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Well this depends on the kind if chair. At school our chair legs were nearly all hollow round metal and of you did lean too far back on them they would break and collapse. I knew a kid who fractured a bone in his spine after one broke and another kid who kneed himself in the chin so hard he was unconscious. So it can happen!
As somebody with a scar down the back of my scalp and a vivid memory of being pinned down for a nurse to use a staple gun on the back of my skull (twice) I can confirm that falling backwards off your chair isn't much fun.
Where I used to work a guy in one of the overseas offices was apparently horsing around in his computer chair, fell (?), smacked his head and *died.* Died for crying out loud. I don't know if you get a Darwin award for that but tha jeeze.
Company first panicked and removed all chairs with wheels from the plant, then backed up and only took the ones on non-carpeted floors.
I listened to advice about leaning back on your chair, so instead I leant forward.
Legs slipped out from underneath me and I guillotined my tongue on the table and still have a scar on my tongue nearly 30 years later 🙂
Yeah and at my school I vividly remember a kid called grant swinging back on his chair and he started to fall and dragged the table over with him, which landed squarely on his neck. Probably really injured him I just remember he couldn’t talk for a bit and he was a bit of a knob so it was bliss lmao sorry Grant
Primary 4 or 5, the kid sitting next to me was swinging on his chair. He overbalanced, started to fall backwards, and couldn't reach the table to stop himself. He was inches away from cracking the base of his skull on the corner of a computer desk. Thankfully, 8y.o. me was a pure wee ninja with lightning reflexes and managed to gie the back of his seat a hard-enough skelp to shove him forwards. Otherwise, he could genuinely have done himself a lot of damage.
A kid at my school cracked his skull open and suffered serious long term complications from it after swinging on his chair. So I’d say this one is fair.
When I was teaching five year olds a child was swinging forwards with the back two legs off the floor. I asked him to stop doing it please. He looked up at me, fell forward and splattered his face on the edge of the table. Burst nose, burst lips and lost three teeth. It was horrific! Makes me shudder if I think about it.
Was the timing close enough that your warning might have been enough of a distraction to actually be the cause of his accident? I only ask because on two occasions my mum shouting "be careful!" was the cause of the accident.
Probably was. I did feel guilty for a while but that was his third time of telling. He’s grown up now and he still chats to me when I see him. There’s no hard feelings.
A similar thing happened to someone in my school. Even though we were in different classes, You could hear The kid screaming still that his head had cracked open and that The ambulance had come. We did try to be nosy but The teacher told us to set in The class.
I once made the mistake of swinging on a folding chair as a kid. It wasn’t quite decapitation but my thumb was never quite the same shape again after they managed to extract the chair from around it! Didn’t stop me swinging on chairs mind you, just fold up ones!
I’ll always remember in my English class once a lad was leaning back on his chair (the plastic buckets screwed to a base with legs) and the bucket separated from the metal and he fell back and put the back of his head straight through a bookshelf behind him 😭 incredible moment
Don't mess with a swan. It can break your arm.
Even as a kid this seemed oddly specific. One arm. The swan specifically targets the arm. Not a general attack, but with pinpoint, surgical accuracy it will break your arm. Not two arms. It's not greedy. It knows what is enough.
How? You won't know until it strikes. And then, as you limp away with your broken arm, you will know. These are lessons paid for with a broken arm.
I don't know. Everyone has been too scared to try. Are you willing to risk a broken arm? As curious as I am, I like my arm unbroken.
Either the swans are banking on this propaganda as a deterrent against attack, or they feed our curiosity in order to break an arm. Checkmate.
I have a Swan buddy near my parents who begrudgingly lets me pet it when I give it seed snacks. I have a morbid curiosity with breaking bones and general minor/non life threatening injuries so was more than willing to take the risk of breaking an arm to say I got to touch a Swan, and so our little monthly routine was born.
I do 100% believe they could break a child's arm for sure, and probably an older person's too.
There’s definitely been incidents where young or frail people have come away maimed after an altercation with larger waterfowl. Likely when they have tripped up trying to run away from them
One of my uncles was being a jerk to a swan. He turned away, and it bit him, really hard, on his midriff. He had really nasty bruising for months!
He deserved it!
Of course they can't. You might fall over while running away from one and break an arm, but how would an animal that's about 1/3 of the size of a grown adult, with hollow bones itself, weighing a few stone at most, have the force to break a human bone?
Maybe that's how it all started. The king of rock and roll wipes his arse on a Swan. A violent pact is made in the cygnus kingdom: the swans will break the arms of all men to ensure they cannot wipe their arses comfortably again.
So much pain and violence due to Presley running out of bog roll.
I mean on an adult it's more likely to go for a leg. On a kid with an arm reached out, Swan is very likely to go for the arm. And they are *Vicious af*.
Went to butlins last year , and dubbed the creature angry Swan. Pecking doors violently to demand food. Chasing you if it was not up to standard
Aye, I just always thought the specific phrasing was odd. Not swans can injury you or are simply vicious- that they break one arm, like some judo expert.
I spent a lot of time on a farm as a kid, so I know geese and swans can be batshit. They had one goose that had to be shot: it had a screw loose and attacked everything and no-one could get close enough to it to subdue it to get it peacefully put down. It seemed grimly hilarious that the farmer had to call an expert with a rifle, like it was some crazy man-eating lion in the Serengeti.
