Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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

I knew someone who, if my friend is to believed, is said to have uttered at age 18 "wait, you can't get pregnant if your clothes are on, right" while making out.

'Shore' rhymes with 'oar'. 'Shaw' is the same as the first three letters in 'shopping' xp

i'm loving this thread. so many discoveries!

WAT! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flea_circus

― Øystein, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 1:59 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

http://www.noonco.com/flea/movie.htm

My flabber hasn't been gasted quite like this in a long time :-/

xp I only got that Sandie Shaw pun because I once attended a seminar about legal practice given by an English professor who made a big thing out of the difference between 'law' and 'lore'. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about

Wait - how the hell DOES a candle work?!

I know, right?!!??!

i too only figured out lipps, inc. lately. also, fear's lee ving. it never occurred to me until i was driving in the car one day and bam.

I just now got Lipps, Inc. I say in my head "Lipps Incorporated" whenever I read that.

I was pretty close to thirty when I was told that "prevalent" is not pronounced pree-VAY-lent. I liked my version better. "The PREE-VAY-LENT opinion in this country is that Barack Obama will be a force of change."

I didn't realize until sometime in my sophomore year of high school that being forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson (Focus on the Family) every morning on the way to school was completely fucked up. My dad used to drive me to school everyday for years, and that shit was always on the radio.

"i used to think HAZCHEM was a foreign word for danger like Achtung

― Cittaslow Mazza (blueski), Wednesday, 12 November 2008"

haha yes, i thought it must be turkish

a bit like in the psalms when David describes God's love as being "balls deep"

*snort*

Am I the only person who had no idea that Will Geer (Grandpa Walton from The Waltons) was a full-on card-carrying Communist and a pal/roomie of Woody Guthrie?

Some of the most jarring discoveries of my life have learning that beloved TV actors (Normal Fell, Jack Klugman, Cindy Williams, etc) actually had lives before those dumb roles and sometimes did really amazing work in their early years

a bit like in the psalms when David describes God's love as being "balls deep"

― budo jeru, Wednesday, November 19, 2025 4:17 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is the kind of scripture i can get behind

that george floyd was pretty involved in the houston rap scene, appeared on a bunch of DJ screw mix tapes and even in a scarface music video

his wikipedia even has a discography section, it's not like it's hidden knowledge or anything, not sure why i never knew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJCB0C4KexQ

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Leviathan_frontispiece_cropped_British_Museum.jpg

From the British Museum: Title-page to Hobbes's 'Leviathan' (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651): an allegory of governance and the nature of civil and ecclesiastical authority. A crowned man whose body is made of numerous human bodies,

https://i.ibb.co/VcD47CJC/Screenshot-2025-11-23-at-1-13-15-AM.png

honestly just never looked that closely, nice

i always just thought ‘what.a dapper crowned man'

Someone needs to turn that into that a screen-printed graphic tee and sell it on Etsy

Almost one for Album Covers Featuring Tiny People Living In The Artist's Or Cover Model's Hair

It puts me in the mind of the cover of XCOM 2, which subtly implies that humanity's alien overlords don't necessarily have our best interests at heart:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71sxA8UvypL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

look upon my imagelinks and despair

think we might have done this one but i thought the little piggy that went to market had like a lil basket under its arm and was tripping off to have a fun day out get some supplies until i was like 20

(At trivia last night) The Stock Market Crash of 1929 is known as "Black Tuesday," not "Black Friday." So don't use Steely Dan as your guide to world events.

Tiswas (/ˈtɪzwɒz/; an acronym of "Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile") is a British children's television series that originally aired on Saturday mornings from 5 January 1974 to 3 April 1982

think we might have done this one but i thought the little piggy that went to market had like a lil basket under its arm and was tripping off to have a fun day out get some supplies until i was like 20

― Wichita Referee's Assistant (darraghmac), Sunday, November 23, 2025 7:09 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

uhhhh thanks for ruining this for me (i am 43)

im so sorry

Meh iirc that is a modern reinterpretation.

found this on the wiki talk page

That interpretation is considered to be Fakelore. It dates back to a 2018 Twitter post and makes NO sense given the age of the rhyme. Rather, it reflects modern views on the very modern methods of centralized slaughter, factory-farming of animals for meat and the move towards plant-based "meats." This is a Meme that started on Twitter and has circled the world hundreds of times. People who don't know the age of the rhyme or who don't think about it, assume that our modern methods of slaughter were common when this rhyme was first popularized. Think on it. In those days, most pigs were slaughtered at home, The "piggies" referred to, are the young child's toes, which do resemble little piglets feeding at their mother's teats. As Folklorist, I find this modern, sinister interpretation to be ill-informed and as of yet, unsupported by historical analysis by Academics in the field. I searched Google books, numerous books by revisionist fairytale and rhyme scholars and this reading of the rhyme just doesn't ever come up.

glad the pigs are ok

Who feeds pigs roast beef, anyhow? The whole thing is absurd on its face.

not allowed to do that since BSE

xxxp whew

Not a fan of the trend for retelling fairytales etc. with a "dark" angle like this.

lol yeah the Grimm ogs are dark enough! in the original Chinese Cinderella, the stepsisters cut their toes off to try and fit into the slipper!

(n.b. I actually have a degree in folklore)

oh its cool that someone wrote that on a wiki talk page

otoh nah

lol yeah the Grimm ogs are dark enough! in the original Chinese Cinderella, the stepsisters cut their toes off to try and fit into the slipper!
― challopvious (sleeve), dimanche 23 novembre 2025 23:32 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

If you get into slipper, don't bleed out to death, and marry the prince, you don't have to lift a finger for the rest of your life anyway.

Did people not sell pigs to other people in those days? It must have happened. So this doesn't seem like a good disproof in itself. But who knows, maybe it is all intended to be absurd.

They're little anthropomorphic piggies like we thought all along, everything's going to be okay