Things you were shockingly old when you learned

uppity cows then

So no animal is born an ox, they just have oxness thrust upon them?

I learned what fondue was a couple of months ago when I didn't know how to draw it in a game of Cranium, which resulted in a lot of disbelieving laughter heading my way.

I was about 14 or 15 when I learned how luggage gets across the ocean.

I mean I thought there was a giant series of tubes and things under the ocean that took luggage everywhere in the world from the airports. I blame all the kiddy tv shows that had scenes with confusing conveyor belts behind the scenes in airports.

There's a street in Exeter called Musgrave Row, but the road sign always had a bit of the 'R' missing so it looked like Musgrave Pow.

Only at the age of ~25, and only because the sign was replaced, did it occur to me that the street was not called Musgrave Pow.

i was probably 10 before i realized that when a song played on the radio the band hadn't actually come in to the studio, set up their stuff and played it. I had imagined a line of bands outside radio station buildings waiting to play their songs.

^^^ I had this notion, but with tv. I think I was younger when I learned better though.

Most of mine were to do with language. For instance, I heard people talking about this magical shop called WH Smith. where they seemed to go quite a lot, quite a lot that is, compared to the frequency with which I saw it, which was never.

I did however see a shop which I pronounced wsmiths. I really didn't connect the two for a very long time.

When very young I used to say 'WH Smith [properly this time] out!', whenever I meant LBW.

I didn't realise until I was well into my teens that I had been consistently misreading the word everyone said as halcyon as halycon, so in my mind there were two words for the same concept - one pronounced 'hal-see-on' and on 'halicon'. They must in some sense have occupied the same space and yet they didn't.

Also soap operas were so poperas in my head until a revelatory moment I can still remember, when I was sitting on the stairs at home. I realised it was nothing to do with the fact they were 'so popular'.

Gamaliel Ratsey - fuzzy thinker

I just learned what brussels sprouts taste like about three days ago. I am 32.

I just learned how to poach an egg the other day. But I fried one for a roommate a couple weeks ago, and he said "Wow, I think this is the first time I've ever had a fried egg. They're pretty good!"

yeah a lot of cooking i've only grasped in the past couple of years (i'm 35)

There are a lot of things I used to think suddenly fell into place when you became and adult, and it's a bit of a relief and a bit of a disappointment to realize that most of them are actually cumulative, like cooking skills.

I've been cooking for a long long time, but only learned how to properly hold a knife (thumb and forefinger on the blade near the handle, rest of palm and fingers on handle) a few years ago.

my sister likes to make fun of me for drawing a picture of a duck with four legs in my teens

that you have to park a car on the street so it faces the same way as if it were in traffic. 1st time I moved parents' car onto street after getting my license, family was all "lol u bozo u parked backwards" and I was likke "wha???"

I do this sometimes. I know you can get a ticket for it but if it's more convenient, then I still will.

That must be a local thing - it's commonplace practice here.

(right now, my own car and both of the ones parked either side of it are parked on the "wrong" side of the road)

Wasn't til I was about 18/19 that I learned one of my uncles wasn't my grandma's biological son.

never heard that about olives!

also, i had pronounced the word vapid with a long a sound until i was like 24 when i was corrected (and gently mocked). but then i found out via merriam webster that the long a sound is perfectly acceptable a couple of years ago (is that a british thing?). sorry that's all i can think of for now.

now that i'm in the US, if i say a word wrong i just pass it off as 'oh that's how we say it in new zealand...'. works every time!

British & Danish people made fun of me so much last summer for saying the word "buoy" as "boo-ee" instead of "boy" that I changed my pronunciation and felt stupid. Then when I was around Americans again I noticed that they all said "boo-ee" and wished I hadn't given in so quickly!

When I was 5 and describing story characters as "mischievious" the reaction was always, aww, cute, that's a big word, smart kid! And then aged 9 or 10 I said it and the teacher looked at me like I was terribly subnormal and made sarcastic remarks which my friends repeated all week, and the change of reaction seemed so bizarre (I've not only misread it all this time, but been patted on the head for it?!) that I refused to believe for ages that I was wrong.