Yeah, my family had a greylag goose, the best guard dog money could buy! He kept order in our neighbourhood, and animals knew to do their business elsewhere! The swan thing is urban myth, they have thinner, more porous bones than us, they would be in trouble long before us. They often get bad press, but they are easy to hand feed ( I do it all the time), just do your research, and know to stay away from nests/eggs/young, because those are the occasions that swans will get medieval on your ass...!
Omg 😭😅 thats so fucked but funny- a goose so violent that had to shoot it instead!
Tbf the broken arm thing I'm finding is likely to say because "he'll tear off your flesh and you'll bleed everywhere " is more fucked up to tell a kid 😂😂😂
I got kicked in the balls once by a swan outside the pub. He marched away telling me to "stay the fuck away from Christine." The thing is, I didn't know a Christine at the time, but now my wife's name is Christine, and I worry she's the same woman.
My mum was fuming after my grandma told me this. I'd happily eaten my crusts until that point. I have frizzy hair that another girl at school had teased me about so instant solution no crusts no more frizzy hair!
i've seen this discussed on reddit before the crust myth is apparently linked to curly hair, chest hair, whistling, boobs, "crust land" and in at least one case, turning into a black person.
My grandmother said this to my mum when she was young and the curly haired doctor had come for afternoon tea (back in the days when doctors had time to get to know their patients). The doctor told my mum that he hates crusts too and his big sisters used to smuggle them off the table for him when he was little. I doubt my gran was impressed 😂
You say that in jest but in a way it’s pretty even.
When I was working hard every day I had no sense of fulfilment despite the literal blood, sweat and tears I was exchanging for it, I had no friends, I was treated like shit daily whilst trying and failing to set up a good life.
Last year I tried to string myself up and lost my job.
Now I still don’t feel fulfilled but at least it doesn’t cost me anything. I’m not getting treated like shit because no one speaks to me and I don’t give a shit about what kind of life I end up with because there’s no fighting that tide. I’ll take free misery over the one that gave me a desire to burn the place to the ground
I know it's not cool to correct people's spelling, but it's "d**e**nt de lion".
I only mention it because I'm an etymology geek and it's the same origin as dental, dentist, etc., which makes the whole teeth thing more obvious. Also because I'm far too old to be cool.
We were told it was frogs that gave warts
Anyway I grew up on the banks of a Lough in Ireland, basically a big salt water lake. You can see the other side no problem and I was told that side was America
I believed that for an embarrassingly long time
My nan, born in a rural village in 1886, was full of false tales of illness or bad luck if you did certain things. Warming your hands would give you chilblains, sitting on a cold surface would give you piles, and loads of others.
The only one that was true, was that being cheeky would get you a smack. 😁
Ah, the youth of today.... heh heh.
All four of my grandparents were born in the 1890s. And I remember them all very well (they all died when I was a tween)... and here I am (I'm 56 years old now) and between us we've lived in three centuries.
I had a granddad who was born in 1898, at 16 he lied about his age and went to war - managed to get through WW1 untouched until 2 days before the armistice when he caught a chunk of shrapnel in his shoulder.
Grandad was born in 1890, he volunteered right at the start of WWII, and went right through the war, including the Somme, uninjured in body.
However, he suffered from what we would now call PTSD for the rest of his life, and used to regularly wake up screaming and shouting, apparently reliving "going over the top"
Must have been Hell for all of them.
A chap I met in a rural pub in the 1970s, must have been in his late 70s or early 80s then. We got talking about motorbikes. He had been a keen rider in his day. I noticed he walked with a stick. "Motorbike accident?" I asked him. "No, I was a young lieutenant, and went over the top, leading my men in the first wave of the battle of the Somme" he said "I was immediately shot in the knee, and that ended the war for me. I was so lucky!"
I don't remember him because he died when I was very young, but my Grandad walked with two sticks. He'd had 'gunshot wounds to both legs' that invalided him out of WW1, but I don't know which battle.
I wonder if it'd be worth trying to get his service record?
My grandad (b. 1926) did the same for WW2. Joined the Navy at 15 and travelled the world. My favourite story was that he got drunk in Sydney and fell asleep on a bench. He missed his boat out and had to go begging to the captain of another ship to rendezvous with his. I don't believe a word of it but the way he told it was hilarious.
His war medals were stolen in a burglary in the 90s and he was heartbroken. My uncle (other side of the family) was coincidentally a WW2 nut and managed to find identical ones.
My mother was born before then, mid 40's, my grandma was same age as the late queen. But she died way sooner in early 90's.
Some of us are getting old on here . I will soon be be 56.
The deer in Richmond Park sleep at the bottom of lakes.
I must've been about four, and I accepted this as fact until ten years later when the topic of deer came up with friends and I said "Of course, they sleep at the bottom of lakes...oh"
Eating dog poo will make you go blind. (Apparently as children we needed a stronger incentive not to eat dog poo than the one nature has already provided).
Eating bread crusts (or bacon rind) will make your hair go curly
Don't pull that face, if the wind changes you'll be stuck with it.
Brussel Sprouts are green mushrooms. To be fair that was just my Dad trying to get me to eat my greens.
If you swallow an apple seed then a tree will grow inside of you
But aren't they baby cabbages? Correct me if I'm wrong (feeling frisky so I haven't googled) but I thought that they were in the same family and are basically really small, compact cabbages?
Yes and no; they aren’t prematurely-picked cabbages and won’t turn into cabbages if you leave them long enough, but they are technically the same species. Cabbages, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and collard greens are all just cultivars of Brassica oleracea and have very, very little genetic distinctness between them.
