Slightly-Older Misconceptions
Sharing funny childhood misconceptions is a time-honored tradition online because many people made the same ones as kids (thinking that old photos are in black-and-white because the world really used to be in black-and-white, that “guerilla warfare” is humans fighting gorillas or at least fighting like gorillas fight, etc.) and often they are very funny.
We don’t talk as much about our misconceptions as tweens, teens and new adults, even though they can also be funny in the same sort of “Obviously wrong but understandable based on your experiences up to that point” way. Here are some of mine:
When I was 11, I visited the National Air and Space Museum for the first time and saw an emergency survival kit that was carried on the Apollo missions that included water-purification tablets and fishhooks. I did not grasp that this was supposed to be used in the event of an emergency landing in an unexpected place on Earth, so I thought My goodness, did they really know so little about the moon when they sent people there for the first time that they thought there might be oceans and fish there?
I only learned that AIDS was an STD in 7th grade health class. I was used to hearing about it in the news as a disease affecting mothers and children in Africa (Bono’s Product Red charity was a big deal at the time), similar to tropical diseases like malaria and dengue, so I assumed it was probably a similar horrible mosquito-borne illness. (In retrospect, I realize that this was very much a mid-2000s generational thing.)
The first time I saw a posts on Tumblr about raising money to buy "binders" for transgender teenagers, I had never seen the word in that context before, so I assumed they meant school binders, and I thought Well, transgender people do have it pretty rough in school getting bullied and such, getting them school supplies seems like a nice gesture! But why are they always talking about just buying them binders and not pencils and backpacks and everything else?
I thought that Sam Neill was American until I was in college because I had only seen him in movies where he used an American accent (principally Jurassic Park 1 and 3, of course.) I was very surprised to watch an interview he did for the 20th anniversary of Jurassic Park where he talked with his natural accent! I remember telling my friends how surprised I was to learn he was actually an Irish guy raised in New Zealand and all of them wondering how I didn’t know that already.
When I was in Greek School as a kid, I took home a printout about the Greek Revolution of the 1820s that mentioned the Battle of Navarino, and a babysitter saw it and said “Oh, I’ve heard of that island, there’s a movie, The Guns of Navarone.” So until I was an adult, I very sensibly assumed that The Guns of Navarone was a historical movie set during the Greek Revolution and was surprised to learn it was instead a fictional WWII story (that is set on a fictional island and not in Navarino Bay near Pylos.)
