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")

quinoa hurrah

enough of this corn porn

TJ Maxx (US) / TK Maxx (UK). when i studied abroad in the UK in the '90s, this minor difference baffled me. i see now that the name was changed to avoid confusion with the British store TJ Hughes.

this was a weird one because I'd never head of TJ Hughes, presumably had really good lawyers? Although they apparently had a branch in Redditch

I guess most Brits unaware of the 69 Boyz 94 hit, “Tootsee Roll,” which is pretty much the only thing I ever think about when I hear of Tootsie Rolls, because the candy is nasty

Are there messageboards out there where Portuguese and Brazilian posters talk about what color paçocas are in their world?

What's their equivalent of a bottleopener thread? (Probably also has to do with soccer.)

We don't have paçocas in Portugal. But sure there is lots of amused back and forth about vocabulary differences.

I do struggle to see what the Ronaldinho bottle opener thread equivalent would be. I think if shit was to kick off between these two groups it would be about perceived xenophobia rather than racism, as Brazilian migration to Portugal has increased massively in the last decade or so and predictably this has lead to a nasty right wing backlash.

Mostly though Brazilians have better things to do than bother about us, as Portugal's cultural footprint is far lesser than the UK's.

going to need wins to weight in but the grassy stuff is probably barley, wheat, or similar?

They were always called 'flea darts' when I were a nipper. You can chuck them at people, and the dart-like heads stick to clothing. I still find myself almost unconsciously checking them for fleas. Scientifically, it's false barley and came over with the Romans (I think?).

Oh I misread dl’s post. The idea of calling that stuff corn is even weirder to me for some reason!

This is the kind of sentence that makes me a hit at parties obv, but folk are weirdly illiterate about crops in the UK.

I mean they DO look like barley, maybe wheat, but no one ever calls flea darts either of those - only corn. I wonder if there's some confusion about ears of corn as a description? Not sure.

Lol at "flea darts" which i have not thought about for decades.

I think people are pretty illiterate about crops in many places. I grew up in a city in the largest maize-growing regions in the world and it’s funny how many city dwellers had the misconception that their metro was surrounded by sweet corn fields.

When they learn the truth, they will be amaized

"I think people are pretty illiterate about crops in many places. I grew up in a city in the largest maize-growing regions in the world and it’s funny how many city dwellers had the misconception that their metro was surrounded by sweet corn fields."

One issue is that one of the most visible and widespread cash crops in the UK has a really unfortunate name that makes people scared to learn about other crops in case they're called something even worse.

The name apparently comes from the Latin for "turnip", which are probably called snow zucchinis in the United States, or something.

just call it canola like they do in many other places
(taking a wild guess without clicking through, but it’s got to be that one)

Pomeroy is correct. Who can forget the song

Oooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin down the plain
We sit n drink martinis
As the sun sets
On the snow zucchinis

I'm guessing that the corn in "Sloop John B" that the cook took and ate up was some kind of non-maize grain? Since the song dates from when the Bahamas was a British colony?

― Josefa, Friday, June 20, 2025 9:50 AM (two days ago)

y'all smh... grits* are made from dried corn (or hominy)

*mentioned in the previous line

One issue is that one of the most visible and widespread cash crops in the UK has a really unfortunate name that makes people scared to learn about other crops in case they're called something even worse.

It took me years to learn why that Ministry album was called that. (It was the official slogan of Tisdale, Saskatchewan.)

Until late 2016, the town of Tisdale in northern Saskatchewan’s welcome sign read, “Welcome to Tisdale Land of Rape and Honey.” When Al Jourgensen saw the slogan on a souvenir mug he knew he had found the name of Ministry's third studio album. While Jourgensen loved the saying, many who passed through Tisdale over the years were offended by the title and complained about it — which explains why the motto was eventually changed to “Tisdale: Opportunity Grows Here.” So why was Tisdale known as the Land of Rape and Honey for 60 years? The name refers to the town’s once popular exports, a yellow oilseed called rape or rapeseed and, well, honey. In 2015, Tisdale surveyed its residents to find out how they felt about the “Rape” slogan and those who wanted to keep it were outvoted. “There's some residents who feel I should be educating people on what rapeseed is [rather than considering a slogan change],” the town’s economic director Sean Wallace told The Independent.

It took me years to learn why that Ministry album was called that. (It was the official slogan of Tisdale, Saskatchewan.)

TIL ...

I learned about that from Current 93!

An interesting aside about canola crops is, in Australia anyway, they have major biosecurity issues thanks to feckless overseas Instagrammers who see a heaving field of gold, and just stop their car and jump the fence to stand in a field waving their arms for the 'gram.

In the process, introducing god-knows-what foreign seeds/moulds/pollens to the farmer's crop.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/28/canola-field-selfies-australian-farmers-warn-tourists-against-dangerous-social-media-trend

Prozac and other SSRIs can make a person overheat more easily, sweat more and get dehydrated. I was wandering around the national mall in DC today and I felt like I was in a wet t-shirt contest.

Zoloft is particularly bad for sweating but, yep, lots of SSRIs have this delightful side effect.

Oh, I didn't get told that was one of the symptoms when my son went on sertraline. When I'm helping him get ready on a morning, I'm dabbing sweat off his with a towel a few times.

*head*

I had my sertraline this morning without caffeine and slept through my train journey, woke up at Liverpool St in an empty train. had some ice tea now but head still in a fog. can confirm I have also been sweating.

was at a gig in an arena on Thursday last week and it was really hot, I was absolutely soaked through.

fucking hell, it's useful to know. I had already cut lots of unhealthy foods from his diet and cut out ice cream, because I was thinking it might be a symptom of him gaining too much weight. Good steps to make anyway, but at least now I know that isn't the issue.

i had no idea about this, explains why i was such a sweaty pig when i was on Lexapro in my early 20s

something more to learn at a shockingly old age: the incontinence medication oxybutynin has an off-label use of helping with excessive sweating, and doctors (in the UK) are generally quite happy to prescribe it to people with the SSRI sweats

Here's something for the thread topic: As a child I heard the theme song to Gilligan's Island and thought the lyric was "like Robinson Caruso."

I assumed there was someone named Robinson Caruso. Later I found out about Robinson Crusoe and thought, "aha, the lyric is 'Robinson Crusoe' but to fit the meter they sing it as 'Crrrr-usoe'." With me so far?

Just now I realized that the two names must be related in origin. They are, and ultimately they are related to the word "cross."

There was even a sequel to the E.T. novelization, where E.T. goes back to his home planet and gets treated like shit for having Earth cooties.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Flat (as in apartment), so named because they're all on one level and are therefore...flat. To be distinguished from maisonettes ("little house"), which are generally split-level.

That the Mann act is still in use, albeit substantially changed from its inception.

Feel like we may have had the James discussion before, but I only realised Hamish and Seamus are Gaelic versions of James.

Makes me wonder if James was pronounced differently back in the day

that linen isn't cotton?!! good god

karl marx still winning

flax vs fiction

V.I. Linen

Imagine there's no fabric

flaxis

that linen isn't cotton?!! good god

― Tracer Hand, Friday, June 27, 2025 11:00 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol whoa i had no idea either

^^^ yeah same here... i thought it was just a different type of weave or something.

plumbus: the latin word for the chemical element lead; hence "plumbing"

that the majority of PATROIT missile is an acronym for what i do for a job.

PATRIOT

Pat Riot

You work at Target?