drohne said:
"pussy" as the female genitals never occured to me. i guess i was a sheltered kid.
in a similar vein, as a child i only knew the word "breast" as a high-toned literary cliché, as in "he felt a stirring in his breast." i couldn't understand why schoolmates found the word amusing, or why they thought men didn't have breasts. they'd titter at mentions of "breastplate" or male breast cancer, and then they'd laugh harder at me when i objected. it was some time before i made the connection between "breast" and "boob."
I feel for you, drohne. I do.
As for myself, well, I never really had any odd beliefs as a child that I can recall. There was the Santa Claus thing, obviously-- though that was debunked at a young age when I awoke late one night to find my mother feverishly scribbling out Christmas cards and placing them on wrapped presents. When she realized she had a peeping tom, she told me to "go back to bed, or else I'll tell Santa to take all these gifts back" (this was more than a week before Christmas, mind you
); needless to say, her charade didn't fool me for much longer after that incident.
And I had one weird "belief", too. If anyone remembers the old TV series "War of the Worlds" (the 80's version), well, they used to have these nasty looking alien hands that would pop out of people's bellies and assume control of others; I was an avid viewer, of course, being heavily into sci-fi of all sorts. Anyway, one day my neighbor down the block chased these two kids who were trying to break into his car in broad daylight. They rounded the corner onto this court that's adjacent to my house and that was the last I saw of them. Now, what happened was that I had a dream that contained that
exact same scenario, except in the dream, he chased them into a neighbor's yard across the street and then an alien hand proceeded to emerge from his gut and enter into the perpetrator. In my dream, I watched from my room's window in pure horror, and all of a sudden he looks up and sees me spying on him. So I run from the window only to hear a loud knock at my front door; I then curled up into a fetal position on my downstairs couch, because I was home alone. All I remember is him breaking the door down before I awoke.
The thing is, it took me a good year or so before I fully accepted that that was merely a dream which conflated actual with imagined events. That fact made it difficult for my mind to separate the waking events from the dream, for some reason (I was around 7 or 8, iirc). For the next year, I avoided that neighbor like the plague, believing him to be some evil alien entity housed in a human host.
I eventually came to terms with it and realized the truth of what had happened, thankfully.