Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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?

How a candle works.

Practically everything.

that SHIFT + 6 = ^. I think I figured it out a month or so ago. I always wondered how people got that character.

DO you have a Mac?

The best things about macs is that making any character is stupid easy.

¢™
øºÖØ°

&¶¶¶¶¶¶

!

That (most) BMWs are named according to engine size (I was a car freak as a child but never knew this until being informed by a German flatmate while I was a PhD student).

i.e. 318 = 3 series 1.8 litre engine etc.

Didn't know that black and green olives are identical, just different stage of maturity, until a few months ago.

Didn't realise that Adam Ant was a pun, until a year or so ago. Likewise Lipps Inc.

I've got a mac and I still don't know how to do any of, um, ^ those ^

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")

I always assumed the name had something to do with the hairstyle resembling the fish, although I've also heard the style compared to a lobster tail, which seems more accurate.

I remember it also being called a 'safety cut' before I ever heard the term mullet... 'short in the front for your folks, long in the back for your friends'

"Hockey Hair" was another common term

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

I've Got an Ape Drape

i've stared at The Breeders' "Pod" album cover so many times and just assumed it was some weird manipulated picture of nature only to find out:

The cover art was designed by Vaughan Oliver and portrays a man performing a fertility dance while wearing a belt of eels.

A male fertility dance, in response to some very visceral music from an almost all-girl band. Kim Deal has a sense of humour to which I was trying to appeal. I also loved her, and in an attempt to woo her I strapped on a belt of eels and danced for Westenberg’s camera. No Photoshop – just a long exposure. It needed to be long to accommodate the appendages.

I need an exposure that's 6 minutes ten, it's gotta be that long so I can fit it all in.

Middlesbrough is in yorkshire

Some countries, including India and Iran, are on meridians with a half-hour difference from everywhere else, e.g. when it's 3pm in London it's 6.30pm in Tehran or 8.30pm in Mumbai. I didn't know you could set your own time zone!

wait until you learn about Australia

The Indian one creates a neat trick for those with analogue timepieces who want to see the time in Britain: just turn the watch/clock upside down

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20

wait until you learn about Australia

Started reading up on it but my head exploded so I couldn't continue

Things you were shockingly old when you learned

"Thursdays at nine. Nine-thirty in Newfoundland."

It’s not Tom Waits on the cover of ‘Rain Dogs’.

https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/15/anders-petersens-best-photograph-cafe-lehmitz

That's one that I've known for a while but still can't quite accept.

!!

Yeah, I know better but that is Tom Waits.

Fantasy author David Eddings spent time in jail for physical child abuse.

... and that's where he launched his writing career!

Ciabatta, the italian bread, was invented in 1982

Fantasy author David Eddings spent time in jail for physical child abuse.

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, December 18, 2024 12:49 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whoah.

yeah it was extreme stuff

They kept the child in a cage, among other things iirc.

I was aware of the MZB abuse history (which you can see reflected in some of her work quite grossly, it totally went past me when I read her in my teens but now would be a huge red flag) but never heard about this one before.

That "Away In A Manger" and "O Little Town Of Bethlehem" have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TUNES in England than in America???!

English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRuXdOb6TrA

American:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crfdk5TDbWk

I knew about one but not the other! Unsurprisingly I prefer the UK version of Away in a Manger, it has nicer harmonies imo.

:-O

The American "Away in a Manger" is rubbish! But it seems both versions are American anyway.

the UK version of "O Little Town" is one of my favourite carols so i'm not feeling the US version (which i think i was previously unaware of)

Whoa. No I didn't know this. I've heard the melody of the US version before around Christmas but didn't know it was Little Town

Oh that's interesting, the UK version of Little Town feels EXTREMELY like any normal hymn. The melodic line, the choral structure, everything about it could be any hymn in the old Methodist hymnal.

Oh haha per Wikipedia:

"O Little Town of Bethlehem" is a Christmas carol. Based on an 1868 text written by Phillips Brooks, the carol is popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but to different tunes: in the United States and Canada, to "St. Louis" by Brooks' collaborator, Lewis Redner; and in the United Kingdom and Ireland to "Forest Green", a tune collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams and first published in the 1906 English Hymnal.

Yes, it's based on folk tune collected by Ralphie VW.

RVW responsible in some ways for 20th Century Christmas. My anglophile Midwestern Dad had a copy of the Oxford Book of Carols Ralph edited.

The American version of O Little Town has the absolutely thrilling minor key change on “yet in thy dark streets shineth” which takes it onto a totally different level imo

And in orbit otm, the English version sounds so standard I fruitlessly hunted for a few minutes for what OTHER carol or hymn shared its tune

xpost otm. as a kid I asked my dad why Christmas carols were so much better than regular hymns and my dad basically said "yo they paid people to shit out hymns by the brickload but Christmas is special"

Away in a Manger often sounds like a kiddie song but w/ the right arrangement is incredible. when I was with Caroling Company we did an incredible challenging arrangement that made people hate me when I called the song

I really really like a lot of hymns but older is better than newer imo. I like that one! The harmonies are very nice. I actually didn't know it from the stock of hymns I sang weekly for 20ish years, it might not have made it over to the US outside the Episcopal church.

Aaahhh the descant on the last verse is satisfying.

Not just learned but only just hit me that "breaststroke" has five consonants in a row.

Oooh that's a good one. Compare "catchphrase."

I think the word with the most consonants for only having one vowel is "strengths."

Yes, I think catchphrase has the most. At the opposite extreme, "queueing".

At school we sang "All Things Bright And Beautiful" to a fairly different tune to what I'd hear later and would learnt o be the "standard" version. I wonder why.

Xp, "Matchstick" and "walkthrough" also pretty dense.

I like words with four-letter runs that would seem impossible divorced from context, like the tthr in "cutthroat" or the ghp in "throughput" or the splendid double h in "roughhousing."

Personal note on "strengths": I learned this in college, when we had those magnetic letters on the refrigerator. We would get high and play fridge scrabble because we were and are ginormous dorkwads.

The sets made for kids are horrible for this as their letter frequency ratios are off. Evidently Fisher-Price did not have the lexical needs of stoned nerds in mind.

bookkeeper is a good one: three double letters. and there's a bird that eats bees called a beeeater, but it's generally hyphenated.

Whenever topics of doomsday prepping and climate-change-related societal collapse come up, this is the shit that worries me.

Post-collapse society will have need of people who are handy with food production, food preservation, building and fixing things, self-defense, sewing and knitting, hunting and gathering.

There will not be a lot of post-apocalyptic scenarios where they're like "okay we need someone who knows a lot of words that have a Q without a U."

We used to do those Cold War thought experiments about who you would choose to be in a bomb shelter with limited capacity. Like, the optimal skill sets for rebuilding society. A farmer, a scientist, a supermodel, etc.

No one ever says "okay we're gonna need someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Cure's B-Sides from 1982 to 1997"

bookkeeper is a good one: three double letters.

This fact is the thing that solves the case in an old Encyclopedia Brown mystery.

always wondered if Jim Croce was a big Encyclopedia Brown fan