Things you were shockingly old when you learned

The cows-and-bulls thing, plus Adam Ant, are the only things on this thread that I do know

how to cook an artichoke properly

(a julia child recipe steered me right)

How to tie my shoes (velcro, you see..)

Didn't realise that Adam Ant was a pun, until a year or so ago.

^^^ this. Same with Sandy Shaw.

Fay Fife of the Rezillos.

(i.e. it's a pun on "I am from the town of Fife, my good fellow" in broad scots)

What's the Adam Ant pun? Adam Ant = adamant? If so... pretty lame pun.

That's it.

xpost Tell that to Lai Mpun, the lead singer of Bangkok's Phleng Chat.

I am 33 and didn't know any of these things. Wait - how the hell DOES a candle work?!

Same with Sandy Shaw.

i don't know how to explain it but i used to think chickens had a really weird way of "mating", something to do with the rooster's legs. (!!?!?) :)

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

"that SHIFT + 6 = ^. I think I figured it out a month or so ago. I always wondered how people got that character."

^^^Dude, you beat me by a month. Thanks!

I once spent a half hour trying to eject a cd from a Mac before someone finally told me there's an eject button on the keyboard. I was going through all these crazy menus and preferences...

I think I was like 16 or 17 when I learned that cows and bulls were the male and female versions of the same animal and not two distinct animals.

What sort of seemingly basic facts did it take you a surprisingly long time for you to learn?

― filthy dylan, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:30 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

loooool one of my friends thought this and it was since passed into running joke territory.

I think I've done that Mac eject button thing too :(

Pronounced lapels like 'labels' for years until corrected but happily don't dress well enough to use it often

My girlfriend was shocked to learn, at the age of 33, that a 'Flea Circus' is actually a rather charming mechanical toy, and is in no way operated by any parasitic insects.

Ismael, at the age of 32, is shocked to learn the same thing. This thread is getting embarrassing

WAT! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flea_circus

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

one of my friends thought this and it was since passed into running joke territory

no but seriously, what is this about?

i mean i can see that there's rarely anything to size them against in the big white antarctic, but why would anyone then automatically think okay here's a bird i could play tag with

u could still play tag w/it tho

But you could make the same assumption with ostriches in the big yellow desert (or wherever they live), and in that case you'd be right!

I'm still in touch with several grown adults who genuinely believe there's 'something' to supernatural claims about ouija boards, despite its fairly obvious origins in parlour games / illusions which utilised the (admittedly fucking spooky) ideomotor effect.

aw no-one said 'where babies come from'

I've had a lot of experiences in my adult life with mispronouncing words I understood as part of written text, but hadn't heard aurally in the context of conversation etc. For example, I was well into my twenties before I knew the word "vehement" wasn't pronounced veh-hee-ment. I wish others would politely correct you when you do that instead of letting you blindly sound like an idiot.

I'm a bit like that, but now I'm in the habit of saying works incorrectly, I can't get out of it. Canal is not pronounced can-el, but there's fuck all I can do about it now.

^ This happens to me all the time too - so much so that I actually now find it quite amusing when I realise, midway through a sentence, that a word I've never heard before is looming at the end. I suppose that people who talk a lot, rather than reading, must find the same with spelling. It only annoys me when some moron uses it as an opportunity to score cheap points (sadly fairly often)

I was going to start a thread like this, but it was going to be more about 'life lessons' that took you forever to learn, rather than trivia.

Anyway it's taken me this long to fully realize how unreliable first impressions can be when it comes to people.

but why would anyone then automatically think okay here's a bird i could play tag with

haha

TAL have an episode on this in the "best of" section on their wesite. people who thought unicorns were real, etc., lots of awkward silences at cocktail parties: good stuff.

i like to tag birds. (runs)

There's a penguin here and he wants to say "you didn't touch me ner ner ner"

I thought penguins went "weh weh weh"

I'm still in touch with several grown adults who genuinely believe there's 'something' to supernatural claims about ouija boards, despite its fairly obvious origins in parlour games / illusions which utilised the (admittedly fucking spooky) ideomotor effect.

― Huey in Bristol (Huey in Melbourne), Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:08 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you couldnt get me in the same room as a ouija board

I was about 35 when I figured out Open Sesame = Open Says Me.

i used to think HAZCHEM was a foreign word for danger like Achtung

I just figured out, like 2 days ago, that the lyrics are "highway to the danger zone"

(until then, thought they were "I went to to the danger zone")

ooh i like that

lol mandee those are even better

Nothing, as I'm not shockingly old.

Misheard lyrics are always better. The singer of my old band had this (intentionally) corny line that went "sleep all day til the telephone ring / head to the bar and shake that thing", the latter half of which I always thought was "head to the barber and shave that thing".

My friend always thought that Op Ivy song Take Warning went "skate boarding", which is way better.

Same with Sandy Shaw.

