Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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"!

I just remembered something. It was ages before I worked out what "watersports" meant, in a sexual sense. There used to be adverts in the back of newspapers for "watersports" videos, usually with the subheading "BUY NOW BEFORE THEY ARE BANNED!". And I used to think, "why would the government ban videos of people waterskiing and windsurfing?"

those italics make your thoughts sound like maxwell smart.

"why would someone throw a shoe at the President?"
http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2005/news/051010/dadams2.jpg

I only recently learned why football pundits always criticise strikers for not shooting into the far corner when coming in from the wing. Fifteen years of hearing that cliche, and Lee Dixon was the first pundit ever to explain it

"you couldnt get me in the same room as a ouija board"

I'm 35 and been on this board such a long time but only now discovered SS is a GIANT.

I only learned to drive a few months ago. :-(

Is it cause keepers always guard the near post?

(NB all I know about feet hockey was learned ages 5-12)

keeper more likely to deflect shot into play again if saved?

Yes, it's because if the keeper saves he's likely to parry it into the path of a fellow striker. I'd always found it easier to tuck it in at the near post myself - no team player, me

I just remembered something. It was ages before I worked out what "watersports" meant, in a sexual sense. There used to be adverts in the back of newspapers for "watersports" videos, usually with the subheading "BUY NOW BEFORE THEY ARE BANNED!".

Haw, I learnt that in 1987 through a teen girls' magazine's review of Alison Moyet's album Raindancing (I had older stepsisters, you see). According to the review, she had wanted it to be titled Watersports, but was DENIED by The Man at the record company because of ^^^.

Puns department: Johnny Marr is (roughly) 'I'm angry' in French.

Oh yeah! It's more like "I've had enough", but yeah.

I relate to a lot of these. I remember imagining racehorses inside the TV as a child.

i was shockingly old when i learned the smiths blew

nobody told me that beards were itchy!

only for some people...never had that problem.

your skin is obv too womanly.

apply conditioner

I didn't know that luggage went into airplane cargo holds until I was about 14. I just thought there was a massive series of underground tubes/conveyor belts that whisked luggage to other parts of the continent. I only questioned this when I first contemplated how luggage got over the ocean. I made the mistake of asking this aloud in front of some friends who looked at me like I was crazy/making a bad joke and then I finally learned how the great modern phenomenon of air travel truly works, the end.