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")

'they' = some of my very best friends, of course

I'm afraid that old joke about the fishmonger's daughter just wouldn't work in the US.

Another question for the Americans: if you "fillay" a fish, do you use a "fillaying" knife to do it?

No, I use a fillay knife for fillaying.

In ostraya we called that burger a “fillitafish”

realised this morning that bricks are ceramic. usually i just think of crockery, vases etc as ceramic but the humble brick is made the same way.

That's there is a fourth Mazzy Star album.

how do britishers say "filet mignon"?

Answered upthread:

you would say "fill-it mig-non" and if the waiter looks confused you order some lovely blood sausage instead

― . (jamiesummerz), Friday, November 14, 2025 11:40 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know what a filet mignon is or why i would order one

image search indicates that it's a chonky steak, not really into steak

don’t worry britishes if you get one just boil it like usual

Filet mignon is French, fillet is English, it's not a borrowed word.

So they're pronounced differently.

I mostly eat Chinese food but I know people who eat steaks in England and think they just have different cuts here (and don't boil them, we are well-known in France for roasting our beef)

it is true you are i believe v famous for roast beef, i do stand corrected

What Americans call a filet mignon is also not what a filet mignon actually is, discovered that searching for mentions of it on this thread.

i noted that they are different words in different languages upthread but look you can only do so much rly

how do britishers say "filet mignon"?

In the unlikely event I said it, it would be "fill-ay min-yon", but as Tom D said, it's not the same word.

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

what do you say when you fillet a turbot?

what do ye say when badgering a witness?

fillet is pronounced fillet

id love to blame stanlet tucci for this but ofc he is a symptom not a cause

that is not who I would have expected to post the McDonalds commercial and that brought me joy yesterday

Mine is chasm - thought it was pronounced like Chad.

Oh whoops, TIL etc. Thanks, Daniel_Rf!

Apropos, it seems no-one has ever googlably written "no dark, sour chasm in the classroom" on the internet before.

The words testes/testicles come from the same root as testify/testimony/testament, because in the ancient world, men would seal a pact or promise by grabbing each other's genitals.

This comes from Latin and the practice existed in the Roman Empire, but I learned it from the Old Testament while at a Bar Mitzvah this past weekend, so it was practice there too -- there are apparently multiple places where it says that someone put their hand under someone else's thigh to solidify a vow, and this is what is meant.

(NB sounds like the etymological connection is debated, but it's too good not to believe imho)

a bit like in the psalms when David describes God's love as being "balls deep"

*snort*

Am I the only person who had no idea that Will Geer (Grandpa Walton from The Waltons) was a full-on card-carrying Communist and a pal/roomie of Woody Guthrie?

Some of the most jarring discoveries of my life have learning that beloved TV actors (Normal Fell, Jack Klugman, Cindy Williams, etc) actually had lives before those dumb roles and sometimes did really amazing work in their early years

a bit like in the psalms when David describes God's love as being "balls deep"

― budo jeru, Wednesday, November 19, 2025 4:17 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is the kind of scripture i can get behind

that george floyd was pretty involved in the houston rap scene, appeared on a bunch of DJ screw mix tapes and even in a scarface music video

his wikipedia even has a discography section, it's not like it's hidden knowledge or anything, not sure why i never knew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJCB0C4KexQ

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Leviathan_frontispiece_cropped_British_Museum.jpg

From the British Museum: Title-page to Hobbes's 'Leviathan' (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651): an allegory of governance and the nature of civil and ecclesiastical authority. A crowned man whose body is made of numerous human bodies,

https://i.ibb.co/VcD47CJC/Screenshot-2025-11-23-at-1-13-15-AM.png

honestly just never looked that closely, nice

i always just thought ‘what.a dapper crowned man'

Someone needs to turn that into that a screen-printed graphic tee and sell it on Etsy

Almost one for Album Covers Featuring Tiny People Living In The Artist's Or Cover Model's Hair

It puts me in the mind of the cover of XCOM 2, which subtly implies that humanity's alien overlords don't necessarily have our best interests at heart:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71sxA8UvypL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

look upon my imagelinks and despair

think we might have done this one but i thought the little piggy that went to market had like a lil basket under its arm and was tripping off to have a fun day out get some supplies until i was like 20

(At trivia last night) The Stock Market Crash of 1929 is known as "Black Tuesday," not "Black Friday." So don't use Steely Dan as your guide to world events.

Tiswas (/ˈtɪzwɒz/; an acronym of "Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile") is a British children's television series that originally aired on Saturday mornings from 5 January 1974 to 3 April 1982

think we might have done this one but i thought the little piggy that went to market had like a lil basket under its arm and was tripping off to have a fun day out get some supplies until i was like 20

― Wichita Referee's Assistant (darraghmac), Sunday, November 23, 2025 7:09 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

uhhhh thanks for ruining this for me (i am 43)

im so sorry

Meh iirc that is a modern reinterpretation.

found this on the wiki talk page

That interpretation is considered to be Fakelore. It dates back to a 2018 Twitter post and makes NO sense given the age of the rhyme. Rather, it reflects modern views on the very modern methods of centralized slaughter, factory-farming of animals for meat and the move towards plant-based "meats." This is a Meme that started on Twitter and has circled the world hundreds of times. People who don't know the age of the rhyme or who don't think about it, assume that our modern methods of slaughter were common when this rhyme was first popularized. Think on it. In those days, most pigs were slaughtered at home, The "piggies" referred to, are the young child's toes, which do resemble little piglets feeding at their mother's teats. As Folklorist, I find this modern, sinister interpretation to be ill-informed and as of yet, unsupported by historical analysis by Academics in the field. I searched Google books, numerous books by revisionist fairytale and rhyme scholars and this reading of the rhyme just doesn't ever come up.

glad the pigs are ok

Who feeds pigs roast beef, anyhow? The whole thing is absurd on its face.

not allowed to do that since BSE

xxxp whew

Not a fan of the trend for retelling fairytales etc. with a "dark" angle like this.

lol yeah the Grimm ogs are dark enough! in the original Chinese Cinderella, the stepsisters cut their toes off to try and fit into the slipper!

(n.b. I actually have a degree in folklore)