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")

It's the same show, it's just hosted by Ryan Seacrest

whether Seacrest is merely acting in his stead or is part of a program to create a next-generation tulpa of Kasem is up for debate

No, this was like rebroadcasts of old Kasem recordings, so yeah.. the songs were old, not current chart-toppers

i remember when they would play those kasem re-broadcasts in the wee hours on the top 40 station when i was a kid

now that i think about it, an AI Kasem would be incredibly easy to create. if his estate agreed there’s no reason you couldn’t have Casey Kasem’s Top 40 forever

"these guys are from England and nobody gives a shit"

Zoinks!

speaking of DJs i just realized that the frank zappa song "wonderful wino" was almost certainly named for george carlin's 1966 "wonderful WINO" routine. this is _definitely_ a routine frank zappa would've found hilarious. to be clear it's also genuinely funny. i mean george carlin is genuinely funny.

i'm shockingly ill-informed on 1960s stand-up in general. i went down this rabbithole because a furry account on bluesky posted nichols and may's 1961 jax beer ad. one of my friends compared the humor to a "low-budget adult swim show", which honestly i think is more of a compliment to nichols and may than anything. comedy doesn't always age well, you know? so yeah i start looking up the comedy grammy nominees seeing as how "an evening with nichols and may" won a grammy and wow yeah speaking of things that don't age well bill cosby won six grammies in a row for best comedy album between 1965 and 1970

anyway i didn't bring up nichols and may winning a grammy because jesus christ it's a _grammy_, those things are worse than the fucking oscars. and uh, yeah. the grammy comedy nominations are dire even by grammy standards. you know who's won the grammy for best comedy album three years running? dave chappelle! this year he beat out ricky gervais, i bet it was a really hard-fought battle. chappelle also won three years in a row from 2018 to 2020. you know when chappelle was first _nominated_ for a grammy? 2018!

actually chappelle has won _every single year he's been nominated_. that's impressive.

Went to buy a new TV yesterday and learned that the screens are measured diagonally. A 42-inch screen is not 42 inches long. I am 55 years old.

I only learned that this year!

Louie CK also seems to have won some comedy Grammies, they appear to be on a mission to reward assholes. And this has unfortunately raised their profile somewhat, because "disgraced comedian wins a grammy" is marginally more of a news item than "comedian wins grammy, no one cares".

Went to buy a new TV yesterday and learned that the screens are measured diagonally. A 42-inch screen is not 42 inches long. I am 55 years old.

― fetter, Tuesday, May 6, 2025 1:41 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

in fairness this feels like just about the most cynical underhanded thing i've ever heard. i didn't know either. not to be that person, but, guess what i don't have in my house

I did not know that either!

in fairness this feels like just about the most cynical underhanded thing i've ever heard

have you read the news lately?

it's the same for phones and tablets btw.

oh god i sound like sic

it's the same for phones and tablets btw.

and boners right?

It's probably a bit cynical and underhanded but if you think about it, measuring by width wouldn't really be as useful a guide when TVs and especially other devices and boners have come in various aspect ratios

i mean you can see how big they are in the shop (a place people used to go to buy things) so i don't know how underhanded it really is.

The shop might be underhanded if they are selling boners.

(xps) So... what you're saying is you can't determine the actual width of a television from it's diagonal length? That seems a lot less useful to me.

It might have made more sense when all television screens were roughly the same shape?

it's just a bit of basic trigonometry, people need to get with it

SOH CAH TOA

(xps) So... what you're saying is you can't determine the actual width of a television from it's diagonal length? That seems a lot less useful to me.

Not of the width though?

Unless the television screens are all the same shape... am I missing something here?

Why are you so interested in the width?

Because sometimes people don't have much space or have a particular space in mind to put a telly - e.g. in a kitchen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Quality,_Feel_the_Width

(I'm speaking from recent experience here as someone I know wanted a small(ish) telly to put in a particular spot in her room).

Because sometimes people don't have much space or have a particular space in mind to put a telly - e.g. in a kitchen.

You're talking about the width of the TV set, not the width of the screen. They publish that separately in the specs. You couldn't make a decision on whether something will fit based on screen size – bevels etc vary.

Blake the Messenger isn't yet old enough to learn about bezels

(xp) If you know that a 24" TV refers to the diagonal size of the screen which, as has been established here, people don't necessarily know.