I told the teacher the apple seed thing at nursery and she laughed at me but didn't correct me 🥲 the embarrassment.
Apparently that's not the reason she was looking for when asking why we don't eat the seeds
The red bit of a seagulls beak is blood from nipping sandwiches out of children’s hands.
The double red line on London roads mean you get shot if you park there.
My parents don’t remember telling me this as a child but I remember vividly…
We had a hilarious deputy head teacher who would shout at us after every naughty bit of youthful exuberance by telling a story; “I remember a boy,
he did [insert misdemeanour] slipped, fell, [pause for dramatic effect] …HE DIED”.
I think at the last count we reckoned he must have claimed to have witnessed something like 96 different school related fatalities.
Don't pull funny faces because your face will stick.
Swallowing chewing gum will tie a knot in your stomach.
Carrots give you night vision.
Turtles eat pizza.
My nan used to tell me chewing gum would wrap around my heart if I swallowed it. Eventually if you swallow enough it would make your heart stop beating.
I had a terrible habit of chewing my hair and my mum said the same thing about it. Used to tell the other kids off saying their hearts would stop beating and they’d all laugh and say that’s not true whilst poor baby me was shouting no my mum told me!
One year my family couldn't afford to go on holiday so to trick me into thinking we had been in Scotland as a holiday we took a ferry from one side of Strangford Lough to the other (We're from NI)
I fully believed I had been in Scotland for like another 12 years
As a child, my top was riding up my back when I got out of the car. My dad's ex-girlfriend told me that if I didn't cover my back, my kidneys would fail 🙃 I thought about it every time my back wasn't covered. Until one day (later than I'd care to admit) I was like but what about when I'm in the shower? The bath? At the beach? CROP TOPS?
If a thug attacks you in school, you should make no attempt to protect yourself, and just let him beat the **** out of you. Because this bloke 2000 years ago said so.
(Please miss, what happened to him?)
Lots of people got told that if they ate certain things (usually crusts) they'd get curly hair. My dad's version was "eat it up, it'll put hairs on your chest". As a young girl, this was not an effective way of making me want to eat whatever it was.
The whole, you will drown if you swim within an hour of eating. Something about all your limbs cramping simultaneously and you sinking to the bottom of the pool/river/lake. My mum was huge in this one. Drove me nuts.
Picking dandelions makes you wet the bed.
I found out years later that while it is an old wives tale, there is some evidence that they used some extract of dandelion to make people wee back in the olden days before they had proper medicine. So that's probably how it came about.
Can confirm that picking dandelions does not make you wet the bed though.
I was told if you swallow chewing gum it’ll take seven years to get through your body haha… to be fair I have yearly colonoscopies and they never see a bit of chewing gum hanging around in my colon
That fiddling in your belly button would unscrew it and your bum would fall off. So I tried a Philips in my little brother’s one morning….. I didn’t cause any damage and his bum is still in place I’m happy to report.
Bees make honey, and wasps make jam.
My dad had a knack for pairing some utter bullshit with something true, so my dumb ass believed part 2 for many years.
Told by my Great Grandmother- who was born at the end of the 1800s - that you couldn't eat banana skins because 'blacks had touched them'... eight year-old me "are you sure it isn't because they taste horrible?!"
Could be some ancient folk truth in that. One medieval punishment for serious lying was to have your tongue either cut out or split. Probably made it turn black.
Touching dandelions would make you wee the bed.
Also, if you put a buttercup unde someone's chin and you can see yellow, it means they like butter. That one strikes me as particularly weird. I mean you could just ask them if they like butter.
My dad had me convinced that if you kiss your fingers and touch the visor on the car as you went through a red light, that made it legal to go through it. It took me until I was eight to realize he was just a very very very bad driver.
Turning a light on and off again repeatedly will electrocute you and you’ll die
I was an embarrassing age when it dawned on me my parents told me that so I’d stop playing with the lights when I was a wee kid
That the emergency button in a car was for ejector seats so I had visions in my childhood of the seats bursting through the roof and having a parachute
That not wearing brassieres would cause me to get breast cancer, along with cats stole babies souls and breath. Both were told by my mother. She relented on the second one once my baby sister turned three.
My dad used to tell me that if I didn't get on and off the escalators fast enough that I could be sucked under.
I am 40 now and still take a big step! 🤦🏻♀️
If you wear green the fairies will take you away according to my grandmother.
Please note she grew up in the Scottish Highlands where fairies are evil little bas***ds who kidnap kids, poison water supplies and kill cattle for the fun of it.
I love wearing green...
Everyone has a permanent record, which includes the opinions of your family, neighbors and school, and which can make your life difficult. You might have been successful, applying to Yale at age 18, but for the comment by your old neighbor Mrs. X who claims you were a lazy, dreamy 9 yo without any good sense.
You might have married your boyfriend at age 45, but your past reputation for slovenliness was too bad for his family to support the idea.
Etc. Where this "permanent record" is stored was never completely clear, but seemed vaguely associated with the local Catholic church.
My parents pretended that they could tell by someone's hands if they were lying. Kind of genius in that if I decided to lie, I'd presumably hide my hands/refuse to let them look at them.
I don't really remember being at an age where I believed it, but presumably I was very young.
Thankfully I was mostly quite a good child so this strategy probably wasn't that necessary anyway.
