27 Things You've Always Heard That Just Aren't True

It's become common for parents to console children about bad grades by comparing them to Einstein, saying he got bad grades, and look how he ended up. Then the child drops out of school and tells his parents, well, Einstein dropped out, too, and look how he ended up. The myth about bad grades came from a misunderstanding of how numeric grades in Switzerland (and later Italy) worked. Einstein was brilliant in science and math, and okay in other subjects. He just hated school because it was regimented and boring. He did drop out of school at 15, because he wanted to join his parents who were living in Italy. Einstein went on to get a PhD in Zurich.



This myth came about purely because of Hollywood. It's much more exciting to see a body flying as it is shot than to just see the victim slump to the ground. Things are a bit different in wartime, with missiles, bombs, and cannons, and the only way to make a mundane murder by gun look as exciting on screen is to emulate the explosions of war. In fact, a lot of what we think of as "common knowledge" commonly comes from Hollywood or debunked science or someone just making a good story better. Find out the stories behind a bunch of these myths at Cracked.