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")

just to note that i don’t use teflon or any shit like that, i use stainless steel and yes, once in a while a glazed cast iron that i can actually wash like a normal pan instead of fussing about it.

I'm a stainless steel/carbon steel wok enthusiast as well, table.

lol, just ordered a chainmail scrubber and in my enthusiasm I didn't notice it was a China based ebayer, so might not get it for weeks. No more wearing out wire brushes for this fool!

we got a fancy carbon steel pan that we only use for eggs or egg-related dishes like shakshuka

there’s a lot in baseball that could have sprung from the mind of dr seuss tbh

I would not, could not, with a bat
I would not, could not, wearing a hat

I will not eat them with a ball
I will not eat them, Sam, at all

I would not eat them while playing Tetris
And I don't subscribe to Sabermetrics

That sounded like it segued into a Flight of the Conchords song at the end there.

that a sac fly doesn’t count as an at bat! what!!!?

it does count as a plate appearance, though. So it doesn't lower your BA, but it does lower your OBP. This is how you can have a lower OBP than BA, if you have more sac flies than walks (and HBPs)

enjoying all this sac talk

My favorite sac is Sacagawea

i mean it's not like you were deliberately trying to fly out, you were trying to rip a double. for some reason sac bunts not counting as at bats seems more normal... but it's true that it's the same principle. i dunno man. good point about OBP. it needs to show up somewhere. and it does!

It also shows up as an RBI

^^^

indeed

let us not sneeze at the good old ribbie

I only figured this out looking at a box score and trying to figure out someone that went 0 for 4 had an RBI.

how someone

I always thought for baseball fans most of the fun was in the stats and remembering the arcane rules, whereas watching an actual game from beginning to end was only an incidental pleasure.

“pleasure”

Should I have a put something like “a very rare occurrence”? Thought about it.

Computing pioneer Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and her mother steered her towards mathematics partly in reaction to Byron's calling and life choices.

didn't quite work though...

Just listened to Kate Lister 5alking about Byron on Betwixt The Sheets current episode. So that's a coincidence

Huh, I'm currently reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" and Lord Byron appears in the chapter I was just reading last night.

Betwixt the Sheets comes out on a Tuesday so I was loistening to it while i walked around town. Had probably stopped a little before I saw that.
POdcast comes out Tuesday and Friday.

pickles (cukes) have no calories

that's my fav thing about them.

well that and the fact they're awesome

well.. i think pickles do

Huh, I'm currently reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" and Lord Byron appears in the chapter I was just reading last night.

absolutely do not be scared to post on ilb, the more the merrier

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Mace and nutmeg are part of the same seed.

WHAT

Wait till you hear about cilantro

lol that one I knew!

Makes sense, they're practically interchangeable flavour-wise

lice is the plural of louse. like mice and mouse.

pretty sure I must have known this at some earlier point and then forgotten it.

dice = die

rice = rice

Relieved sometimes that this is my first language.

Spice is the plural of spouse

Uh, wait, no

formerly abanana (dat) at 2:25 24 Mar 23

lice is the plural of louse. like mice and mouse.

pretty sure I must have known this at some earlier point and then forgotten it.

Turn back, you lousy fule!

There are few adjectives I enjoy more than using "lousy" to mean "has a lot of" (rather than "is bad"). "This restaurant is lousy with cute waiters," for example

... same sense as the Scots word "hoachin'", which means infested or swarming with, Mr Redd will be interested to here.

Ye rang?

As far as I can tell, that word is not considered Scots, but an English word that is now only still used in Scotland.

Like most, sorry maist, Scots' words!

Kate Lister just did a Betwixt the Sheets on Sordid Soho where she says the name Soho derives from a hunting cry.
Had no idea.
Is it just a coincidence that NYC also has an important arty space called SoHo but derived from abbreviation then portmanteau of the words South of Houston. Is the pronunciation different?

in times gone (very) by soho (the london one) was a royal hunting ground and some of the pubs frequented in ilx FAPs gone by -- viz at least two of the fours pubs called the BLUE POSTS -- are said to mark the boundaries of this ground, with their name as a reminder of the relevant marker or signpost

Just found out that what we call filet mignon in America (a cut of beef) is not called that in French.

Apparently in French, filet mignon only refers to pork tenderloin.

What we call filet mignon I've usually heard of referred to as just "filet" in France

Never heard that about the pork

I've just learned that Americans call coriander cilantro. I knew about arugula being rocket, but somehow cilantro escaped me all these years.

Don’t forget TS cilantro vs. Italian parsley. In Latin America they also have cilantro macho and cilantro hembra.