Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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?

How a candle works.

Practically everything.

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

DO you have a Mac?

The best things about macs is that making any character is stupid easy.

¢™
øºÖØ°

&¶¶¶¶¶¶

!

That (most) BMWs are named according to engine size (I was a car freak as a child but never knew this until being informed by a German flatmate while I was a PhD student).

i.e. 318 = 3 series 1.8 litre engine etc.

Didn't know that black and green olives are identical, just different stage of maturity, until a few months ago.

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

I've got a mac and I still don't know how to do any of, um, ^ those ^

I end up going to wikipedia and copy-and-pasting when I want unusual characters

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")

I always thought that when I was boiling eggs, if a crack appeared, it was caused when I put the eggs in the pot. I was always slowly placing the eggs into the water as my arm burned and then watching the egg white start to slowly seep out regardless. I guess the eggs are just already cracked very slightly, enough that the cooking process exposes it. I feel a sense of relief

you’re putting your arm in nearly boiling water?

No definitely not I use a big soup spoon. Just gets hot up there when you’re gently placing

Delta Burke, O. J. Simpson, and Shannon Tweed co-starred in "1st and Ten", a football sitcom on HBO that ran for 80 episodes(!)

xps if you keep your eggs in the fridge, get them out to room temp a good while before you boil them.

Maybe more a "never thought about it" than a "just learned," but: olives are fruit.

You should still not put them in fruit salad.

Say goodbye to cracked boiled egg woes with an egg piercer!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_piercer
(I thought everybody had one of these in their kitchens, but apparently not, as recent pub conversations revealed.)

olives are fruit

and bananas are apparently berries?

I steam eggs for hard boiled, sixteen minutes in the basket.. they peel really easily

Same, but 12 minutes.

https://i.imgur.com/pfEnXNT.png

Anyway, related, apparently those seeds in strawberries are not seeds, they are called achenes:

The achenes of the strawberry are sometimes mistaken for seeds. The strawberry is an accessory fruit with an aggregate of achenes on its outer surface, and what is eaten is accessory tissue.

https://news.ncsu.edu/2016/05/strawberry-seeds-2016/

But in TIL world, apparently everything in Cheesecake Factory is made fresh in-house (*except* the cheesecake, lol).

after consideration i think calling the achenes “not the seeds” is kinda semantics nonsense. the seed is technically inside the tightly shelled achene. no opinion about saying the flesh of the strawberry is an accessory organ tho— just like “ok whatever.”

"They shall lament for the breasts."

It's odd, because my mental stereotype of Victorian-era poetry is that it's full of "breast" as a synonym for "chest" or "heart", e.g. "he held her to his breast" or "my breast pounds with emotion". I think I've mentioned it before, but I have a vivid childhood memory of having to read from a book to the rest of the class. I picked a Doctor Who novelisation, and - yes - the page I chose had Ian Chesterton saying the word "breast". Which meant that I had to say the word "breast" out loud to a class full of children, albeit that I was a child myself. I have said this before. It wasn't funny the first time. But it's too late to stop now.

The book? Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Breast-Women of Planet Penis. That's right. It was a First Doctor adventure. Written by Terrance Dicks. Although this being the 1980s he had to use a pseudonym because "dicks" sounds rude. His pseudonym? Terrance Memberofthepublic. That's right.

On a more serious note the novel may well have been The Time Warrior, which does indeed have the word "breast" in it.(PDF) And yet I associate the word with Ian Chesterton.

lol I wrote a book report in like third or fourth grade on a Doctor Who novelization

Cover art for the Time Warrior clearly repurposed from the cancelled title "Doctor Who and the Sontaran Disco Party"

omg, the lol I had at Paragraph 3, feeling the hook pull against my cheek.

For some reason I've been calling letter-sized paper "A4" for decades (this is in the US) but now I discover that actual A4 paper is a different size (as used in other countries).

disgusting

cultural appropriation is not cool

It should not be legal

Legal is a different size.

lol

Today I learned the etymology of "tragedy"

Wiktionary: "from τράγος (trágos, “male goat”) + ᾠδή (ōidḗ, “song”), possibly a reference to the goat-satyrs of the theatrical plays of the Dorians, or according to Beekes possibly to a goat given as prize, though the etymology remains uncertain."

I read too that some think it comes from the practice of sacrificing animals in public as a spectacle, etc.

There is a pleasant comic novel, set in ancient Greece, called Goatsong by Tom Holt.

Fun fact, the words satyr and satire are of separate origins.

The Great Mall of Milpitas was only built in 1994

how is that mall doing, btw? doesn't seem to be a growth industry, owning a mall

It’s doing great afaik

Tragedy
When the doeling's gone and you can't go on
It's tragedy
When the yearling cries and you don't know why
It's hard to bear
With no-one to save you, you're keema matar

Not shocking that I didn't know this, but as a Mad Men lover, this is a major wow concerning SCTV's Dave Thomas: "Starting his career at ad agency McCann Erickson, after one year, Dave Thomas became the head writer of the Coca-Cola account."

I still think I called that first. The minute the episode aired earlier in the season where they mentioned Don maybe joining I said "he's gonna do the Teach the World to Sing" coke ad in a post on ILX. I've found one other mention online from a blogger who suggested that around the same time.

Gary Lewis (of Gary Lewis and the Playboys) is the son of Jerry Lewis

Bernardo Silva has a dog named John Stones

The founder of publisher Simon & Schuster was the father of Carly Simon

That a musketeer is someone who wields a musket.
Not sure how this escaped me aside from visuals of people with swords. I thought they were pirate-adjacent? Nope.

mousketeers had mouse ears, no muskets.

Anthony Perkins's wife died as a passenger on the plane that crashed into the North Tower of the WTC.

Also a bit shocking to know he was married in the first place.

"wilco" as in "roger, wilco" means, "will comply".

Huh. Never knew that...

Margaret Rutherford and Tony Benn were first cousins once removed. Her father was William Rutherford Benn, who coincidentally murdered his own father while her (pregnant) mother hung herself when Margaret was three.

speaking of relations, Shirley maclaine and Warren beatty (siblings)

It never occurred to me until today that Denny Laine was in a band with the writer of 'Penny Lane'.

Hence the Rutles' double a-side, "W.C. Fields Forever/ Denny Lane".

Lol

Venus Williams is still playing. 46 next month.

she still strikes the ball really well! if she has to move too much it's over though.

But can she fly a plane?

uhh.. the connection between 'amicus' (friend) and 'amigo' (friend)

Anthony Shaffer (of Sleuth, Frenzy and The Wicker Man fame) and Peter Shaffer (of Equus and Amadeus fame) were identical twin brothers. Also Peter was in a relationship with Paul Giovanni, the composer of the music in The Wicker Man.

Gently, Johnny!