Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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")

ooh i like that

lol mandee those are even better

Nothing, as I'm not shockingly old.

Misheard lyrics are always better. The singer of my old band had this (intentionally) corny line that went "sleep all day til the telephone ring / head to the bar and shake that thing", the latter half of which I always thought was "head to the barber and shave that thing".

My friend always thought that Op Ivy song Take Warning went "skate boarding", which is way better.

Same with Sandy Shaw.

Ok I sounded this out several times in several different ways and I still don't get how this is a pun. Help?

I think that 'Shaw' is meant to sound like 'shore' - I don't hear it either

Sandy Shore.

Shaw is pronounced exactly the same as Shore, in England.

hows it pron in USA?

Mow-Have-Ay

mojave is pronounced more like mohawk-y

AYyyyy…ZOR ayys. like fonzie?

I don't wanna take a stab at it because as a non native English speaker I fear my attempts would perhaps confuse things further, but this video has it correct:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=142zclENL0M

Of course in Portuguese they're the Açores. A very large percentage of Portuguese immigration to the US and Canada is Azorean, since we're halfway across the Atlantic anyway (mainlanders tended to move to France and Switzerland instead).

Fun fact, the islands are named after a bird that doesn't actually exist there, some sailor just got the species wrong.

AY zors seems about right and matches my usa usage. wow that place seems amazing

What was that like? I find it difficult to imagine, so different from my experience.

My parents moved from Hamburg, Germany when I was four years old, mainly because my dad was despondent at Germany's turn from his student radical days into the yuppiedom of the 80's - so like the boomer bands he loved, he decided to get it together in the country and become a farmer. We were in S Miguel, which is the largest and most developed of the islands, BUT within that context we were in one of the smallest villages, and on a street that mostly had Summer houses for tourists. So I'd say it was a very isolated childhood, I did have friends but the cultural gap was immense, video games and TMNT pretty much all we could agree on, I wasn't really an outdoors kid. So getting the internet in my early teens really saved my life, made closer friends than I ever did in school.

It's a place of immense natural beauty and I had the ocean 10min away on foot, so it did give me a love of the sea and swimming; the port where I would swim at that time still had amazing ecodoversity, I'd see starfish and octopi and little crabs, that's all ruined now. Also fond memories of a hot spring waterfall (they charge for it now) and the mountains. I'm still not an outdoors person but yeah definitely thankful that I grew up surrounded by such beauty, I used to stay awake all night online talking to people in Australia and then check out the most amazing sunrise from my balcony.

Socially people are very closed off and stick to their own, my parents made a lot more friends who were immigrants as well (Cabo Verde, Angola, Brazil). Everyone was very catholic in theory tho obviously if anyone wanted to do something that the church didn't approve of they'd do it anyway (this taught me a lot about how religion works).

It's a totally different world now tho, there's a hipster record shop and a hipster music festival (Tremor), people are openly gay without getting beat up on the regular. Recently we've been overrun by American digital nomads of the woo woo variety, my mum likes it because now she gets to do yoga but on the other hand I have to debunk the chemtrails bullshit and other conspiracy theories that these ppl love to get into, despite being hypervocal about "fleeing Trump".

xp "brooks" rather than "brokes"

ty

i grew up in a north american town called cheswick, and, whatever, carry on

Euro Portuguese is to Brazilian Portuguese what Danish is to Swedish, maybe. Just kind of ... swallowed

lol Daniel I have a hipster-type friend who just bought a house in the Azores. I think right now he's splitting his time between there and D.C., where his wife works. But they're planning to move there full-time at some point. If you hear of a guy offering banjo lessons, that's him. I don't think he's into chemtrails tho.

Haha, banjo players def welcome! Do you know which island he's on?

i was completely unaware of the Mel Brooks/David Lynch/Elephant Man connection until reading all of the tributes to Mel's 100 years on earth yesterday.

this one is embarrassing but i didn’t get the pun in “Honk if You’re Horny” bumper stickers until last week, when i saw one that read “Chonk if You’re Chorny” and put two and two together

I didn’t realize it was a pun either! So that’s why I’ve never gotten laid by honking.

No honky, no bonky

That Walt Disney is not, nor was he ever, cryonically frozen; he was cremated. This is an urban legend.

Suspended animation

Never knew Billy Preston was gay until today. I heard "Will It Go Round in Circles" on the radio--never a favourite; it's okay--and the line "I've got a story, ain't got no moral/Let the bad guy win every once in a while" jumped out at me. I wondered where the song stood chronologically in relation to Nixon and Watergate--checked his Wikipedia page (the album came out in October '72; maybe with re-election imminent, that line captured that feeling), found out the other.

It-narratives.

TIL that Buggin' Out was played by the same guy who played Gus Fring

and that was after being one of the main characters in School Daze!

Azores fun fact: the eighth-largest island of the Azores has the same name as the eighth-largest of the Canary Islands (give or take a definite article).

(Mentioned mostly apropos of the interesting Azores talk recently; I shan't claim it's shocking that I didn't realize this until I was 55.)

That "bend it" in "Bend It Like Beckham" refers to putting spin on a soccer ball when you kick it, and not, I guess, some kind of dance move

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQyo89JaWJk

The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company has no actual connection to the Charles Goodyear who invented a process for vulcanizing rubber. The company just took his name, 38 years after his death.

whoa, good one

That "bend it" in "Bend It Like Beckham" refers to putting spin on a soccer ball when you kick it, and not, I guess, some kind of dance move

big raised eyebrows for this one!

when it came out I felt like it was a very odd name considering how we use 'bent'/'bender' in the UK, never thought it was about a dance move though

People from the USA commonly (though not universally) use the term “western hemisphere” to mean the Americas.

I have never heard anyone do that anywhere.

I definitely saw it used in the World Cup thread. Ironically most of the UK and all of Ireland are in the western hemisphere.

No, not buying that one. Maybe some online nerds, but not in real life.

I'm not sure if most people in the USA could tell you what a hemisphere is.

Online Neds not online nerds.

Yeah that'll be choice if it happens. (Partially because, assuming Argentina also wins and all, that means there'll be at least one other Western Hemisphere team still in the competition.)

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 7 July 2026 02:09 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

France and Harry Kane (born Leytonstone, 0.0084° E) the last plucky representatives of the Eastern Hemisphere left in the tournament.

In the 16th century there was a crank theory that American native tribes were descended from a Welsh chieftain and spoke a variety of Welsh.

Wales is in the Western Hemisphere, so...

I kinda think accurately knowing what "Western Hemisphere" means entails also knowing roughly where Greenwich is?

it’s in Connecticut

No, it's a village in New York.

i am surprised at a single person not understanding western hemisphere as shorthand for americas i’m 59 duh

also “third world” is a reggae band, i would say roots but whatever

We know Trump knows what the Western Hemisphere is, because he knows Greenland's in it and it makes him mad he can't have it.

Champs Elysses = Elysian Fields