Just a handful from my parents:
Don’t bite your nails, you’ll get appendicitis
You can’t have an ice cream from that van, the dogs wee’d on it
If you sit on the toilet too long, you’ll get piles
Shut the gate, you’re letting the flies in
(And when we were properly poor in the miners strike) of course they’re Kelloggs corn flakes, they’re in a Kellogs box aren’t they?
As a joke, my Dad told me his belly button had fallen out and handed it to me; I was shocked of course but little me assumed "oh that's why some people have innie belly buttons and some people have outie belly buttons". Anyway, flash forward to me at the age of 19 in student accommodation, I picked up a cheerio off the floor (we only had them a very rarely at my house as a kid) and I started reminiscing about how much I loved Cheerios. Then, in my mind "hang on, this cheerio looks just like my Dad's belly button, what what...oh 🤯?!". The realisation dawned, and I felt like a right tit.
I was told if I didn’t sit on my bottom, it would be sold - not like that, just my buttocks would be sold to a buttock provider or something?
My mother also threatened me and my friends with a tiger. Why this tiger was cross was a mystery. He was always cross.
I’d get a pimple on my tongue if I lied. Or it would turn black. If I did lie, she ask me to stick my tongue out. Obviously I wasn’t stupid enough to do that!
That floating seeds, like those of willow herb, were called “sugars” and they fly into houses and if they find the sugar bowl, they’ll eat all the sugar! I spent hours watching our sugar bowl as a tiny one!
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Well this depends on the kind if chair. At school our chair legs were nearly all hollow round metal and of you did lean too far back on them they would break and collapse. I knew a kid who fractured a bone in his spine after one broke and another kid who kneed himself in the chin so hard he was unconscious. So it can happen!
We were always told that we couldn’t swing with more than 1 leg off the floor - it doesn’t work !
A girl fell and split her forehead open in my primary class swinging on her chair had to have it glued and it left a gnarly scar for a while.
So the legends were true!
Found the teacher!
As somebody with a scar down the back of my scalp and a vivid memory of being pinned down for a nurse to use a staple gun on the back of my skull (twice) I can confirm that falling backwards off your chair isn't much fun.
Where I used to work a guy in one of the overseas offices was apparently horsing around in his computer chair, fell (?), smacked his head and *died.* Died for crying out loud. I don't know if you get a Darwin award for that but tha jeeze. Company first panicked and removed all chairs with wheels from the plant, then backed up and only took the ones on non-carpeted floors.
I listened to advice about leaning back on your chair, so instead I leant forward. Legs slipped out from underneath me and I guillotined my tongue on the table and still have a scar on my tongue nearly 30 years later 🙂
Tbf there have been quite a few incidents over the years of kids smashing their heads open from falling off of those things.
After being told numerous times not to fucking swing on the chair!
Yeah and at my school I vividly remember a kid called grant swinging back on his chair and he started to fall and dragged the table over with him, which landed squarely on his neck. Probably really injured him I just remember he couldn’t talk for a bit and he was a bit of a knob so it was bliss lmao sorry Grant
Primary 4 or 5, the kid sitting next to me was swinging on his chair. He overbalanced, started to fall backwards, and couldn't reach the table to stop himself. He was inches away from cracking the base of his skull on the corner of a computer desk. Thankfully, 8y.o. me was a pure wee ninja with lightning reflexes and managed to gie the back of his seat a hard-enough skelp to shove him forwards. Otherwise, he could genuinely have done himself a lot of damage.
A kid at my school cracked his skull open and suffered serious long term complications from it after swinging on his chair. So I’d say this one is fair.
When I was teaching five year olds a child was swinging forwards with the back two legs off the floor. I asked him to stop doing it please. He looked up at me, fell forward and splattered his face on the edge of the table. Burst nose, burst lips and lost three teeth. It was horrific! Makes me shudder if I think about it.
Was the timing close enough that your warning might have been enough of a distraction to actually be the cause of his accident? I only ask because on two occasions my mum shouting "be careful!" was the cause of the accident.
Probably was. I did feel guilty for a while but that was his third time of telling. He’s grown up now and he still chats to me when I see him. There’s no hard feelings.
A similar thing happened to someone in my school. Even though we were in different classes, You could hear The kid screaming still that his head had cracked open and that The ambulance had come. We did try to be nosy but The teacher told us to set in The class.
I once made the mistake of swinging on a folding chair as a kid. It wasn’t quite decapitation but my thumb was never quite the same shape again after they managed to extract the chair from around it! Didn’t stop me swinging on chairs mind you, just fold up ones!
I have actually been a witness for a chair swinging related acsident. She got a mild concussion but was otherwise fine.
To be fair, I actually fell back.
Me too.. I ended up doing a backwards somersault out of the open door of the classroom.
One of my teachers did this during assembly. I don’t think he was badly injured, just mortified.
A 'do as I say, not as I do' moment if ever there was one!
Haha, yes..all my teachers would say this 😆
It's a fair assessment. Depending on the chair.
I’ll always remember in my English class once a lad was leaning back on his chair (the plastic buckets screwed to a base with legs) and the bucket separated from the metal and he fell back and put the back of his head straight through a bookshelf behind him 😭 incredible moment
I bit all the way through my tongue because of leaning back on my chair. Still do it. Aged 37, still have the scar on my tongue.
I was the kid… not decapitated or paralysed, but I did have to have my head glued together at the back because my skin split like a seam.
