Things you were shockingly old when you learned

just tonight i learned that in french you put a space BEFORE question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons! ??!?!? this is madness !

srsly what is it with the french

people have been trying to unravel that one since Charlemagne

We still talking about Country & Western superstar Sheena Easton here?

http://i.imgur.com/yeoNyMv.jpg

helena bonham pardner

http://i.imgur.com/cgUNSLx.jpg

just tonight i learned that in french you put a space BEFORE question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons!

is hanle y french

There was one of those 3-D computer-generated shows starring the Mouse. Soundtrack by They Might Be Giants

Annnoyed me at :59 how fast the characters disappeared from them leaving the gate to when the camera pans to its wide shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xGHrjXH9Gk

ok so my kid is now OBSESSED with this show, that sequence in particular. so now I spend like 20 minutes a day picking out dumb idiosyncrasies like that. bothers me that none of the characters are really dancing to the actual rhythm of the song. also very odd that they keep getting safety scissors as a mousekatool yet are totally cool riding around in faulty hot air balloons and flying airplanes without seatbelts. in one episode they went to fucking Mars because Martian Mickey forgot where he buried a treasure chest full of hot dogs. idk man this show is weird.

and another thing: how to properly use the quote function

Figured there had to be some video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSfU5Zmgioc

The What's Up vs. What I Am thread reminded me of something.

At least twice in the 1990s, I heard the term brah/bra/bruh, when used to mean brother or homie, and could not understand why someone was referring to their friend as if he were lingerie.

Indeed there is an Edie Brickell song that goes, "Sitting on the front porch in Oak Cliff with my bra." The song is called, in fact, "Oak Cliff Bra." I distinctly remember wondering why she needed to tell us that not only was she sitting there, but also that her bra was there. So were all the garments she was wearing, one presumes.

It was only yesterday that I realized she wasn't talking about a brassiere, but rather a person whom she regarded as a sibling or friend.

That apparently etymologically the dog in Hot dog is a real canine. Not sure where it could have come from otherwise but source i read had there being such a widespread rumour that sausages meat basis was so dodgy that it did contain real dogs and cats.

it took me a good long while to figure out what people meant when they started writing MAGA in things. thought it might be a trade agreement i didn't know about. it also took me a while to figure out that pussy hats were supposed to look like cat ears and that people weren't just really bad knitters. i was old when i figured these things out.

That ammonia and bleach aren't the same thing. I used to think ammonia was the scientific term and bleach was what was generally sold in stores, perhaps diluted and/or scented for the consumer. It may have been the King of the Hill episode in which Peggy recommends mixing them in her newspaper column, which Hank realizes will produce chlorine gas, a poison that clued me in.

I discovered that fact by actually mixing ammonia and bleach at my high school job like a dumbass and very nearly asphyxiating. Scary as fuck.

I don't know if this is necessarily knowledge that I should have acquired by a certain age, but I was surprised to just learn that Tommy Douglas is Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather.

I knew all about Jimmy Page's pre-Zeppelin studio work, but had no idea that was him on Joe Cocker's "With A Little Help From My Friends." I just learned that yesterday.

just tonight i learned that in french you put a space BEFORE question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons! ??!?!? this is madness !

Oh holy shit, I wasn't checking the right punctuation marks. You're right: they do have a space before exclamation marks.

But def not before question marks in the RC article.

yeah not the others though. huh.

I realized last week that the Fleetwood Mac song I thought was called "Surrender" was actually the mythically famous song by them that I thought I'd never heard before, "Rhiannon"

in my defense, I don't go out of my way to listen to Fleetwood Mac but that's still incredibly embarrassing

Have you checked out Cheap Trick's "Rhiannon"?

Not a patch on Rainbow's "I, Rhiannon" imo

I thought it was called "Brianna" for a long time

No retreat, baby, no rhiannon

I'm gonna take you by the hand
And make you understand
Rhiannon

Werner Erhard, the creator of est training, is not a German but an American and that's not his given name

The song's close to twenty years old, but I just found out that "Zombie Nation" is the name of the band, not the song. The song is actually called "Kernkraft 400" for some stupid reason, even though "Kernkraft 400" is not spoken at any point in the song and in fact the only words in the song are "Zombie Nation." They couldn't have just called it "Zombie Nation"?

I just realized that "companion" means "person you eat bread with."

I knew about ponies and horses, but the fact that an "ox" isn't a distinct species but just a catch-all word for cattle trained to be draft animals was a total surprise to me recently.

Per the earlier discussion about 'Rhiannon', I think I thought until last year that 'River Deep, Mountain High' was Ike & Tina's cover of 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' (which doesn't even make sense chronologically). Just imagine my surprise and awe and wonder when I actually heard the song for the first time.

I just realized that "companion" means "person you eat bread with."

― been there, not done that (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, March 31, 2017 2:10 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that was in the same book I just read about etymology The Etymologican.
It has recognisable roots if you look at it closely. com pan ion.

Yeah, and since I love this kind of thing (conspiracy = people breathing together), it should have been one I'd already noticed and loved!

I forget whose observation this is, but etymology puts you in closer touch with the mot juste. It is better to speak of a dilapidated wall than a dilapidated raincoat, just as speaking of a threadbare raincoat makes more sense than speaking of a threadbare wall.

Since it's Easter I'll admit to not realizing the Mott the Hoople song title "Roll Away the Stone" was anything but a rock and roll reference until Alice Bag posted her version (with helpful graphic) on fb.

https://alicebag.bandcamp.com/track/roll-away-the-stone

rats and mice are different species????? what?????????????????????????????/

did you think a mouse was just a baby rat

mice are just domesticated rats iirc

xp yes

Mice are the ponies of the rat kingdom, iirc

i thought so

weirdly I have known since middle school that mice were mus musculus and rats were rattus rattus.

However I was in my twenties before I learned that soft drinks were so named because there's no liquor in them.

rats and mice are different species?????

I suppose if one's only point of reference is cartoons, then rats are just mice that smoke cigarettes and act like hoodlums.

yes!

this week i learned that the chorus of Dancing Queen isn't "you can dance! you can die!"

haha

rats and mice are different species????? what?????????????????????????????/

― flappy bird, Sunday, April 16, 2017 10:35 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How closely related are they?
Assume that they have a not that distant shared ancestor.
Though mutation over generations over time with something that breeds as frequently as they do and so on.
They do seem pretty static though.

down vote
True rats and mice are rodents that constitute part of the subfamily Murinae in the family Muridae. The Old World house mouse is Mus musculus, the brown rat is Rattus norvegicus, so they are members of two different genera in that family. It is estimated that they split from a common ancestor 12-24 million years ago. Just to put that in perspective, the rodent lineage (including rats and mice) and the primate lineage (apes, monkeys, humans) diverged about 80 million years ago.

So says the first Google hit.

the caribou is the north american species of reindeer

I think I was about 30 when I learned that christians, muslims, and jews all believed in the same god. I was like wtf, forget all you people. People are the worst.