Well, I’d read the children’s encyclopaedia Childcraft when I was 6. And I was pretty proud of my reading capabilities.
Childcraft had an age-appropriate elucidation of the reproductive system. And I duly read that.
Somehow, this came up on a visit with my uncle George (God rest him) and aunt Hariklia. (She goes by Iris to you beef-eating barbarians.) So they asked me to elaborate on what I had learned about the mechanics of the reproductive system.
I remember being rather miffed that they found the whole thing uproariously funny.
Misconception? Well, Childcraft spoke of spermatozoa, and it spoke of the… delivery mechanism, shall we say. But it does not speak in any great detail about the delivery vector.
So I assumed sperm was a powder.
Well, how was I supposed to know? Little spermatozoa. Directional applicator. I must have just assumed they were puffed out as particles. Like a mist or something. And I clearly did not have the command of fluid dynamics, at the age of 6, to have worked out the downsides to such a vector.