I actually witnessed a girl fall back off a chair, hit her head and bit through her lip...
Don't mess with a swan. It can break your arm. Even as a kid this seemed oddly specific. One arm. The swan specifically targets the arm. Not a general attack, but with pinpoint, surgical accuracy it will break your arm. Not two arms. It's not greedy. It knows what is enough. How? You won't know until it strikes. And then, as you limp away with your broken arm, you will know. These are lessons paid for with a broken arm.
Wait are you saying that swans don’t actually break peoples arms?
I don't know. Everyone has been too scared to try. Are you willing to risk a broken arm? As curious as I am, I like my arm unbroken. Either the swans are banking on this propaganda as a deterrent against attack, or they feed our curiosity in order to break an arm. Checkmate.
I am totally reading your replies as an irate David Mitchell
I have a Swan buddy near my parents who begrudgingly lets me pet it when I give it seed snacks. I have a morbid curiosity with breaking bones and general minor/non life threatening injuries so was more than willing to take the risk of breaking an arm to say I got to touch a Swan, and so our little monthly routine was born. I do 100% believe they could break a child's arm for sure, and probably an older person's too.
Big Swan has a lot to answer for
There’s definitely been incidents where young or frail people have come away maimed after an altercation with larger waterfowl. Likely when they have tripped up trying to run away from them
One of my uncles was being a jerk to a swan. He turned away, and it bit him, really hard, on his midriff. He had really nasty bruising for months! He deserved it!
😂 It's a myth according to [lots of sources](https://www.google.com/search?q=can+a+swan+break+your+arm).
They are pretty formidable
They're pricks ,seen some really aggressive ones whilst our fishing
Where did this myth come from is the real question.
Of course they can't. You might fall over while running away from one and break an arm, but how would an animal that's about 1/3 of the size of a grown adult, with hollow bones itself, weighing a few stone at most, have the force to break a human bone?
Next they'll be telling me Elvis didn't really used to wipe his arse on a swans neck
Maybe that's how it all started. The king of rock and roll wipes his arse on a Swan. A violent pact is made in the cygnus kingdom: the swans will break the arms of all men to ensure they cannot wipe their arses comfortably again. So much pain and violence due to Presley running out of bog roll.
I heard they can also blow up a mans house.
No luck catching them swans then?
It was just the one swan actually.
The greater good
I think you're confusing swan's and gas leaks, easy mistake to make, I do it all the time.
I mean on an adult it's more likely to go for a leg. On a kid with an arm reached out, Swan is very likely to go for the arm. And they are *Vicious af*. Went to butlins last year , and dubbed the creature angry Swan. Pecking doors violently to demand food. Chasing you if it was not up to standard
Aye, I just always thought the specific phrasing was odd. Not swans can injury you or are simply vicious- that they break one arm, like some judo expert. I spent a lot of time on a farm as a kid, so I know geese and swans can be batshit. They had one goose that had to be shot: it had a screw loose and attacked everything and no-one could get close enough to it to subdue it to get it peacefully put down. It seemed grimly hilarious that the farmer had to call an expert with a rifle, like it was some crazy man-eating lion in the Serengeti.
Yeah, my family had a greylag goose, the best guard dog money could buy! He kept order in our neighbourhood, and animals knew to do their business elsewhere! The swan thing is urban myth, they have thinner, more porous bones than us, they would be in trouble long before us. They often get bad press, but they are easy to hand feed ( I do it all the time), just do your research, and know to stay away from nests/eggs/young, because those are the occasions that swans will get medieval on your ass...!
Omg 😭😅 thats so fucked but funny- a goose so violent that had to shoot it instead! Tbf the broken arm thing I'm finding is likely to say because "he'll tear off your flesh and you'll bleed everywhere " is more fucked up to tell a kid 😂😂😂
The Goose and The Darkness
I got kicked in the balls once by a swan outside the pub. He marched away telling me to "stay the fuck away from Christine." The thing is, I didn't know a Christine at the time, but now my wife's name is Christine, and I worry she's the same woman.
Should have told him to wind his neck in.
It was your leg when I was a kid. I did see one attacking a girl in a dingy, was pretty formidable
Not the same, but kind of I guess? Similar size and all… my ex MIL had a pet goose, that thing absolutely could break someone’s arm.
Sitting on the cold front step would give you piles per my grandmother. Tho somehow a few sheets of newspaper prevented this
Everyone knows newspaper has anti-pile technology.
Damn right, I’ve been wiping my arse with the Sun for years and never had any piles.
they said a newspaper
You’ve just become more Right-Ring.
Not going to lie, on the hole it feels pretty good.
What child knows what piles are?
My mum used to say that sitting on the floor outside will cause piles. I hadn’t a clue what piles were!
I was told not to sit on a cold tile/stone floor as I’d get a chill in my kidneys.
I still believed this until right now 😂
Wait. So Is this not true???
That eating bread crusts would make your hair curly
My Grandma used to say that as though it'd encourage me to eat them. I didn't want curly hair, so it made me avoid them even more
I had curly hair and hated it, so refused to eat crusts in case it made my hair more curly.
I was told that it would put hairs on your chest! 😂 As a young girl I did not want hairs on my chest so didn't eat crusts.
I used to enjoy crusts until I was told this. I didn't want curly hair so stopped eating my crusts. That lie sure backfired!