Ok I sounded this out several times in several different ways and I still don't get how this is a pun. Help?

I think that 'Shaw' is meant to sound like 'shore' - I don't hear it either

Sandy Shore.

Shaw is pronounced exactly the same as Shore, in England.

hows it pron in USA?

Well I guess it must be different, if people are having problems hearing it? Dunno.

I didn't even know it was her real name, tho.

The resolute desk in the White House is called that not because it’s where presidents sit while being purposeful and determined. It was built from the oak timbers of the British Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute.

that’s actually pretty cool. i always thought it was because it was as big and sturdy as a ship not cause it was built from one

I had no idea either. Some interesting history (on both)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolute_desk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Resolute_(1850)

TIL: four nuclear missiles were detonated during the Cuban Missile Crisis - two by the U.S. and two by the Soviet Union. Doing this during DEFCON 2 conditions seems like a bad idea and I'm kinda shocked that we're all still here.

Ned Ludd was actually a folkloric figure whose name was appropriated by the Luddite movement several decades after he (or the person/people he was based on) lived. I'd always assumed he was the leader of a social movement! Shows you how much I know about British industrial history.

Wow, I just realised that “cuckold” and “cuckoo” are part of the same concept. I had thought the former was just infidelity, or maybe it’s come to mean that.

cuckoos notoriously leave their eggs in other birds nests for them to rear or that was the myth anyway. So I can see why it would tie in with the idea of cuckold though I thought cuckold was the passive role possibly victim. Though the understanding all seems to deny free will on the wife/female role in the situation.

i was thinking it must at least go back to Molière, but a quick check at wiktionary shows a quote a hundred years earlier from Rabelais. but i think you're otm about laying eggs in another's nest

Basically all of Western Europe is on the same time zone. Except for Portugal and the UK, if the UK counts as "europe" and not "the hell islands".

... and Ireland.

xp European cuckoos do this. American cuckoos raise their own young.

xp and Iceland

"trailblazing" has the literal meaning of marking trees to create a path. i always imagined someone running and leaving fire behind them.

... and Ireland.

― I've left the box of soup near your shoes (Tom D.)

your country is basically fine but tainted by proximity to The Worst Country

kind of like canada

Cardiff has only been the capital city of Wales since 1955. Wales had never had a capital city prior to 1955(!) and Cardiff, Caernarvon and Aberystwyth were all in contention.It was never even formally announced...

On 20 December 1955, Gwilym Lloyd-George, then Minister for Welsh Affairs and Home Secretary, proclaimed that Cardiff was the capital of Wales, in a reply to a Parliamentary question from David Llewellyn. Lloyd-George said that "no formal measures are necessary to give effect to this decision"[14]

haha wtf

Americans call it "soccer" because It's a truncation of "association football"

having watched man u all season, i'm more into disassociation football these days

(xp) Like rugger. It's English public school speak.

The person on the cover of REM's Lifes Rich Pageant is Bill Berry. I always thought it was Boris Karloff or someone who looked like him.

Ouch.

all of Western Europe is on the same time zone. Except for Portugal and the UK

Lots of "how are you getting on with the time difference" jokes when I moved.

hms resolute was one of quite of lot of ships dispatched to find the lost franklin expedition. franklin's two ships had become trapped in the ice (from which fate no one returned). resolute was one of at least three three further ships that that also became trapped in the ice!

luckily everyone got off them ok, since there were by so many other ships also searching nearby that ((unlike with the franklin crews) rescue was possible

jesus imagine if i was a professional proofing editor or something

that the US military didn't ban smoking on its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines until 2010

Formica was a mica substitute and the name is from 'for mica'.

xp I think if I was a mile underwater with a nuclear reactor I could probably use a cigarette now and then

Just step outside, if you hafta.

the designated smoking areas were called "smoke pits". I just never knew this happened on modern submarines loaded with nuclear warhead armed ballistic missiles. But yeah I can imagine the appeal of a pensive smoke before the end of human civilisation, but it does seem very much like a remnant of 1950's H+S protocols.

TIL this is a saluting emoji:🫡

It’s mystified me for years. I could never figure out what that appendage was.

Dave and Ansell Collins, who recorded the great reggae single “Double Barrel,” are not related. Dave’s surname is Barker, actually born David Crooks.

you could add to that the davis sisters and james & bobby purify (actually cousins)

Very much hoping James Purefoy has a cousin called Robert.

I don't think it's Dave Collins & Ansell Collins - more like 'Dave, and Ansell Collins'. How confusing.

Ansell Collins and Dave would have been more sensible.

Which reminds me, when I was very young Tony Orlando & Dawn were always on TV and the name confused me because I couldn’t figure out which of the two ladies was Dawn. I finally got it at the shockingly old age of 8 or so.

I never knew Dick Van Dyke played the old banker in Mary Poppins until a rewatch with my kids some 20+ years later.

deferred interest

pull the other one, it's called Smith