Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Metro / boulot / dodo

(Commute/work/sleep)

xp - the "rockers" for switches thing I've noticed in several industries, where they refuse to adopt the lay term. Like how computer manufacturers until recently insisted on calling portable computers "notebooks", even though everyone calls them "laptops". I hear telecom industry people speak of a "wireline"; to everyone else it's a landline.

Curious about the "metro" for subway thing though. I've from the Washington DC area where the local subway is usually called the "metro" too (parts of it literally aren't a subway as it pops aboveground in the suburbs), but I've always considered "metro" the name of *this* subway, not any subway. Just like BART is the San Francisco subway or "the tube" is the London subway or the Boston subway is sometimes "the T". I almost always call the DC subway "the metro" but would never call the London or NYC subway that.

In French, it's always 'métro', which is why even anglophone Montrealers call it that in English.

Beyond that, however, London's Metropolitan Railway inaugurated the history of rapid transit in 1863 so it's likely that the abbreviated version stuck even in parts of North America.

Bit of whiplash in the last minute as I went from realizing, on seeing the abbreviation FKA elsewhere, that the FKA in FKA Twigs stood for 'formerly known as', to discovering that in fact, despite her being known as just Twigs for a time, the FKA doesn't stand for 'formerly known as', according to her anyway, and is just "a selection of letters that sounded quite kind of masculine and strong".

i do not believe that at all

does that mean my pronunciation of "fucker Twigs" is correct after all?

Of course, somebody in R.E.M. once claimed that the name didn't stand for anything, they just liked the dots.

Boss likes dots

dots man gets paid?

Irmin Schmidt used to tell people CAN stood for Communism Anarchism Nihilism.

Political Unrest Stabilize Society, YES

KMFDM really means what I think it means and nobody will ever convince me otherwise.

That the first word in King Kong is the royal title and the name of the ape is simply Kong. I guess it's understandable that it wasn't translated into Norwegian, as "kong Kong" might look a bit silly.

In clearly specious name origin claims, there was also “ In an early promotional interview, Vedder said that the name "Pearl Jam" was a reference to his great-grandmother Pearl, who was married to a Native American and had a special recipe for peyote-laced jam.”

There's a whole lot of speculation about that name, another origin (from Jeff Ament) gives Neil Young credit for the "Jam" part:

Neil Young, of course, would go on to be one of Pearl Jam’s biggest mentors.

And on this one night in 1991, the three band members watched in amazement as Young stretched a few key songs on and on for hours. “He played, like, nine songs over three hours. Every song was like a fifteen- or twenty-minute jam," Ament told Rolling Stone in 2006. "So that's how 'jam' got added on.”

Ament soon turned to his longtime bandmate Gossard and simply said, “What about Pearl Jam?”

it's cum

https://www.xxlmag.com/shelley-fka-dram-interview/

Thin white rope was already taken.
As was 10cc.

Lovin spoonful too.

God, rock is awful

Do we need a 'bands whose names are probably references to semen' thread? I think we almost certainly do.

the jizz is on mary chain

Threads you were shockingly old when you clicked Remove Bookmark

jesus, had never made that connection with 10cc or lovin spoonful, ick

Cream was actually named after Jack Bruce's family's dairy farm iirc

what do u think the "Wall Street Shuffle" alluded to

i was so naive

RUSH = running under satan's house

Or so I was told on the school playground

weirdly I knew that about 10cc without having much of a clue what they even sound like

wait till you hear their reggae track

The song "Coffee Blues" is a tribute to Maxwell House Coffee, which Hurt describes, "rapping" in the beginning of the song, as being two or three times any other brand, ergo, he only needs one spoonful to make him feel all right, what he describes as "my lovin' spoonful" in the song. The song is part of a group of songs with a long history in recorded blues that generally use the term "a spoonful" to suggest sex, and in some cases use of a drug such as cocaine.[36] The term "lovin' spoonful" has been conjectured as referring to the amount of ejaculate released by a human male during a typical orgasm.

... Mississippi John that is, not William or, er, John.

xp
actually I looked them up after posting that and naturally I know a bunch of their songs, including Dreadlock Holiday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just learned that Cardi B.'s real name is apparently Belcalis, but she often went by the nickname "Bacardi." Bacardi, B. Cardi, Cardi. B.

(Coincidence or no, her sister's actual name is Hennessy.)

I'm sure this is the kind of thing everybody on this board knows this already but I only learned today that the Ramones did not come up with "Second verse, same as the first"

pretty sure that was the violent femmes

boy scouts iirc

It was Herman's Hermits! I didn't know that until I googled it right now.

Or to be more accurate it was Fred Murray and R.P. Weston, who wrote the song in question in 1910!

Yesterday I learned that ILX comment boxes--like the one I'm typing in now--can be enlarged or minimized using a tiny little doodad in the bottom right corner. Very exciting.

Whoa! When did that happen?

I had never noticed that!

Members of 10cc disagree about the origin of the band's name. I will note that early singles written by them include "When He Comes" and "Come on Plane".

(with each other I meant, not with us)

Pixel = picture element. Probably everybody other than me knew that.

I went to school for graphic design and I did not know that.

It probably wasn't the best school for graphic design, though, tbrr.

I didn't know that

Yesterday I learned that ILX comment boxes--like the one I'm typing in now--can be enlarged or minimized using a tiny little doodad in the bottom right corner. Very exciting.

Isn't that more of a browser function kind of thing?

Loved the song for 35 years, but only just discovered that in ‘West End Girls’, when Tennant sings ‘ Call the police, there's a mad man around, Running down underground to a dive bar, In a West End town’ he’s actually referring to a bar called The Dive Bar in Gerrard Street, Soho.

It gets a brief mention here https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/may/17/london-soho-stories-sex-drugs-rock-and-roll

That reminds me, I wasn't old at the time but it didn't immediately click that Kelis' 'Trick Me' has a line referencing that - 'Call the police there's a mad girl in town'