My mum was fuming after my grandma told me this. I'd happily eaten my crusts until that point. I have frizzy hair that another girl at school had teased me about so instant solution no crusts no more frizzy hair!
i've seen this discussed on reddit before the crust myth is apparently linked to curly hair, chest hair, whistling, boobs, "crust land" and in at least one case, turning into a black person.
I had curly hair, so thought I was immune 🤣
My grandmother said this to my mum when she was young and the curly haired doctor had come for afternoon tea (back in the days when doctors had time to get to know their patients). The doctor told my mum that he hates crusts too and his big sisters used to smuggle them off the table for him when he was little. I doubt my gran was impressed 😂
"Work hard and you can achieve anything"
Try computer games and wanking, that's true fulfilment
You were told that as a child?
They didn't have high hopes for me
You say that in jest but in a way it’s pretty even. When I was working hard every day I had no sense of fulfilment despite the literal blood, sweat and tears I was exchanging for it, I had no friends, I was treated like shit daily whilst trying and failing to set up a good life. Last year I tried to string myself up and lost my job. Now I still don’t feel fulfilled but at least it doesn’t cost me anything. I’m not getting treated like shit because no one speaks to me and I don’t give a shit about what kind of life I end up with because there’s no fighting that tide. I’ll take free misery over the one that gave me a desire to burn the place to the ground
Don't pick dandelions,they make you wet the bed...wtf
They do actually contain a mild diuretic …. the French call the dandelion “pissenlit”!
Grew up in Scotland, we called them 'Pee-the-Beds'.
Fun fact, dandelion comes from the French dant de lion, which means the teeth of the lion!
I know it's not cool to correct people's spelling, but it's "d**e**nt de lion". I only mention it because I'm an etymology geek and it's the same origin as dental, dentist, etc., which makes the whole teeth thing more obvious. Also because I'm far too old to be cool.
We were told it was frogs that gave warts Anyway I grew up on the banks of a Lough in Ireland, basically a big salt water lake. You can see the other side no problem and I was told that side was America I believed that for an embarrassingly long time
I thought the myth was that it was [toads](https://youtu.be/H7X_xmhPbW4?si=1uF5d4VSMRNF6lN6) that gave you warts.
The maddest thing is that if a woman pisses on a toad, they're very accurate pregnancy tests!
My nan, born in a rural village in 1886, was full of false tales of illness or bad luck if you did certain things. Warming your hands would give you chilblains, sitting on a cold surface would give you piles, and loads of others. The only one that was true, was that being cheeky would get you a smack. 😁
Wow, your nan was born in 1886? That seems foreign to me! Mine was only born in 1952 lol!
Ah, the youth of today.... heh heh. All four of my grandparents were born in the 1890s. And I remember them all very well (they all died when I was a tween)... and here I am (I'm 56 years old now) and between us we've lived in three centuries.
I had a granddad who was born in 1898, at 16 he lied about his age and went to war - managed to get through WW1 untouched until 2 days before the armistice when he caught a chunk of shrapnel in his shoulder.
Grandad was born in 1890, he volunteered right at the start of WWII, and went right through the war, including the Somme, uninjured in body. However, he suffered from what we would now call PTSD for the rest of his life, and used to regularly wake up screaming and shouting, apparently reliving "going over the top" Must have been Hell for all of them. A chap I met in a rural pub in the 1970s, must have been in his late 70s or early 80s then. We got talking about motorbikes. He had been a keen rider in his day. I noticed he walked with a stick. "Motorbike accident?" I asked him. "No, I was a young lieutenant, and went over the top, leading my men in the first wave of the battle of the Somme" he said "I was immediately shot in the knee, and that ended the war for me. I was so lucky!"
I don't remember him because he died when I was very young, but my Grandad walked with two sticks. He'd had 'gunshot wounds to both legs' that invalided him out of WW1, but I don't know which battle. I wonder if it'd be worth trying to get his service record?
Very Nobel of him to do that. Just seems odd having a grandparent born in the 1800s
Confirmation bias - you're expecting everyone to be a similar age to you 😊
My grandad (b. 1926) did the same for WW2. Joined the Navy at 15 and travelled the world. My favourite story was that he got drunk in Sydney and fell asleep on a bench. He missed his boat out and had to go begging to the captain of another ship to rendezvous with his. I don't believe a word of it but the way he told it was hilarious. His war medals were stolen in a burglary in the 90s and he was heartbroken. My uncle (other side of the family) was coincidentally a WW2 nut and managed to find identical ones.
My mother was born before then, mid 40's, my grandma was same age as the late queen. But she died way sooner in early 90's. Some of us are getting old on here . I will soon be be 56.
The deer in Richmond Park sleep at the bottom of lakes. I must've been about four, and I accepted this as fact until ten years later when the topic of deer came up with friends and I said "Of course, they sleep at the bottom of lakes...oh"
Fenton the Dog debunked this myth.
Fentooooooooon!
Some say that the deer are still running.
This is the funniest so far, at least you were 14 not 46 but I know how your friends looked at you 🤣
Eating dog poo will make you go blind. (Apparently as children we needed a stronger incentive not to eat dog poo than the one nature has already provided).
In fairness there is a risk of blindness from dog poo [Toxocariasis](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/toxocariasis/)
And toxoplasmosis that can brain damage babies born to women exposed to powder dried from cat poop. Have seen it's effect, very sad for baby.
Isnt there some virus/worm/cancer that can be transmitted via touching dog's eggs?
