Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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.

hows it pron in USA?

I did know that the cheez-a-riffic guitar line in the Top Gun theme was Steve Stevens.

Did NOT know, I mean

It’s “belay that order”, not “delay that order” (as heard in the Navy and old Star Trek episodes).

i don't think i ever knew that was joni mitchell in blackface on the cover of that album until this year. think i read about it on ilm first! forgot about it and then read about it again in a review of the new ann powers book. i've looked at the cover a million times and i don't think it ever registered.

there are flight map screens on the backs of airplane seats. who knew? that's cool.

i just saw obama's sister on t.v.! auma obama! i had no idea. she was protesting in kenya. and getting teargassed! had no idea he had a sister.

Some planes include nose cone cameras as part of the in-flight entertainment menu too! You can't see much tbh

I'd tease you guys, but I was the guy who showed up at the airport with a 5-page stapled itinerary folded into quarters in my pocket.

When I saw everyone else scanning bar codes from their phone (as Satan prophesied) to board the plane, I went O fuck, where is that darn email.

Bar code was probably somewhere inside the 5-page itinerary, now that I think about it.

the number of times I've lost a physical boarding pass between check-in and the gate is absurdly high. the main reason I finally moved over to doing it electronically.

Things I haven't learned even though I'm shockingly old: how long to hold the barcode on the ticket scanner for so the gate will open while some fierce airport employee glares at me.

I went through some Digital ID security line last week at LGA. I didn't even have to show them the boarding pass, just gave them my ID and they scanned my face. Creepy, but it's not like they don't already know everything about me before getting on the plane anyway.

I have yet to transition to electronic boarding passes. I also have to print out the QR codes for Amazon returns. I get jittery thinking about having to find these files on my phone at a critical time even though I know there is probably a smart easy way to go about it that doesn't involve wasting paper.

the number of times I've lost a physical boarding pass between check-in and the gate is absurdly high

Same. Got paged once at JFK cause I lot one while looking at duty free makeup. Panicked when I heard my name over the loudspeaker obv. I like the digital scanning things at the gates. Very futuristic.

I'm not typically an app guy, but if your airline has one, it makes boarding passes a lot easier.

I learned recently that the lyrics to Buffalo by Stump are not just a random selection of phrases but a character sketch of a couple of American tourists in London.

that the word Benelux comes from the names Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg.
I mean, of course it does. obviously. so why didn't I notice before?

is anyone talking about benelux these days?

...also means "good light" in Latin.

the number of times I've lost a physical boarding pass between check-in and the gate is absurdly high

Happened to me once, I went to the gate, explained, dude instantly printed out a new boarding pass! So I think as long as it's before boarding there's nowt to fear.

is anyone talking about benelux these days?

Yesterday, because we were playing Twilight Struggle.

hate trying to open an app which will invariably want to update and hope internet service works in a boarding line. taking a screen shot of the code beforehand = the way imo.

1.print your boarding pass
2.take a photo of that on your phone
3.print that out
4.scan that in and save it to your phone
5.send it in a message to the internet
6.get it printed onto a tshirt on redbubble
7. simply board plane with ease

I only learnt today that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of 1964 movie Bedtime Story with David Niven and Marlon Brando. I also did not realise that 'The Hustle' was a remake.

Seersucker:

The word originates from the Persian words شیر shîr and شکر shakar, literally meaning "milk and sugar", from the gritty texture ("sugar") on the otherwise smooth ("milk") cloth.

thank you. and now i learn where the word came from.

From Sanskrit (śarkarā), meaning "ground or candied sugar", came Persian shakar and Arabic sukkar. The Arabic word was borrowed in Medieval Latin as succarum, whence the 12th century French sucre and the English sugar. Sugar was introduced into Europe by the Arabs in Sicily and Spain.

the word sucre always reminded me of an arabic word. so, i was in the right ballpark.

i imagine shîr is also the origin of the word “sheer” to describe very thin fabric?

Sheer sounds distinctly Germanic to me.

hmm you’re right

schiere "thin, sparse" (c. 1400), a variant of skere, from late Old English scir "bright, clear, gleaming; translucent; pure, unmixed." The Middle English word might also be from or influenced by the Old Norse cognate scær "bright, clean, pure." Both of these are from Proto-Germanic *skeran (source also of Old Saxon skiri, Old Frisian skire, German schier, Gothic skeirs "clean, pure"), from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut."

"mano a mano" means hand to hand, not man to man

A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean ‘more than once’ or continuously—so originally, to ramble is to ‘roam’ on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks.

A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean ‘more than once’ or continuously—so originally, to ramble is to ‘roam’ on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks. pic.twitter.com/85oefNHMfa

— Wylfċen (@wylfcen) April 10, 2024

I wouldn't call my reaction to this knowledge "shock" as much as "bitter amusement, and relief that two other people have been spared" but TIL that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are married.

(xp) Awesome.

xxp I like that one

yes.

I've been known to ILXle.

Literally this morning it struck me that Ludacris is a pun on his name, which is Christopher Brian Bridges. For a while he went by the name Ludichris, but he streamlined it.

His first album was called Incognegro, which is either genius or naff. Or both.

Andy Murray's dad was a former footballer who played for Hibs.

https://www.doingthe92.com/images/uploaded/previews/U2P29481.jpg

There is a fourthJonas Brother who isn't in the band. He's called Bonus Jonas.

Careful he flies off the handle when you call him that