Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Marmalade?

william of orange cats

Orange cats.

Among redheaded guys born in the the first half of the 20th Century in the US, I hear the nickname Rusty.

That a lot of online communities are pretty toxic. This one seems ok tho.

Rusty and Red are so nice. I hate the UK sometimes.

Carrot top less so

I do remember hearing the negative “…like a red-headed stepchild” growing up in slang regarding personal or societal rejection. I suspect that has more roots than mere dislike of gingerness as a trait itself. Does that slang exist in uk?

I don't know, tbh, the thing about the UK/Ireland is that there are probably more red-headed people here than anywhere else in the world, and that's got to be a factor somehow. It's like there's enough of them around to annoy people.

Got this from twitter, but I, too, never considered the meaning of the "This little piggy" rhyme as being about anything other than the piggy going shopping, or not, or having dinner, etc.

I always assumed 'red headed stepchild' meant it was an obvious sign that the kid was the product of adultery due to the uncommonness of the the trait

I seem to recall people where i grew up calling redheads.... "red"

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/scratchpad/images/0/02/600full-fraggle-rock-screenshot.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141211024155

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/scratchpad/images/0/02/600full-fraggle-rock-screenshot.jpg

I always assumed 'red headed stepchild' meant it was an obvious sign that the kid was the product of adultery due to the uncommonness of the the trait

― joygoat, Sunday, 23 January 2022 23:52 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

There was an advert, well back in the day. A happy family in the house, one daughter with long red hair. The milkman passes by, he has short ginger hair. The father looks at them both, then the mother and goes ‘hmmm…’. Father and mother both laugh, and get on with I dunno, breakfast maybe.

At the time, I was like oh vaguely accusing your wife of adultery is a funny thing to do, is it?

Ironically enough, advertisers in the UK absolutely love red haired people - children and women almost exclusively mind you - I imagine because they stand out?

Yeah - all the "ginger" taunting seems to be reserved to blokes..

Ruby Hamad says squaw is Algonquin for vagina I'm finding some alternative sources but it does look like usage has lead to it having a colloquial meaning along those lines. It was what I grew up thinking was just the common term for indian woman thanks to media representation etc.

I have read that the House of Orange associated the orange carrot to themselves as a publicity etc device and focused the cultivation of the plant in that colour. It appears that there was an earlier development of the plant in that colour but there is still a tradition that it was bred for the purpose of House of Orange propaganda/promotion. I'm also reading that prior to this point things like carrots were mainly livestock fodder. Reading that seed for orange carrots may have come from Islamic sources a while before, like 100 years or so. But up until a certain point a carrot was as likely to be one of a range of different colours and after a certain point it is stereotypically orange.

Oh & ginger was a spice used by the Romans and first written about 500 BCE in China

All the ginger root I've ever seen is light brown on the outside and white on the inside. It is neither red nor orange.

possibly the first time I knowingly ate ginger root was at Wagamamas where it was bright pinky-orange! I assume it's pickled in some way. But I eat the normal ginger root all the time now.

Mick Hucknall claims he was ginger-taunted

...and Hucknall's cinematic avatar in 24 Hour Party People is the first I heard of "ginger" as an insult. In the year of our lord 2002, when I was already thirtymumble years old.

Only after that did I learn that it was a Whole Thing in Britain, and there was even a documentary about gingers and ginger rights and ginger acceptance and the difficulty of ginger dating unless you went to a specifically ginger convention.

Yeah, documentary was nonsense, but hey.

the pink ginger in sushi places is dyed I believe

And now I am eating a ginger biscuit. Life is good.

The woman in Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World is on the ground because the woman who inspired it had a degenerative muscular disorder and could not walk.

She was firmly against using a wheelchair, so she would crawl everywhere.

i found that out a week or two ago!

only a ginger
can call another ginger ginger

it hasn't the same sting over here, and anyway redhead is the more common word ime

now if one said the word ginger with 2 hard gs it sounds so much more derogatory dunnit.

Yes! That seems to be the preferred pronunciation for the noun form these days.

I've only recently taken on board how bonkers French history is. Monarchy, revolution, republic, coup, empire, monarchy, coup, empire, monarchy, revolution, monarchy, revolution, republic, empire, republic - all in under 100 years.

deems is that the Tim Minchin song or did he nick a folk saying?

I mis-read that as Tin Machine.

Your occasional reminder that the main villain in the Take On Me video (who pursues Morten Harket with a pipe wrench) is played by Philip Jackson, who was Chief Inspector Japp in Poirot. pic.twitter.com/hX4HsHCKLb

— Jason (@NickMotown) January 30, 2022

!

No feckin' way!

Grendel isn’t a dragon

My dad called me today to inform me that "Tangled Up in Blue" is a series of sonnets.

I'll have to check that out! It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I took a look and it kind of works! Not the meter, I don't think, and the rhyme scheme is similar but not the same. But it does (arguably) divide into sections of three quatrains followed by a final couplet, as in a Shakespearean sonnet.

Though to make this work you have to consider the last line Dylan sings before "tangled up in blue" - e.g. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view" to be two lines, the last line of the third quatrain and the first line of the couplet. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point/ of view / tangled Up in blue."

James Williamson and Ron Asheton were in the same band at different times as early as the mid 60s. Hadn't realised until Williamson posted a photo of the Chosen Few from his time and said that.
He did apparently meet Asheton and Pop because of taht band though. BUt Asheton joined on bass after Williamson left.

That there's a UK Dennis the Menace in addition to our US Dennis the Menace... he seems more willfully naughty than the U.S. version.

The weird part is that they were both first published on March 12th, 1951; apparently just a coincidence.

Yeah, we got the US Dennis over here as an animated series, but he was just “Dennis”

And I think the UK version is titled "Dennis and Gnasher" outside the UK

the notoriously litigious DC Thomson must have been really fucked off. I joined the Dennis The Menace fan club and all I got was two badges and a membership card. The furry Gnasher badge was not very well made iirc.

Until recently I thought "consumption" (as it often appeared in old literature and movies, as in "she died of consumption") was a euphemism for alcohol-related illness, as opposed to it being just another name for tuberculosis

It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I just now learned that from reading your post.

I'm not an expert on rock festival history, but I was surprised to learn that Lou Rawls was one of the performers at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Liam is short for William