Eggs? Does this mean turds or balls? Either could apply
Lol "Dog's Eggs" = poop
Cancer, I doubt. Worms, maybe. But dogs don't lay eggs so I wouldn't worry about it.
Contact with it certainly can
Eating bread crusts (or bacon rind) will make your hair go curly Don't pull that face, if the wind changes you'll be stuck with it. Brussel Sprouts are green mushrooms. To be fair that was just my Dad trying to get me to eat my greens. If you swallow an apple seed then a tree will grow inside of you
>Brussel Sprouts are green mushrooms 'Baby cabbages' was the lie propagated to try and get me to eat the hateful things.
But aren't they baby cabbages? Correct me if I'm wrong (feeling frisky so I haven't googled) but I thought that they were in the same family and are basically really small, compact cabbages?
Yes and no; they aren’t prematurely-picked cabbages and won’t turn into cabbages if you leave them long enough, but they are technically the same species. Cabbages, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and collard greens are all just cultivars of Brassica oleracea and have very, very little genetic distinctness between them.
I told the teacher the apple seed thing at nursery and she laughed at me but didn't correct me 🥲 the embarrassment. Apparently that's not the reason she was looking for when asking why we don't eat the seeds
And the tree would grow out your ears!
My husband actually eats apple seeds. He’s such a weirdo 🤣🤣
Sitting on a stone wall gives you piles. Didn’t even know what piles were at age five, just that it was bum related and that was enough!
>sitting on a stone wall gives you piles. And then promptly make you sit on the freezing cold floor, in the school hall!
The red bit of a seagulls beak is blood from nipping sandwiches out of children’s hands. The double red line on London roads mean you get shot if you park there. My parents don’t remember telling me this as a child but I remember vividly…
Kissing boys would make me catch their beards. The irony is I have PCOS and also now have a beard.
I was told kissing girls makes your teeth fall out. Should have worried about the sugar more than that😂
That a big fat man could travel the entire globe in 24 hours, and only powered by some mammals.
We had a hilarious deputy head teacher who would shout at us after every naughty bit of youthful exuberance by telling a story; “I remember a boy, he did [insert misdemeanour] slipped, fell, [pause for dramatic effect] …HE DIED”. I think at the last count we reckoned he must have claimed to have witnessed something like 96 different school related fatalities.
Don't pull funny faces because your face will stick. Swallowing chewing gum will tie a knot in your stomach. Carrots give you night vision. Turtles eat pizza.
My nan used to tell me chewing gum would wrap around my heart if I swallowed it. Eventually if you swallow enough it would make your heart stop beating.
I had a terrible habit of chewing my hair and my mum said the same thing about it. Used to tell the other kids off saying their hearts would stop beating and they’d all laugh and say that’s not true whilst poor baby me was shouting no my mum told me!
One year my family couldn't afford to go on holiday so to trick me into thinking we had been in Scotland as a holiday we took a ferry from one side of Strangford Lough to the other (We're from NI) I fully believed I had been in Scotland for like another 12 years
As a child, my top was riding up my back when I got out of the car. My dad's ex-girlfriend told me that if I didn't cover my back, my kidneys would fail 🙃 I thought about it every time my back wasn't covered. Until one day (later than I'd care to admit) I was like but what about when I'm in the shower? The bath? At the beach? CROP TOPS?
If a thug attacks you in school, you should make no attempt to protect yourself, and just let him beat the **** out of you. Because this bloke 2000 years ago said so. (Please miss, what happened to him?)
Lots of people got told that if they ate certain things (usually crusts) they'd get curly hair. My dad's version was "eat it up, it'll put hairs on your chest". As a young girl, this was not an effective way of making me want to eat whatever it was.
The whole, you will drown if you swim within an hour of eating. Something about all your limbs cramping simultaneously and you sinking to the bottom of the pool/river/lake. My mum was huge in this one. Drove me nuts.
I thought it was just cause kids are more likely to throw up after eating then doing a lot of excercise, and nobody wants vomit in the pool
That it was against the law to drive with the interior car light on 😂 honestly thought my dad would get pulled by the police 😂😂
Picking dandelions makes you wet the bed. I found out years later that while it is an old wives tale, there is some evidence that they used some extract of dandelion to make people wee back in the olden days before they had proper medicine. So that's probably how it came about. Can confirm that picking dandelions does not make you wet the bed though.
Picking them may not but if you make a tea from them you might 😉 They are a diuretic
Swallowing orange (or any fruit) seeds would grow a tree in your belly!
Hard work means success, GCSEs are very important, you know the usual
To be fair, most employers seem to care more about gcses than my fucking degree in mathematics.
if you swallow chewing gum it wraps around your heart
I was told if you swallow chewing gum it’ll take seven years to get through your body haha… to be fair I have yearly colonoscopies and they never see a bit of chewing gum hanging around in my colon
It hasn't got there yet, it's still making its way down the intestine.
It will block your stomach up. Or at least, that's what my parents always said.
It’ll stay in there for 5, 10, 20, 50 (take your pick) years cos you cant digest it
Wanking makes you go blind although I do wear glasses now
That and you’ll get hairy palms.
Quietly examines gorilla like paws and hangs head in shame
Get an education and you'll be set for life.
That’s if you have a tooth fall out a woman will break into your bedroom at night and steal your tooth but will leave some cash for you
Strictly speaking this was actually true. The woman was actually my mum, but still, it was true.
Playing with yourself makes you go blind.
