Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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

Sandy Shore.

Shaw is pronounced exactly the same as Shore, in England.

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.

The father who buys the mogwai was the bloke who sang Della & The Dealer.

Hoyt Axton. Also wrote "Mama Told Me Not to Come," "Joy to the World" and "Never Been to Spain" among many, many other songs.

Hoyt Axton's mom wrote "Heartbreak Hotel."

More like shockingly old when realizing, since the lyrics were burned into my memory without ever reflecting upon them: "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" was earworming in my head last night during a bout of insomnia, and as the words flowed through my head I realized the dock he was sitting on was in the Bay Area! All these years I was picturing a country-fried lil' dock near his home in Georgia, not a big ass seaport dock. Without thinking much about it, I felt the song as a retreat from the city, even though ships are rolling in and such and the hook specifies "The Bay" and there were a dozen other pop songs about the Bay Area at the time. #noonelistenstothelyrics

That's funny, I never knew that either, even though I just edited a profile of Otis's daughter that has a whole section about that song.

"Mama Told Me..." was Randy Newman

Things I didn't know until I read this thread: Mogwai got their name from a creature in a movie.

This isn't a "shockingly old when you learned", exactly, because of course I knew this. But the other day I came across a trivia question about Anne Hathaway - NOT the actress, but Shakespeare's wife. And it occurred to me that for a long time I'd kind of never been quite sure if Shakespeare had really existed, or if he was like a folk hero or a composite of different people or a pseudonym or something. I think at one point I must have read something about this and just retained it - that Shakespeare wasn't a really real person, but was more like Robin Hood or Jesus or something

"drawing room" being short for "withdrawing room"

Homer may have been a committee; Shakespeare was a dude

There's centuries of Shakespeare truther stuff, mostly from snobbish people who couldn't fathom a working class person like Shakespeare being able to write brilliantly.

I realized the dock he was sitting on was in the Bay Area!

Specifically Sausalito, I believe

Rather than being hollow chambers similar to bellows as I'd vaguely imagined, lungs are in fact filled with tiny expanding sacs called alveoli that process the drawn-in air.

Oh man, as an art kid “drawing rooms” were such a disappointment.

Lungs. During grade school education, all those hard plastic anatomical models and cross section diagrams sure made the internal organs seem like a series of elegant chambers and pipes. I’m not sure how much I’ve updated my mental model to really think of all that spongy stuff as squished tightly together.

For those who never knew it until this moment, Mark Twain was a Shakespeare "truther" who thought a man with such a poor formal education couldn't possibly have written the poems and plays. Twain preferred Sir Francis Bacon as pseudonym-Shakespeare, rather than Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford. Which opinion was truly ironic for a man whose entire formal education took place in the backwater village of Hannibal, Missouri, who basically learned the craft of writing while working for a printer's shop as a typesetter, but who ended his life as a world renowned author with an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

be that as it may twain had a hand in popularising the great line about all the works of william shakespeare actually being written by another man also named william shakespeare, which is about as perfect a refutation of the entire enterprise of shakespeare truthing as can be imagined

Only learned recently that the late Shelley Fabares was the niece of Nanette Fabray. They were both born Fabares; Nanette tweaked the spelling for her stage name.

Mos Def has been a background presence in my life for so many years, but I've never really focused on him. He exists at the edge of my vision. In the ambient occlusions at the corners of my mental sphere. And so it wasn't until five days ago that I realised his name is short for most definitely. I just never made that mental leap. And that isn't even his name any more. He calls himself Yasiin Bey now.

I've always been annoyed by the title of his debut album, Black on Both Sides. The packaging is a visual pun - it has his face on the front, and the back of his head on the back. But the pun it doesn't work. Because the front and back of a man's head aren't the sides. Of his head. They're the front and back. The album should have been called Black on Both Sides (Not Pictured). Or alternatively the packaging should have the left side of his face on the front, and the right side on the back. Then the pun would work. Or vice-versa. It could have the right side of his face on the front etc.

Not the front and back. The sides. Like David Bowie's Low.

This is really more a trivia thing than a "I was shockingly old before I realised it", but I grew up being fascinated with space, and I am old enough to remember the Challenger disaster. However it wasn't until two days ago that I realised that astronaut George Nelson flew on both STS-61-C - the mission immediately before the Challenger disaster - and STS-26, the return to flight mission that took place two years later. Presumably the run of missions cancelled post-Challenger just happened to be long enough for him to have another go at the shuttle.

Back of front face.

I've looked as Mos Def from both sides now

at

he nailed Ford Prefect so perfectly I can't picture the character as anyone else now

He was kinda charming in The Italian Job

On the DVD commentary track for that film one of the commentators jokes that his name stands for Mostly Definitive. That’s stuck with me for years.

(hitchhiker’s, not the italian job)

Hellenic just means Greek; nothing to do with Helen of Troy.

I met Yasiin Bey (when he was Mos Def) the summer of my 17th year— I was waiting in line to get into the Suzan-Lori Parks play ‘Topdog/Underdog’ and happened to be standing by the stage door. A huge SUV pulled up and out came Mr. Bey. He said to me, “Hey, how are you feeling?” and I replied, “Great! I’m excited to see you tonight, I am a big fan of your work,” and he smiled and said, “Thank you for coming, it should be a great show,” and then he went in the door. Nice guy, seemed genuine!!

It wasn't until earlier in 2026 that I realized that Detroit isn't on Lake Huron. I had some idea that the great lake went all the way down the mitten. I was literally at a wedding on the shore of Grosse Point Farms, looking at water, with my phone telling me "Welcome to Canada" and Uber was refusing to send a car to pick me up across the international border, and all along it was just Lake St Clair.

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

I know this is late pedantry, but just ftr: Greco-Persian Wars if you please (I doubt Rome was in much shape to fite on Greek isles in the early 5th BCE).

aka the Pepperonisian Wars

(sorry)

It wasn't until earlier in 2026 that I realized that Detroit isn't on Lake Huron.

That Detroit isn't technically a Great Lake city in the first place!

Michigan is my only unvisited state left east of the Mississippi. Hope to clear that up one day.

Awwww pp! Bring sunny and the whole fam! I recommend a beach vacation on the West Michigan lakeshore.

Some of our docks are quite bucolic. At the time he wrote it, SF was still an active major port as well as Oakland, but the majority of the docks are not.

I was told on my solo Oakland visit that George Lucas got the idea for ATATs from these things:

https://i.ibb.co/cKjGSdrB/Screen-Shot-2026-08-27-at-9-55-47-PM.png

George Lucas later dismissed claims that the AT-AT design was inspired by container cranes at the Port of Oakland (across San Francisco Bay from ILM's San Rafael offices), calling it a "myth"; animator Phil Tippett told the San Francisco Chronicle the same thing.[9]

I know this is late pedantry, but just ftr: Greco-Persian Wars if you please (I doubt Rome was in much shape to fite on Greek isles in the early 5th BCE).

― anatol_merklich, Thursday, 27 August 2026 22:24 bookmarkflaglink

d'oh, not pedantry at all - no idea what i was thinking! xerxes the famous.... roman.