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

i sorta had bauble in my head as a small decorative toy or even semi-precious item thingy, so— it made sense, but was not a familiar usage.

I always think of "baubles" as a term to use when someone is judgy about someone else wearing jewelry.

"Dry cleaning" of textiles doesn't mean cleaning without liquid, it only implies that the clothes are sloshing about in a liquid that isn't water.

oh yeah that blew my mind.

!!!

i accidentally brought my laundry to a Dry Cleaning concert

jeez. i thought they cleaned em on a hanger with a magic wand or something.

Dry cleaning chemicals have also been found to potentially cause Parkinson’s. When I heard this my jaw dropped bc my dad (who had Parkinson’s) wore dry cleaned clothing for as long as I can remember.

i guess i always thought dry cleaning was like they were blasted with heat/air and some powdered substance à la dry shampoo

the materials used in dry cleaning have gotten less toxic in the last few decades but they’re basically industrial solvents/degreasing agents used in manufacturing. a handful of former dry cleaning storefronts are listed EPA superfund sites, usually due to leaking chemicals contaminating groundwater

😬

Yeah next to a building i used to work at there was an empty lot which i discovered was a superfund site because there used to dry cleaners there.

used to *be a* dry cleaners

dandelion = "dent de lion" eg lion's tooth

If you don't know what a lion's tooth looks like, don't pretend you do, medieval Britons.

I think you should be blaming for the French for that one.

their real name should be FREEDOM LIONS

I think you should be blaming for the French for that one.

They knew better and called it piss the bed

Other French derivations I only found out about late in the day: mayday = m'aider, tennis = tenez (said before serving), , curfew = couvre-feu

I think the "dent" de lion refers to the root which was used as a food?

Mark Tulin of the Electric Prunes went on to be on the Buckingham Nicks lp. Just got that album on CD in a sale and saw the name credited so checked it was the same guy. Hadn't realised he'd gone on to much else. Is apparently playing in the band in the Poseidon Adventure too.

meaning "lion's tooth", referring to the coarsely toothed leaves.

ah, sorry

Yeah, thought it was the leaves.
Were people thinkingit was the yellow heads or the seeds or something?

I think the plant is supposed to help repair broken ground by depositing nitrogen in it. Remembering reading a book called Ecological Imperialism where the author talks about the positives of some weeds like them and nettles on that level as well as medicinal and culinary usage.

Piss-the-bed and lion's tooth are equivalent and both used in French, even if one may be more associated with the flower and the other with the leaf. The funny name comes from the plant's diuretic properties.

Checking now, the English did call it piss-a-bed at some point

occurred to me this morning, not sure why, that the name of the television show "Stranger Things" probably derives from the stock expression, "Stranger things have happened"

(xp) English speakers you mean.

https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/6603

Spent a long conversation in Franglais trying to explain what dandelions look like, to explain American homeowner obsession with perfect lawns. Many many adjectives thrown around before we realized it was the same word in both languages.

Since when do you care about Scots? (xp)

freedom to pee flowers

(xp) It's Scottish English, not Scots. They use it Ireland too.

"druthers" originates from "i'd rather"

That Bolivia is named after Simon Bolivar, I'd just never thought about it. I know, what a dummy.

caint bolieve it

Something clicked in my mind a couple of days ago. EVRi. The parcel company. It's the word "every". It seems obvious now, but based on the capitalisation I mentally read it as "eve-ree". It's every. The word every.

I learn from Wikipedia that it used to be Hermes, but after coming in for some criticism for refusing to pay its staff during the COVID pandemic the company solved that problem... by rebranding itself as EVRi. Which led me to one of those classic dot.com-boom-era rebranding articles, except that it's from 2022, the modern age:
https://www.designweek.co.uk/how-hermes-rebranded-as-evri-with-an-ever-changing-logo/

"The studio wanted to find a way to represent all the 'different people, different parcels, different places, different communities' which interact with the brand and its messengers. This translated to the name: Evri represents a phonetic spelling of 'every'. And the name in turn quite literally led to the creative response, which saw the studio partnering with Monotype to create a chamaleonic logo. Using what it calls 'variable font intelligence', Monotype created a tool, which is built into the typeface and makes it easy for Evri's teams to randomnise the fonts of each letter in the logo for different uses – resulting, in practice, in a whopping 194,481 different possible logo iterations."

The idea seems to be that every logo is rendered with the same colour scheme and layout, but the letters are in different fonts, so that each of their vans has a subtly different logo:
https://thebrandgym.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/evri.png

Except that the few non-professional photos of Evri trucks I can find all seem to use the same logo, so perhaps they gave up on the idea. Or perhaps they tried it once, until the first wave of trucks needed a repaint, and then held up their hands and said "no".

The animal with the longest lifespan is the Greenland shark, which can live anywhere from 250 to 500 years. (Trying to think of a Greenland-related joke to put here.)

i always love the idea of a fresh young whippersnapper tooling around the northern Atlantic and Arctic Seas at the time of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare etc still swimming through those waters now, reaching the end of its days and thinking 'thank God' probably...

What a post

just read the Greenland shark wiki and that's some straight up Alien nightmare fuel.

https://i.ibb.co/Ww9Z4Rr/Screenshot-2026-01-07-at-10-46-32-AM.png

lol

Baz Luhrmann was called Baz after Basil Brush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lpKqXuEu0Q