Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Today I learned the guitar parts for the Cure’s “Other Voices”. I’m 53. I’ve wanted to play it since I was 16.
Also, now I know why I love the broken chord shapes I typically play, they are all over that album and Seventeen Seconds.

Yes those chords are deliciously weird.

Note that Smith has also known to tune a little bit off, intentionally. Not like tuning everything down a specific amount - he wants it wrong, on purpose.

I've long been perplexed and intrigued by the obscure slur "butterface," but never actually knew what it meant. I enjoyed trying to determine what about someone's face would remind someone of butter. I mentioned this to a female friend recently, in the context of wondering why there's never been a band, to my knowledge, called Butterface, and she incredulously explained the origin of the word and let me tell you a small part of me died right there

Tip, in the sense of a gratuity, was originally an acronym ('to insure promptitude')

The meaning "give a gratuity to" is first attested 1706.

The popularity of the tale of the word's supposed origin as an acronym in mid-18th century English taverns seems to be no older than Frederick W. Hackwood's 1909 book "Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England," where it was said to stand for To insure promptitude

Don't blame me, blame the New Yorker factcheckers!

Tip, in the sense of a gratuity, was originally an acronym ('to insure promptitude')

I've heard so many fake acronym stories (posh, golf etc) that I'm immediately doubting this. I was once on a pleasure boat on the Thames where the tour guide proudly explained to us that "wharf" was an acronym for "warehouse at riverfront".

print the legend (to insure promptitude)

"Cabal" is another fakeronym.

Someone in my orbit once speculated that sic (Latin for "thus") stands for "spelling is correct."

Well in my defence, I read it in the latest New Yorker feature about tipping, and just assumed with their legendary factchecking that it was correct...

Both parts of Dick Tracy's name tying into police work. & him having had the possibilityof being called Plainclothes Tracy before they picked Dick.

One of a number of facts that I got out of a book on American Comic Strip Artists I've been reading.
Bit of a struggle since it's very oversize.

the in situ statue at mt. rushmore has a name which is “shrine of democracy.”

i mean many points re the controversy of its existence are mostly known by me. i just didn’t know it had a name and yet how could it not

Bit of a struggle since it's very oversize.

nice

Seemed to reproducecomic strip pages at close to original size which meant book was unwieldy.
So not sure what ideal setting for reading it would be. Reading room somewhere.
Had some very good stuff in plus biographies of the artists.

Recently learned those ‘stories’ on Instagram and Facebook allow the creator to see who viewed them.

Stories is such a bad feature

burrito = little burro

i love that one. and "taco" means "wad"

shoot your taco

which is funny because the modern burrito is not a small meal. Still small compared to an actual burro, though.

it's called that because the burrito transports the ingredients like a donkey hauls goods ...

"taco" means "wad"

Huh. I am pretty fluent in Spanish, and I always assumed the word came from tacón, which means "heel." This made sense to me, as the shape of the folded tortilla is kind of like a shoe or boot heel.

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")

― homosexual II, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:03 PM (fifteen years ago)

I didn't see this part of the thread until today...

Karel Reisz was one of the children rescued by Nicholas Winton from the Nazis.

So I knew that James Taylor sang on "Back in the High Life Again," but did not know that the lyrics are by Will Jennings and that it was subsequently recorded by Warren Zevon.

Only recently learned that the entire order of carnivora is broken down into the suborders of feliformia and caniformia — cat-animals and dog-animals. This doesn't actually account for all carnivores (bears and others are in other orders), but I hadn't realized that cats and dogs are such a literal binary split in taxonomy. Also how are there not metal bands named feliformia or caniformia?

Oops I take that back, bears actually are caniforms.

Makes sense since Caniformia is The Bear State.

At a minimum Snoop Dogg should make an album called Caniformia.

So I knew that James Taylor sang on "Back in the High Life Again"

Same tune as Steve Winwood?

Yes, Winwoid. Taylor sang harmony and you can kind of hear it. A departure for Winwood, who tended to do everything himself prior to that record.

Steve Winwoid is the New Jersey Steve Winwood

I had no idea until today that Roxette, not Pat Benatar, did “Listen to Your Heart”

I thought you were gonna say Heart.

who tended to do everything himself

except when he was playing in traffic

yet he didn't die

He had blind faith

while there is time

that Be Bop was named after a tune Monk never recorded, original title Bip Bop. Also occasionally known as 52nd Street Theme + Nameless.

Dizzy Gillespie called his memoir To Be Or Not To Bop
pretty good read too.

he also recorded the 52nd Street version of it which from which Monk received sweet fa in royalties. It was tough out there for a maverick genius!

Dizzy Gillespie called his memoir To Be Or Not To Bop

major nostalgia bomb, i have memories of sleeping over at a friend's house as a kid and looking at this on the bookshelf in their den and thinking it was a cool title for a book. jazzy family, friend's dad played the tuba, would go down to nyc every year for tuba christmas. thanks for jobbing the ol' memory!

"Rock Around the Clock" was written by Max C. Freedman, who was born in 1893!

that's how clocks work (time not linear)

I always liked the title of Charles Mingus' autobiography, Beneath the Underdog.

My laptop keyboard has a Euro symbol on it, accessible by pressing Ctrl-Alt-4. I'd been pasting it in from the Wikipedia page before I noticed just now, what a dork. Wouldn't surprise me if I said this upthread somewhere and had forgotten, although I'm danged if I'm loading 11,000+ posts to find out.

I find it crazy that, over twenty years down the line, I still need to CTRL + ALT + anything to get a euro symbol when £ and $ are still in prime positions.

pasting it in from the Wikipedia page

I used to do this all the time for various symbols until I discovered the Character Map program (built into Windows)... saves having to go to the internet.

if your keyboard has an Alt Gr key you can probably get a € with that + 4 so only 2 keys instead of 3

€

haha you're right

€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€
€