Things you were shockingly old when you learned

The Canadian one I'm obsessed with is 'sorry.'

I never knew about the “sore-ee” until I got to know a couple people who grew up (separately) in Victoria. One had a really pronounced “aboot” but the other two didn’t.

Beastcrawl is really Breastcrawl

https://i.imgur.com/qyqftuc.jpg

That this is a photo of Lauren Bacall and Vice President Truman, taken less than a month after FDR's fourth inauguration.

Man was only VP for only 83 days!

Even in not-great pictures, Bacall is a stunner.

It is interesting that people-who-can't-find-the-ð-and-the-þ-on-their-keyboard roundly spell it Gudmundsdottir instead of Guthmundsdottir

Even google wants to correct me

Is there any purpose to a capital eth (Ð) beyond typing Icelandic in all-caps? Can a word/name begin with Ð?

Thor?

No, hold on I'm getting my eths and thorns mixed up.

Þor. Thorn is a hard "th", eth is a soft "th" and would seem to always follow a vowel-- Höðr, i.e

xp

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative [ð], which is the same as the th in English that, but it never appears as the first letter of a word, where þ is used in its stead. The name of the letter is pronounced in isolation (and before words beginning with a voiceless consonant) as [ɛθ̠] and therefore with a voiceless rather than voiced fricative.

So that's that, then

A completely useless upper-case letter

It is interesting that people-who-can't-find-the-ð-and-the-þ-on-their-keyboard

tbf this was standardised in the 1980s; if the subs and typesetters at music papers started looking for their ð keys and slugs at the time, the issue would be 1,662 weeks late by now and we would all have to be listening to Hipsway and Hue & Cry

Is everyone learning Icelandic all of the sudden?

a bit of homework:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp0sim1RVfI

Hmph.

If 80s kids like me had to correctly style Mötley Crüe, Motörhead, and Hüsker Dü, you pansies can deal with the occasional þ or ð.

We had no computers so we had to get our shit done with typewriters and hot metal and linotrons and photo-offset.

Uphill, both ways, in the snow, beeyotches.

TIL = Today I Learned

Excellent meta-TILing

Swag stands for “stuff we all get” – thanks NYT crossword

Wait! I misread the clue, that’s not true. NEVER MIND ITS BEEN A WEEK

^classic example of a backronym

it took an emoji-filled tweet to tip me off that Herbert Hoover's VP had Native American ancestry:

History of US Vice Presidents:

👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏼👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👩🏾

— Sarah DEMOCRACY IS BACK Parcak (@indyfromspace) November 7, 2020

Born on January 25, 1860, in Topeka, Kansas Territory, before its admission as a state in January 1861, Charles Curtis had roughly ​3/8 Native American ancestry and ​5/8 European American. His mother, Ellen Papin (also spelled Pappan), was Kaw, Osage, Potawatomi, and French. His father, Orren Curtis, was of English, Scots, and Welsh ancestry. On his mother's side, Curtis was a descendant of chief White Plume of the Kaw Nation and chief Pawhuska of the Osage.

people keep failing to mention that she is also the first not-bald VP

it's a red letter day for the haired

Saw a similar meme that had a fly on Pence

Curtis was no friend to his own people, unfortunately.

tbf he wasn't 100% to blame for the legislation that bears his name (source: I just learned about it on Wikipedia):

While serving as a Representative, Curtis sponsored and helped pass the Curtis Act of 1898; it extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory. As such, it ended their self-government and provided for allotment of communal land to individual households of tribal members, after they were registered on official rolls. It limited their tribal courts and government. Any lands not allotted were to be considered surplus by the federal government, which sold plots to non-Natives. Implementation of this act completed the extinguishing of tribal land titles in Indian Territory

In the usual fashion, by the time the bill HR 8581 had gone through five revisions in committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, there was little left of Curtis' original draft. In his hand-written autobiography, Curtis noted having been unhappy with the final version of the Curtis Act. He believed that the Five Civilized Tribes needed to make changes. He thought that the way ahead for Native Americans was through education and use of both their and the majority cultures, but he also had hoped to give more support to Native American transitions.

(also tbf his response has a whiff of, "I wanted it to be slightly oppressive, but that's a bit much, chaps")

Swag stands for “stuff we all get” – thanks NYT crossword

alternatively it means "shitty wild ass guess"

Scooby wiggles ass grotesquely

The stupidest bacronym I ever heard was during a boat trip on the Thames when the tour guide proudly announced to his audience of mainly Chinese tourists that "wharf" stood for "warehouse at river front".

I've been calling the Buddhist zen slap stick the wrong thing for years, thought it wasa ku stick turns out its Keisaku or kyosaku.
Loved the idea of the one revalatory moment where you are woken up from not connecting 2 ideas by having a quick slap from the master's meditation aid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keisaku

I’ve always heard it as “scientific wild ass guess” because that’s funnier.

tony from "west side story" and ben horne from "twin peaks" are the same guy!

wait till you find out about Riff

omg

Easy, Action!

I was today years old when I read this tweet. I wonder if Charlie can sweat.

I was today years old when I learned that Charles was 29 when he met a 16 year old Diana and said "I remember thinking what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was” pic.twitter.com/QdlsnmaVNq

— Sorcha Ní Nia (@Luiseach) November 15, 2020

ok wow. had no idea

Axl Rose is an anagram of 'oral sex'.

A quick search reveals that this piece of information has been on the record on ILM since 2001 (pre-9/11 in fact) and I assume everyone who was a teenager when Guns 'N Roses hit the big time has always been in the know, but yeah, for me today is that day.

also, it's Guns N' Roses. #newinformationoverload

"axl rose is an anagram for oral sex"

w. axl rose is an anagram for oral swex

― ┗|∵|┓ (sic), Monday, April 9, 2012 3:07 PM (eight years ago)

Swex Child o’ Mine

my michelle is an anagram for "chilly meme"

Just heard 'Soul Makossa' for the first time, then researched and unsurprisingly discovered that Michael Jackson settled out of court with Manu Dibango.

The life expectancy of a gray squirrel is 10 years but the average life span is 18 months. An old squirrel would be 4 years old. An estimated 15 to 25 percent of young squirrels survive their first year. After the first year there is a 50 to 70 percent survival rate. About 1 percent of squirrels in a given year will survive longer than 5 years.

there's a reason why squirrels always look like they got caught stealing the golden acorn. they live in a state of perpetual terror

Aka, "acting squirrelly."

(.)(.)

^squirrel eyes

last month someone posted a photo on nextdoor of an eastern rat snake strangling a squirrel in a park like a mile from my house. that is when i learned we have eastern rat snakes in my neighborhood and that they attack squirrels :(

Also just heard Joe Cocker's 'Woman to Woman' for the first time! Never would've guessed Cocker as the source of that famous hip hop sample (I'll let you check it out and surprise yourself if you're unaware).