Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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?

Well I guess it must be different, if people are having problems hearing it? Dunno.

I didn't even know it was her real name, tho.

wasn't, rather

Sri Lanka is not south of the equator.

sports bras were originally made from two jockstraps stuck together

peak "tell me you're a butch without telling me you're a butch"

Conkers ward off spiders.

citation needed

I've heard of that.

i only know waht conkers are because my kids watched the show kipper-- and i had horse chestnut trees in my yard growing up so i knew what they are, just unknown term to me

correction "tree"

i just realized i've never listened to the actual original version of the Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime"!

dunedin is just a translated edinburgh

i was in my late 40s i think when it occurred to me that the word written as "epitome" & the one said like "epitomy" were the same word. i guess this must mean that i never tried to write this word anywhere, nor read a passage containing it out loud.

Epitome seems like a word used far more in spoken language as an intensifier (similar to "literally") and not nearly as frequently in writing.

was at a wedding for a good a friend years ago and his best man/brother gave a toast and pronounced it eppy-tomb.

A repository for used medical pens?

Last resting place for a duelling sword?

I’m sure I have related this before but I was convinced there was a separate word “misled” that was pronounced “mizzled” and it meant pretty much the same thing as the correctly pronounced word except with a tinge of harried frustration about it

apart from epitome (also same as above) my example of the above (isnt there a term for a word you can use perfectly correctly but pronounce incorectly apart from "snobbery"?) is 'awry' which i pronounced awry for years until i heard it pronounced awry at which point the penny dropped

I don't know about you.
but if I can't find an acute accent,
it's going to sound like epee to me.

I love these kinds of stories. For awhile as young i thought awry was a weird word of it’s own unrelated to a-wry. As a kid my word proficient dad didn’t realize facade was like, façade, he just didn’t get it.

Not when he was a kid, i meant he told me when I was a kid.

A repository for used medical pens?

― Stevo, Wednesday, September 25, 2024 10:38 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Last resting place for a duelling sword?

― Stevo, Wednesday, September 25, 2024 10:44 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are you Will Shortz?

my version of this is "behemoth," which i'm pretty sure i first encountered on a magic: the gathering card and which i pronounced and stressed similarly to Beowulf, i.e., BAY-uh-moth

When I was a kid I encountered the "that door is a jar" word puzzle before I knew what "ajar" meant and I was so terribly confused

A kid on the playground once told me a joke

Q: What do you call a herd of cows masturbating?
A: Beef Strokin-Off

Except I didn't know what 'masturbating' meant so I just laughed like I 'got it'

I worked as a valet parker in hs in the early 80s and i cannot remember which car brand but it always announced “your door is ajar” ad foreverr it was infuriatingly persistent.

I got into an argument around age 6 that the word curb was a mispronunciation of the word curve. I could not imagine there was actually a word “curb” that ended in a b nor that it referred to something with an obvious curve (a little elevated pavement connected to the road). I was wrong! I felt immense shame after that.

I know someone whose first language is Spanish who consistently says "curve" when they mean "curb." They also talk about people "owning" them money.

In "free stuff" posts on social media I see "curve alert" posts now and then.

Kind of a relief that at least my logic was good.

Ditto for awry!

I try to kerb my enthusiasm, which definitely keeps it damped. Lightly moist really.

https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2020/05/curb-kerb.html?m=1

english is ridiculous

During the first lecture of my MA the professor (a brilliant woman I was desperate to impress) asked the student sitting next to me to read a passage that contained the word 'gaol'. To my shock he pronounced it 'jail', not 'gaul'. It was a close one.

yeah as a yank i love the existence of the spelling “gaol” it doesnt even look like a fucking word

squad gaols

nice

when i was young i thought there was a place called "yurip", which was a different place from the "europe" people wrote about in magazines and newspapers

it was only recently that I learned a charwoman was not a tea lady

I learned how to pronounce gaol from the Selling England By The Pound album, which had printed lyrics.

I've just realized that's Bryan Cranston playing the annoying neighbour in The King Of Queens.