thought process was that one adult had told us that dinosaurs were really, really old, before there were any people, then a different adult had told us that god was really old and he created the people - and therefore I came to the conclusion that if god was really old and created people, he must have been there before people, and if everything before people was dinosaurs, god must be a dinosaur.
I picked my most “noble looking” dinosaur and decided “this one is god”.
I believed it to be an absolute fact that all cats are female and all dogs are male. I had no idea how reproduction worked at this point, so it just made sense to me.
Then one day, a classmate was talking about her cat and how “HE” had done something funny. I had to clarify, “Your cat is a boy?!?” and my entire understanding of animals was shattered that day.
I grew up in Mexico. We had a kids songs tape, kinda like the chipmunks or something. In one song they talked about sugar being expensive, but using the analogy “sugar is high up in the clouds, and I have no airplane.” I used to think clouds were made of sugar.
I didn’t believe in dinosaurs. I thought evolution meant “things got bigger,” so the idea of these roaming giants was completely unbelievable.