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")

Georgia Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms is the daughter of R&B singer Major Lance.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that explains that someone here was saying they were listening to Major Lance all night

Zohran Mamdani's mother is director Mira Nair

Hahah welcome.

Jenever and juniper are related by the words' obvious similarity, not descent or derivation.

I just saw this from a few weeks ago but I don't think that's right? I've always read that gin/jenever derive etymologically directly from juniperus, and that's what online references I can find right now also say. Is there another source I'm missing?

I forget why I thought that, honestly. Gin is English from Dutch jenever, which is from French and therefore ultimately Latin.

Maybe I just meant that when English drunkards sold their last child for gin, they weren't thinking "wow this sure tastes like juniper berries," drawing on their sophisticated knowledge of botany.

They were just shortening the name of the "jenever spirits" the tavern mistress was selling.

they both seem to come from here

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iuniperus#Latin

I thought the name of that Call her Daddy podcast meant someone should call this woman's daddy for some reason. It did not occur to me until today that she wanted to be called Daddy.

(disclaimer: I have never once listened to this podcast and know nothing about it and don't want to)

this is wise

also my initial take like 2024

"Let's call it Call Her Daddy"
"But what if people think it means you should call this woman's daddy for some reason?"
"We could call it Call Her 'Daddy' and then it would be clear"
"But what if someone thinks that means the scare quotes are are calling into question his paternity?"
"We could call it Address Her As Daddy"
"Let's just call it Call Her Daddy"

After decades of wondering I finally found out who the guitar man was in the La Isla Bonita video. May he RIP. His name was Marcos Loya.

He died April of this year. The last time I searched for him it was at least 5 years ago probably more. I should xp to obits thread :-/

You know how in Sunday comic strips the top row is usually just an unrelated throwaway gag, or info that gets repeated in the row after? According to the Fantagraphics ed of Pogo, this is because some newspapers had a different grid so wouldn't include the top line at all, so cartoonists wrote with that in mind.

yes, Bill Watterson goes into that in some detail in The Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

Wasn't a fan, to put it mildly

He eventually negotiated a new deal in which his Sunday strips had to be an "unbreakable" half page

i think that's a fun constraint. bill w sounds like a pretty crotchety dude

Famously so iirc. And extremely private too.

During C&H’s run, comics were increasingly shrunk and neglected in newspapers. Watterson was one of the only artists who had the clout to push back.

Russell Brand's wife is Kirsty Gallacher's sister (and therefore Bernard Gallacher's daughter).

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/nov/09/is-it-true-that-dock-leaves-cure-nettle-stings

Turns out that dock leaves have no meaningful effect on nettle stings! Another illusion shattered.

When I was younger I fell into a bed of nettles while wearing shorts. Walking home through tall grass provided significant but entirely temporary relief.

the name of that Call her Daddy podcast

I have never heard of this till now but it could also be read as an imperative to one's own daddy to call an unspecified "her" if you assume they are sloppy about commas

if Watterson hadn't fought against those restrictions we'd never have gotten art like this

https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/10-calvin-and-hobbes-time-travel-9.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1

or

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fone-of-my-personal-favorite-spaceman-spiff-sundays-from-v0-74xlubk89cv61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D8e1fb8a4976256fbebc6f8343a1db1fafa6a7de1

https://mathissippi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/calvin-and-hobbes-is-this-why-learners-are-unmotivated.jpg

yeah iirc his discussion of that fight is super interesting

yeah but we would have gotten other, possibly funnier art

at that point in his career he could have easily produced a massive format book for these sorts of ideas and it would have been very successful, and then for the actual newspapers he could have used his prodigious powers of imagination to create fantastic work that fit the requirements of *checks notes* actual newspapers

weird hill

“it wasn’t me…. it was the newspapers that got small”

But they did. Over time comic strips kept getting smaller. A big part of the strip’s popularity is that kids saw it in their parents newspapers. Comics were basically free entertainment that children could enjoy and that was part of why Watterson liked the medium, in addition to being a part of its history. Bloom County ran strips about shrinking comics and I’m pretty sure Breathed also fought against it.

A lot of people, me included, wouldn’t have discovered the strip if it was found in books instead of newspapers. That was the guy’s chosen medium and he resented his canvas being continuously cut down. Would you be arguing about this if movie run times kept getting shorter so they could fit in more and more screenings? If songs had to be under four minutes ?

