Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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")

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

balut or gtfo

Oh that gross saying is OLD as the hills!

people have done research into "bucket list." it really didn’t exist in any kind of common use before the movie. the closest anyone has found is a single reference in a book from 2004, three years before the movie came out. but this seems to be a case of parallel thinking rather than evidence of actual popularity.

“Bucket list” uptick in 1990 to 95, interestingly

but not in the same sense.

1993, the phrase showed up in a different context: a National Labor Relations Board report indicating agenda items that must be postponed (getting warmer): “The conferees were told that if comments or questions came up concerning bargainable issues or items that required more information, these matters should be placed in a ‘bucket list’ to indicate that they could not be considered at the conference.

OED has two definitions for "bucket list." The first is:

"Computing. A list of buckets involved in the operation or design of a program. Also: a list of the items in a given bucket."

This dates to 1960.

The second is for the sense that is now much more common. Its earliest citation is 2006, in an article promoting the upcoming film.

ah i totally remember bucket list as a general term for life objectives before the bump.

before 2006? no you didn't.

ok

First appearance of "bucket list" on ILX:

I had never heard of The Bucket List before now. Is it like the mainstream version of Bubba Ho-Tep?

― jaymc, Wednesday, December 5, 2007 4:09 PM

Except for some indecipherable YouTube comment c&p'ed, every bucket list mention through 2010 is about the movie.

lol at Bubba Ho-Tep

No mention of “fucket list” here, until now.

It should be called a fugu list

sorry for getting aggro itt last nite

That's so funny because I would have sworn that I knew what a "bucket list" was before the movie came out! But I trust jaymc, this is his special interest.

I distinctly remember my dad LOVING that movie and thinking that "bucket list" as a concept was hiliarious and I genuinely don't remember anyone using that term before the movie at all.

i wanna try a bunch of shit before i die. my FAFO list.

if the final thing on your list kills you, that's not a bucket list, it's the blue whale challenge

blackout list is all the shit I've done while blind drunk that doesnt count

It's the same with "sweet summer's child". Someone found a single obscure piece of text from 1900 or whatever on Google Books that has the phrase and people think that somehow validated their false memory that they'd heard it before GoT. "My grand aunt used to say it, even if it wasn't written down". No, I doubt it.

I somehow convinced myself that "you want the moon on a stick" was a phrase that predated Lee and Herring. It did not.

Grand aunt. We've always said grand aunt.

And Tracer OTM about the loathsomeness of "bucket list".

I had wondered about Moon on a Stick. Used in Succession!

i have used "moon on a stick" with the kids, Richard Herring says he made it up as "the kind of thing a mum would say"

I had wondered about Moon on a Stick. Used in Succession!

Yes, in the same episode as Shiv says "give my love to Kevin" I think, those indie fuxxors"

Sorry, Kendall says it, not Shiv, and maybe not in the same episode as moon on a stick. Memory, eh?

i have used "moon on a stick" with the kids, Richard Herring says he made it up as "the kind of thing a mum would say"

Bucket Lust writer Justin Zackham: "I made it up as the kind of thing tedious normies on Instagram would say."

Bucket Lust being the inevitable porno parody movie.

You'll miss my awful attempts at covering typos with humour when the edit function comes.

"Don't let's ask for the moon on a stick. We have the stars." Who could forget that Bette Davis line.

Jon Langford from the Mekons and science fiction author/editor David Langford are brothers.

Heh, I remember when I first discovered that and impressed an acquaintance with this information

moon on a stick is my favorite state fair food

That there is a Greek island called Salamis.

I never sausage a place

Salamis often cited as the location of one of the most significant (naval) battles in history (480BC - the Greco-Roman Wars) fwiw.

I feel like the scale of time between like 600bce to 0 like, it defeats me. that is sooo long. like ppl treat it like the dif between 0 and 125ce. either or both of time and history are total bullshit.

Yeah and imagine this weird experience of the years counting down to zero, people must have been very on edge about it.

ya that’s not what i’m on about

like tell me a true story about something 500 yrs ago

500 years ago this month, the New Testament was officially translated into Swedish for the first time.

https://i.postimg.cc/59C83n6d/d09eab32276d5631229e9a43a5f12695.jpg

Romans had their own arbitrary dating system based on years elapsed since the founding of Rome, which date was ofc arrived at through pure guesswork during a much later age. But at least those legionaries would have heard of Romulus and Remus.