BEZELS

Back on topic:

That the j in Beijing is really a j not some kind of zzchh sound

i hear it as more of a "ts" to be honest. but its former romanization as "peking" attests to the difficulty of rendering the sound exactly in our alphabet. additionally, beijing has its own dialect, so (even though i know nothing about this) it's conceivable that there's more than one way to say it in mandarin, to say nothing of chinese more broadly

wiktionary is good for dialectical pronunciations:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%AC

lol have you been reading my bluesky, Alba?

Both J and ZH are somewhere between the initial consonant sounds in "jam" and "cheese" but the J is formed nearer the front of the mouth and ZH nearer the middle. But a regular J-as-in-jam sound is an easy substitute for both.

Yes indeed I have!

I don't know any varieties of Chinese with a /ʒ/ sound, spent years trying to teach it. Standard Mandarin doesn't have a /v/ sound either.

My 42 inch screen is 5 inches tall and 41.7 inches wide

I pretty much just watch documentaries about snakes

reasons for "Peking"

* it's like "bakging" in Cantonese and that was a more important dialect to Westerners
* the 'P' and 'B' sounds are quite similar in Chinese, just a different in aspiration, all of these are approximations
* we used a different romanisation method called Wade-Giles, Pinyin was only adopted in 1958
* Just the usual subtle sound changes you get over a couple of centuries

(xxpost) Fritz Lang on Cinemascope: "Oh, it wasn't meant for human beings. Just for snakes – and funerals."

He says that as part of his dialogue in Contempt iirc.

Googled "famous quote about Cinemascope," not quite remembering the speaker or wording--you're probably right.

the entire screen measurement metric for televisions is to create classes of television sets, so you can roughly compare apples to apples when shopping. so if Brand A has a 55" for $500 and Brand B has one with the same features for $450 you either base it on that or dig into features

the actual width of the device varies, as it always has throughout all sales of televisions. if you care about the physical, non-functional characteristics, you dig into the specs to see how wide/tall/deep it is. depth varies a lot, and the screen size isn't going to tell you if it has a stand with wide legs, a standard wall mount, etc.

you can always do what we did in the old days and use a tape measure at home and then go to the store and use it there. that measurement is in the specs on the web if you scroll down, though

All these years I've been seeing the term U-boat for German submarines and never bothered learning that it's an abbreviation of unterseeboot. U-boat sounds way cooler.

agglomerative wholewordssmashedtogether vs frenchy prefixes and suffixes is actually on the bayeaux embroidery

Louie CK also seems to have won some comedy Grammies, they appear to be on a mission to reward assholes. And this has unfortunately raised their profile somewhat, because "disgraced comedian wins a grammy" is marginally more of a news item than "comedian wins grammy, no one cares".

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

honestly i'd kind of argue that at this point, getting nominated for a grammy is itself disgraceful. it's kind of like being a democratic party candidate for president.

maybe not as bad as that. do you have to, like, put yourself up for nomination for grammies? some funny stuff has won in the past... i haven't _heard_ all those bill cosby records that won between '65 and '70, and bill cosby is, yes, a monster, but my general impression is that those records are at least funny. like, in '63 vaughn meader... was he funny? i mean these days he's best-known for abruptly getting put out of work. and then the year after that it was "hello muddah, hello fadduh".

_ernie kovacs_ was nominated in 1978. 1978! say what you will about dave chappelle, he wasn't nominated after being dead for 15 years. also, he... i mean i'm not gonna say nominating kovacs is _exactly_ like nominating "marcel marceau's greatest hits" (which, again, is funnier than some actual grammy winners). alvin and the chipmunks' "urban chipmunk" was nominated in '82. i'm told that the albums firesign theater were nominated for in '85, '99, and '02 were in fact funny... i haven't heard them... but it's not like they nominated _don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers_ in '71. instead, they nominated homer and jethro and _orson welles_ for "the begatting of the president". for some reason the _entire text of that last album_ is contained on the album's wikipedia page. i've heard it. it's not funny.

i'll be honest i'm pretty sure whoever nominates these people doesn't actually know any comedians. like seriously, i am 49 years old and i do not know jack shit about comedy and i _still_ am more "up-to-date" on comedy than whoever is in charge of nominations at the grammies. at some point somebody told one of them about P.D.Q. Bach and the poor guy won four years in a row. schickele played on the soundtrack to "oh calcutta!". he deserves better than to win four comedy grammies. you know who won in 1996? jonathan winters for "crank(y) calls". jonathan winters! out of the nominees that year i would've given it to judy tenuta, but that's just a particularly verbose way of saying "i'm gay".

The winner of the Le Mans auto race isn't the team who completes a set distance first (see Indianapolis 500), but the team who goes the furthest distance within a set period of time.