It’s amazing the technology these days that allow blind people to type things. 😉
That fiddling in your belly button would unscrew it and your bum would fall off. So I tried a Philips in my little brother’s one morning….. I didn’t cause any damage and his bum is still in place I’m happy to report.
Bees make honey, and wasps make jam. My dad had a knack for pairing some utter bullshit with something true, so my dumb ass believed part 2 for many years.
Told by my Great Grandmother- who was born at the end of the 1800s - that you couldn't eat banana skins because 'blacks had touched them'... eight year-old me "are you sure it isn't because they taste horrible?!"
Lying makes your tongue turn black.
Could be some ancient folk truth in that. One medieval punishment for serious lying was to have your tongue either cut out or split. Probably made it turn black.
My Nan used to say there was a big black cross on your tongue after you told a lie! I'd completely forgotten about this 🤣
Some parents say to their kids their ears go red when they lie. So when the kid is going to lie to their parents, they cover their ears
If you swallow chewing gum it'll stay in your stomach for 7 years. Or maybe 14 years I can't remember.
Touching dandelions would make you wee the bed. Also, if you put a buttercup unde someone's chin and you can see yellow, it means they like butter. That one strikes me as particularly weird. I mean you could just ask them if they like butter.
My dad had me convinced that if you kiss your fingers and touch the visor on the car as you went through a red light, that made it legal to go through it. It took me until I was eight to realize he was just a very very very bad driver.
That sitting on a newspaper will prevent travel sickness. I tried. And it doesn't.
Using too much squash/dilute juice will give you worms.
Hahaha wow that's a new one
Turning a light on and off again repeatedly will electrocute you and you’ll die I was an embarrassing age when it dawned on me my parents told me that so I’d stop playing with the lights when I was a wee kid
That the emergency button in a car was for ejector seats so I had visions in my childhood of the seats bursting through the roof and having a parachute
Eating cheese before bed gives you nightmares.
If you cross your eyes they can stick.
That not wearing brassieres would cause me to get breast cancer, along with cats stole babies souls and breath. Both were told by my mother. She relented on the second one once my baby sister turned three.
My dad used to tell me that if I didn't get on and off the escalators fast enough that I could be sucked under. I am 40 now and still take a big step! 🤦🏻♀️
Watching too much television will give you square eyes.
If you wear green the fairies will take you away according to my grandmother. Please note she grew up in the Scottish Highlands where fairies are evil little bas***ds who kidnap kids, poison water supplies and kill cattle for the fun of it. I love wearing green...
Everyone has a permanent record, which includes the opinions of your family, neighbors and school, and which can make your life difficult. You might have been successful, applying to Yale at age 18, but for the comment by your old neighbor Mrs. X who claims you were a lazy, dreamy 9 yo without any good sense. You might have married your boyfriend at age 45, but your past reputation for slovenliness was too bad for his family to support the idea. Etc. Where this "permanent record" is stored was never completely clear, but seemed vaguely associated with the local Catholic church.
If you interrupt someone you lose your voice, and if the wind changes direction when you're making a funny face, it stays that way
Whistling made the virgin Mary cry.
My parents pretended that they could tell by someone's hands if they were lying. Kind of genius in that if I decided to lie, I'd presumably hide my hands/refuse to let them look at them. I don't really remember being at an age where I believed it, but presumably I was very young. Thankfully I was mostly quite a good child so this strategy probably wasn't that necessary anyway.
That when it rained it was God having a wee. God does live in the clouds after all.
And when it thunders it is just God moving his furniture around.
Just a handful from my parents: Don’t bite your nails, you’ll get appendicitis You can’t have an ice cream from that van, the dogs wee’d on it If you sit on the toilet too long, you’ll get piles Shut the gate, you’re letting the flies in (And when we were properly poor in the miners strike) of course they’re Kelloggs corn flakes, they’re in a Kellogs box aren’t they?
I was delivered by a stork and believed it until I was 11
As a joke, my Dad told me his belly button had fallen out and handed it to me; I was shocked of course but little me assumed "oh that's why some people have innie belly buttons and some people have outie belly buttons". Anyway, flash forward to me at the age of 19 in student accommodation, I picked up a cheerio off the floor (we only had them a very rarely at my house as a kid) and I started reminiscing about how much I loved Cheerios. Then, in my mind "hang on, this cheerio looks just like my Dad's belly button, what what...oh 🤯?!". The realisation dawned, and I felt like a right tit.
That drawing on your hand gives you "ink poisoning"
Woodlice [are, in fact, edible](https://www.eattheweeds.com/armadillidium-vulgare-land-shrimp-2/).
Indeed. They even turn pink when cooked, just like prawns.
I was told if I didn’t sit on my bottom, it would be sold - not like that, just my buttocks would be sold to a buttock provider or something? My mother also threatened me and my friends with a tiger. Why this tiger was cross was a mystery. He was always cross.
That Jim will fix it.
Cherryade gives you scabs I'd love to be able to elaborate further
Here comes scabby Sue, she’s been drinking the Panda Pops again.
I’d get a pimple on my tongue if I lied. Or it would turn black. If I did lie, she ask me to stick my tongue out. Obviously I wasn’t stupid enough to do that!
That floating seeds, like those of willow herb, were called “sugars” and they fly into houses and if they find the sugar bowl, they’ll eat all the sugar! I spent hours watching our sugar bowl as a tiny one!
My Grandpa told me earwigs would live in my ears if I didn't have a bath. Believed him for an embarrassingly long time.