I used to be pretty obsessed with the history of newspaper comics, and looking at the originals, going back to when things like Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley were entire pages of a giant newspaper tabloid, or Krazy Kat and Polly and Her Pals had room to breathe, it was a breathtaking artform! Watterson and Breathed were among the few fighting the good fight. If you ever see the full-size Little Nemo book or Gasoline Alley sunday pages, it's a game changer.

This was from 1930!

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm0hmx3dnihle1.jpeg

itt tracer hand is an old timey newspaper exec. "there's no space see?? small is the new funny! all the way to the bank!"

I doubly respect Watterson after seeing that strip, because the airliner is an actual airliner. It's a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. He included the bulges where the wing intersects the fuselage, and he got the middle engine right. He could so easily have half-assed it, but he used an actual reference, and kept it consistent. I have no doubt that the train is a real train as well.

See, there were two large trijets in the 1970s. The Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed Tristar. They pretty much split the market for ETOPS-compliant large passenger jets. The DC-10 was the more successful of the two but they both ended up losing money, and in the case of Lockheed their failure persuaded the company to give up on commercial aviation. The easy way to tell the difference between the two is that the DC-10 had the engine in the tail, with the intake and exhaust in a straight line, whereas the Tristar had the engine at the rear of the fuselage, with the intake curving down from the tail, and the exhaust coming out of the back of the plane. And the DC-10 was a lethal deathtrap that killed hundreds of people whereas the Tristar wasn't.

Trijets are fascinating. They really are! They came about because "Extended Range Twin-Engined Operations" regulations in the 1970s forbade twinjets from flying more than a certain distance from a diversion airfield, which had the side-effect of banning them from transatlantic flights. So airlines had to use four-engined aircraft such as the Boeing 707 or Douglas DC-8 on the London->New York route, or indeed the de Havilland Comet, which is spelled with two Ls. But there wasn't a rule against three-engined planes. At the same time there was a gap in the market for a large "airbus" that could ferry lots of passengers cheaply - a role later covered by the Boeing 747, but that airliner was seen as a huge gamble in the late 1960s. There had been trijets earlier on, such as the Hawker Siddely Trident, but in that case the third engine was a kind of appendix that arose because the specification change. The Trident ended up underpowered, and so the final version had a fourth, miniature jet in the tail, which means that it was both a trijet and a quadjet depending on the model.

Towards the end of the 1970s ETOPS changed, and the twin-engined Airbus A300 turned out to be a perfect fit for the new regulations, and trijets fell out of fashion. I was shockingly old when I learned this. Music website rock bands.

Why did the British airliner industry fail? Because de Havilland and Hawker Siddely are frustratingly awkward to spell. I'm British, and I find it hard to spell them correctly. Imagine how people who aren't British must feel. When confronted with "Siddely". Does it have two ds? Two ls? Or just one d, and two ls? Or one of each? Well, dear reader, the answer is that it had two ds, and one l. Just like accede, or narcissist.

ashley why do brits pronounce paleontology as pahl-? yanks say payl- i’d never noticed til yest, but there’s one L and that’s a long a. that’s like pronouncing uh… radiology as rahdiology.

actually brit is æ but i dint have all the characters or nearby

also the ligature is æ like “hat,”the romans said the dipthong like “eye,” but brits say it like“heat.” we yanks pronounce as “hell naw.” it’s confusing and i am not drunk. yet.

I say it as payl-

As do every one of these people...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvN79zoID4U

ha, thx tom d. these nerds on bbc were sayin it like “pal, yer my pal” overr and overr.

"mattress" is and has been used as a hip new slang thing for over a decade apparently

yeah 'that mattress has bounced' is the new 'jump the shark'

Embarrassed by my stupidity - I had always thought Coleridge was versifying on the salty crust of the ancient mariner, I didn’t realise that’s just how “rhyme” was spelled at the time.

I say it as payl-

Same. Never heard it pronounced any other way.

^^^

Mattress is the new swingin' on the flippity-flop

that David Walliams isn’t gay???

Sean Lock once called him "Pink Minstrel" in an altercation.

that David Walliams isn’t gay???

― Tracer Hand, 10 November 2026 21:23 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

jury's lurking