I even thought dictionaries were just lying and that children's books used to spell it my way until some recent cult decided to change it to embarrass clever kids or something. (I was even older before I realised that hearing "smart kid" a lot doesn't mean you really are, especially if you haven't for several years, and that anyway it would be nicer not to be a pompous jerk thinking you were all day, yeah.)

Sadly, I'm still waiting for most of the cooking revelations. Some friends have suddenly got into inviting people for dinner, and I feel horribly guilty knowing I can't cook well enough to (want to) return the favour.

do you say buoyed and buoyant like boo-eed and boo-ee-ant in America

xposts I am in the UK and a) haven't heard "vay-pid", though I don't hear the word much, and b) am pretty sure that here you can park facing either way, as everyone does all the time. We were pretty confused visiting the US and having some guy come out of the store we'd parked outside to tell us we'd parked illegally and to turn it around. A sort of dawning realisation of "oh... yeah, everyone else IS facing the other way, aren't they?"

(Nice of him to tell us, though, I suppose.)

I've heard a lot of adults say "mischievious," it must be a very common mistake.

I say "buoyed" like "booyd" and "buoyant" like "boyant".

Can't remember exactly how old I was when I figured out that thunder is just the sound of lightning and not some seperate thing, but I was at least 10. I have a sneaking suspicion I was a lot older actually.

I did however see a shop which I pronounced wsmiths

I used to do that too. This thread makes me feel less alone.

mischievious

Yeah, I thought this for a long time, too. Like, I actually thought it was a UK/US thing for a while, and taught my spellchecker to keep it.

It wasn't until I moved back to the UK that I discovered, no, it was just wrong.

Yeah, I still think "mischievous" sounds British and formal/pretentious even though I know it's right. I think to the extent that I noticed the two pronunciations at all, I was sure they were alternates.

I didn't realise until I was well into my teens that I had been consistently misreading the word everyone said as halcyon as halycon

I had been doing this until maybe two years ago.

This is gonna sound pretty moronic, but...

I just figured out last night what those old-timey photographers were doing underneath those big black curtain hoods before taking a picture.

i know, isnt it gross

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

http://www.myfineartphotos.com/antiquecameraframed%20sm%20proportioned.jpg

^^ Not reviewing replay footage.

Thanks to a Xmas gift (2 days ago) explaining the origin of phrases, I now fully understand & appreciate the meaning of "Revenge is a dish best served cold" - always thought the cold designated a loss of passion, rather than the passage of time. I always thought that was a particularly irrelevent and counterintuitive idiom. Seems so obvious now!

aw no-one said 'where babies come from'

It's the "...and how they get there" part that's more pertinent

Myonga i think it's your old interp that was right - basically, "don't give them the pleasure of getting hot under the collar"

Only, like, 2 years ago did I learn that there is no north pole (i.e. a landmass), as well as that it's Sherbet, not Sherbert.

okay, i just learnt both of those things

there's not even a glacier at the northpole? how sad. santa must get awfully wet.

that <a href=;this</a> existed and that carole was quite so lovely

guh sorry, this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I35WA_BSi_w

Sty-vuh-sint.

I just figured out last night what those old-timey photographers were doing underneath those big black curtain hoods before taking a picture.

So what is it, I still don't know?

Setting up the photographic plate, so it didn't get exposed to light?

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

I guess I thought it had something to do with avoiding the glare of sunlight as the photographer got his subject into focus, but that only goes to show that I never really put any thought at all into why the hood was there in the first place.

I used to work at one of those Wal-Mart studios, and we'd have to change out the negatives by sticking the whole camera into a black bag and switching everything around blindly. I remember watching my boss do it the first time for me, and she got those dull shark eyes as she was focusing on something she couldn't see and my solitary thought at the moment was "Well, I bet that's the same look she gets when she's using the toilet paper."

Because I am shockingly old (for an ILXor), anything I learned recently or am likely to learn from now on qualifies.

Red, green, and yellow capsicums are all the same thing, at different stages.

PP's last graf is splendid!

It was YESTERDAY, watching A Christmas Story for the first time in many years, that I realised I've always pronounced Terre Haute, the Indiana town, incorrectly, at least if Jean Shepherd is any guide and I think he is. I always said "Terry Hot" but Shep says "Terrah Hote"!