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

That Duffel coats are named after a town in Belgium where the cloth is made.

Did not know that. Did know that denim was from Nimes.

train between london, brussels and amsterdam goes through it, which was the first time i realised.

levi strauss wasnt a surname, its a shortened "levi's traussers"

wow, at denim origins.

Many years ago I dimly heard "Armand Hammer bought Arm & Hammer so people would stop asking if he owned it."

Sometimes my mind changes that to the Mandela effect memory "Claude Levi-Strauss bought Levi-Strauss so people would stop asking if he owned it."

Denim came from Nimes, but jeans came from Geneva

Genoa.

... which is called Gênes in French.

Tangent spinning off from Geneva/Genoa/Gênes:

We also get the word "gin" from Geneva > jenever.

Jenever and juniper are related by the words' obvious similarity, not descent or derivation.

Ginevra de Benci, the Leonardo portrait in Washington, had juniper as her emblem.

Ginevra, of course, is related to Guinevere and eventually Jennifer.

So if (like me) you know a Jen who likes gin, she is merely obeying the logic of language.

"Jenever and juniper are related by the words' obvious similarity, not descent or derivation."

She rides a dappled mare.

Yall got me down the jeans rabbithole and I arrived at the 17th c. Master of the Blue Jeans - the floppy hat/demin jacket/hand pie pose didn't start on instagram in 2018, more like 1680

https://kunstfinder.com/kunstwerk/master-of-the-blue-jeans-a-beggar-boy-with-a-piece-of-pie-24866/

one for the anachronistic art thread perhaps

makes me wanna write a poem in a letter. the worst poem of all my poems.

shop the look

vintage patchwork denim jacket - £380
pie - £12 (whole)

The inhabitants have a sacred book called (as I remember it) The Book of the Machines that chronicles an earlier age where the people had become enslaved to machines (think: Industrial Revolution), leading to a revolt (think: Luddites) and the perpetual outlawing of machinery.

This sounds a wee bit like at least part of the plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz. I've not heard of this book! And yet I keep seeing the word "erewhon" a lot lately is it some crappy AI company now?

And yet I keep seeing the word "erewhon" a lot lately is it some crappy AI company now?

It's a very expensive (and somewhat cultlike as I understand it) L.A. grocery store.

"plangent" does not mean "plaintive". who'd'a thunk it?

― massaman gai (front tea for two), Thursday, October 8, 2026 3:05 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

must be something in the air: I misused this word just last week and was corrected. I've gone almost half a century thinking plangent meant something pleasant, similar to 'dulcet.' Turns out it doesn't mean that at all

it ofc means a member of the royal house that originated in anjou

the middle of all words are unnecessary details at best and outright lies at worst

Plantagenet from planta genista.

Genista means broom, and broom is the English word for that plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcJg6mYxw88

The brake lights on Mini Coopers form the Union Jack.

really fucking hate those stupid lights

language and tailights
Are both just assigned systems
while chuds kill us all

I plan to fight back by ignoring all taillights.

i’ma floor it baby

I only just made the connection with wieners and Vienna aka Wien. I thought it was just a silly name for a hotdog sausage!

Ich bin ein Wiener

danishes? in denmark called weierbrød

wienerbrød that is

The chequered pattern on police cars, ambulances etc is known as a Battenberg marking.

Just had a piece of the namesake cake, very tasty.

... also that Battenberg cake is English, not German.

So it should consider changing its name to Mountbatten?

Nah, unlike the British royal family it isn't German.

filmmaker Todd Field invented Big League Chew bubblegum, as a child, together with a minor league baseball player while working as a batboy for the team.

gateway drug

(there's a corner store not far from me that still sells candy cigarettes... I think they're made in Macedonia)

low TÁR I hope

Military sexual trauma (MST) is considered a significant public health issue and subject of research due to its prevalence and severe health consequences.

Is it here we were talking about the origins of fabric terms, often based on their presumed geographic origin?

That got me thinking about cambric / chambray and whether they might have something to do with Wales (Cambria).

No. Cambrai, in France, provides both cambric and chambray. One via Dutch and one via American English.

Cambria descends from Cymru, Latinized. Cambridge, as you lot will know, is unrelated.

You all probably know that Panama hats didn't come from Panama.

do bermuda shorts come from Bermuda?

yes

Shortly