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

phased arrays... the other (tracking/targeting) parts are generally associated with that since they involve antennas

tldr: if you own a router that has a bunch of long, adjustable sticks (antenna) off of it - congratulations, that's an example of a phased array.

I don’t know if borderline esoteric character actor knowledge belongs here, but I just learned that TV supporting actor mainstay/“that guy” actor Bruce Kirby (he played Blanche’s Iraq war vet boyfriend in an ep of Golden Girls) was the father of Bruno Kirby. Put this together tonight after watching a Columbo in which they both appear (though not as father and son).

so i came here to post “Nights in White Satin” in the ‘slightly ruin a song title’ thread…
but it turns out that has always been the *actual* song title??? wtf, “Knights in White Satin” is so much cooler and more psychedelic.
Moroder gets it…

very disappointing, justin hayward

plumbus: the latin word for the chemical element lead; hence "plumbing"

― budo jeru, Saturday, June 28, 2025 4:18 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

does that need further explanation in an age a long time after people are aware of lead poisoning. & wouldn't think of making pipes that carry drinking water out of the stuff or using it as a sweetener in the production of cider etc.

Guessing plumbing didn't come straight from the Latin but by way of French ie plomb, plomberie

During her heyday as a porn actress, around 1975, True was hired by a real estate business in Jamaica to appear in their commercials. While she was working there, the Jamaican government banned asset transfers in response to sanctions imposed by the U.S. after the election of Michael Manley, a supporter of Fidel Castro. In order to return to the U.S., True would have had to either forfeit her pay or spend the money before she went home. True, who by this time was trying to break into the music industry, chose to invest the money in recording a demo of "More, More, More", a song she had been working on with record producer Gregg Diamond, her partner in a project called The Andrea True Connection. Remixed by recording engineer Tom Moulton, "More, More, More" became a favorite in nightclubs. It reached no. 4 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, no. 1 on the U.S. disco chart, and no. 1 on the national singles chart in Canada. It also peaked at no. 5 in the UK and no. 9 in Germany.

Indie-guilt: I knew her from being name-checked in a Yo La Tengo song but I had no idea the origin story of "More, More, More".

so i came here to post “Nights in White Satin” in the ‘slightly ruin a song title’ thread…
but it turns out that has always been the *actual* song title??? wtf, “Knights in White Satin” is so much cooler and more psychedelic.

100 Songs about Knights

Steve Shasta, as soon as I saw the name “True” I knew this was going to be crazy fact. I only knew because I was obsessed with Gregg Diamond for a while

Google tells me her musical career ended because of a goiter

"I had no idea the origin story of "More, More, More"."

So I looked this up, because I've never heard it before - according to Robert Christgau "(True) projects an exhibitionistic suck-and-fuck tractability that links the two pervasive fantasy media of our time", which sounds interesting - and it sounded oddly familiar. And, lo and behold, I learn that it was sampled to make the piano hook on Len's "Steal My Sunshine". That's where I've heard it before. That's an example of something that, stage voice, I was shockingly old when I learned (it).

It's actually a slow-paced piano-and-horns ballad. Not really disco. I couldn't detect any kind of exhibitionistic suck-and-fuck tractability. And yet it was played in discos by disco people, so what do I know. Perhaps they could detect an exhibitionistic suck-and-fuck tractability.

i didn't know that i knew the song "more more more," which i do, or recall it sounding so thin and uh, not good.

heresy

More more more is disco. There are slow disco songs. Claudja Barry’s Love for the sake of Love is another gem touched by the hands of Tom Moulton

Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express (1994) was influenced by Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood (1987).

WKW played homage to him in the Chinese title 重慶森林 (Chongqing Forest) playing off of the Chinese title 挪威的森林 (beautiful/powerful forest) of HM's Japanese book's title ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood).

from https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/poet-time-wong-kar-wai-chungking-express

Several people have noticed a connection between Chungking Express and the novels of Haruki Murakami, and I notice that many of the music cues on the soundtrack CD have been given titles drawn from Murakami’s books.

I especially liked his early novel Pinball ‘73 and his short story A Girl, She is 100%. Now that he’s started worrying about the onset of middle age, I’ve kind of lost interest. But he and I are about the same age, and we had very similar formative experiences: we were both marked by what I call “Seventh Fleet culture” in those years between the Korean War and Vietnam. We both bought the music, the cigarettes, the lifestyle; seeing big foreigners on the streets made a strong impression on us. What I identified with in his books was the sense of being a certain age: of being not yet so far out of your twenties that you’ve forgotten them, but not yet feeling middle-aged.

oof please don’t do things that would make me lose respect for WKW. (i loathe HM’s writing)

Slow sure but there is no world in which "More More More" is a ballad!

"rust never sleeps" was a slogan for a rust preventing paint
https://kellyipblog.lexblogplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/551/2018/03/RUST-2.jpg
mark mothersbaugh mentioned it to neil young who made it the album title
for some reason i thought of it is as "i am rust man, i am always awake" like he's tetsuo or something

for some reason i thought of it is as "i am rust man, i am always awake" like he's tetsuo or something

https://images.theconversation.com/files/44518/original/w7qjbkmw-1395629312.jpg

Just learned the phrase “Salad days” comes from Shakespeare and is not a modern American thing (I kind of thought it was a 60s california surfer thing)

I mean, sure — living in England in Shakespeare's time, the day you got to eat a salad was probably the best day of your entire life.

They preferred to go surfing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHuIpse1nM4

the day you got to eat a salad was probably the best day of your entire life.

lol. it's more likely derivation is the metaphoric connection between greenness and youth, but I liked yours better.

A green salad would have killed an Elizabethan child

not paired with a good stout, I bet

Until earlier today I assumed zebra crossings had been invented in the 1920s, when cars were relatively new. It seems like an obvious idea. But no, they were apparently invented in the late 1940s, and the name was coined by James Callaghan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_crossing

The first one was painted on Slough High Street. Until that point there were Belisha Beacons, and studs, but no zebra stripes. For a while crossings just looked like this:
https://i.imgur.com/j0VYbZl.jpeg

You learn something every day.

A green salad would have killed an Elizabethan child

cold roast parsnips and wild fennel with brown sauce, there you go

africa is the 2nd largest continent and larger than north america.

i just now realized that "electric guitar" is a riff on the old show "juke box jury"

(the talking heads song "electric guitar")

innocent is the opposite of nocent

^ I just learned a new word today ;-)

when you piss on someone's chips, you are pissing on their kindling, so it won't light. Not chips from the chippy.

Oh! Still, may as well piss on their chips from the chippy as well.

Yeah I guess once you've got going it's hard to stop

Does this mean the chips in Whizzer and Chips are also wood chips?

that would be a no

I wouldn't know, I was a whizz-kid (death death death to chip-ites)

Sorted out for chips and whizz

forever a Whizzkid!

The Spanish equivalent of "lefty loosey righty tighty" is "La derecha oprime, la izquierda libera" - "the right oppresses, the left liberates" (this may be a load of bollocks as it comes from some rando on the internet)