Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Like I knew Frankfurter and Wiener but

actually I only worked out Wiener when I went to Wien last year tbf

Well that one’s news to me but considering how we pronounce it and what we call the city I think I can be forgiven for not being too quick on the draw.

this is a thread of forgiveness

http://i.imgur.com/rsGN3CS.png

wait til ye figure out what the dubliners were named for

yis oaves

Think abt if Kennedy gave the "I am a Berliner" speech in Hamburg

was gonna post exactly that but think Eddie Izzard did that routine once

I learned today that in some countries some nappy brands make different nappies for boys and girls

Hate to be the one to tell you this but. Boys and girls are built differently, especially around the nappy region. The difference is salient. I speak from 11+ years of experience changing both sorts.

I don't love the trucks vs. princesses or Hulk vs. Barbie stuff, but I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that boy pee and girl pee go in different directions.

I've had two babies and I don't think I've ever seen separate nappies for sale! I mean, it makes sense. If I was doing reusables I'd pad them out differently. I suddenly panicked and wondered if I should've been paying attention to whether the baby on the packaging picture was a boy or girl.

They had separately gendered nappies available when my kids needed them, over 20 years ago.

that 'beaner' is a derogatory term used for people of hispanic origin

never heard it either

It suddenly occurs to me that most slurs appropriately scan as something invented on the fly by a six-year-old who's inordinately impressed with his own 'cleverness'.

that 'beaner' is a derogatory term used for people of hispanic origin

I heard this all the time as a little kid so OL otm

if i'd had to guess, i would have said it was a derogatory term for bostonians

encountered "beaner" in plenty of US media from the other side of the planet

I've known about that all my life, but you all aren't the first to be surprised either.

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/06/changing_coffee_houses_name_wa.html

impossible to avoid when Carlos Mencia was popular

I only know it because the racist cop in breaking bad says it all the time

When I was in junior high (1982-82) a local Cleveland DJ recorded a parody of Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" called "Beaner Fever," which was indeed about Mexicans. It got played over the Cleveland airwaves regularly.

I know the term from this classic

https://youtu.be/8iJMOBcPQyg

think I learned it from Cheech & Chong

I was thinking there was some sort of continental divide that lay between Mexico and Boston.

impossible to avoid when Carlos Mencia was popular

and yet

pplains exp matches my exp- 21 yrs all along mid-atlantic/ne seaboard i never heard it, but heard it in 90 soon after i landed in colo, took me a minute to even get what it meant.

around same time a midwesterner dropped “jew down” as a term for bargaining at me. it was new to me but i got it and objected immed. he really did seem shocked it was offensive.

pplains exp matches my exp- 21 yrs all along mid-atlantic/ne seaboard i never heard it, but heard it in 90 soon after i landed in colo, took me a minute to even get what it meant.

around same time a midwesterner dropped “jew down” as a term for bargaining at me. it was new to me but i got it and objected immed. he really did seem shocked it was offensive.

i gave up the zing app as a resolution and now i’m double posting bad memories in chrome yay

no dude, your post was just that booming

Narcissus and daffodil are, broadly speaking, the same plant.

So the story about Sigmund Freud presenting Virginia Woolf (his English publisher) with a narcissus? It seems rather more homey and pedestrian than I'd been led to imagine. He needn't have consulted a botanist or florist. He probably didn't intend some grand statement based on mythology and psychology. He probably wasn't trying to subtly throw shade on her.

Indeed, he might have just hastily scooped up something from the Woolfs' dooryard, a few minutes before their meeting.

A whole allegedly revealing anecdote, undone by simple taxonomy.

sometimes a daffodil is just a daffodil

Only today discovered that the British employment of 'corn' may refer more broadly to a variety of grain, which clears up what I'd previously believed to be confusingly-anachronistic pre-1492 references to the existence of maize in Europe.

TIL that Duplo blocks are called Duplo because they are double the dimensions of Lego blocks.

Yesterday I noticed that the logo of Domino’s Pizza is a domino

There was also a short-lived product line called Quatro.

I must have heard the Nick Cave song "The Mercy Seat" dozens of times and I only just learned that in the song the seat is God's throne as well as the electric chair. Never knew about the throne meaning and always thought it just referred to the electric chair.

I assume the Mercy Seat title given to the electric chair was originally a pun on the God's throne thing. As in it was ironically applied knowing its prior usage. Not that it was named after a supposedly humane way of dispensing with unwanted criminals who might reoffend if ever let back out into the public.
I heard the guillotine was partially used because it was developed as a more humane method of dispatch.

Gylfi Sigurdsson's actual name is Gylfi Sigurðsson.

I thought eths were pretty consistently misspelled and mispronounced as dees by English speakers and it was just the way it was, no?

vin diesel and paul giamatti are the same age

You mean Vin ðiesel

I thought eths were pretty consistently misspelled and mispronounced as dees by English speakers and it was just the way it was, no?

Probably but kinda weird as the ð sound is pretty damn common in English!

https://i.imgur.com/rTPU9Mn.jpg

That this isn't a photo of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, but of an apartment building just down the street.

xp that is very true we should be just writing eths as "th" the way we do with Þs I suppose, and œ'ing the ös if we're gonna be real, Bjœrk Guthmansdottir maybe. Looks like a brand of cigarette, guess I'm thinking of Roðmans

It is always so interesting to me to see the character equivalencies between Germanic languages, y = ÿ = ij, å = oa, etc.

Hi everyone I've had a smart phone for seven years and today I accidentally found out how to do emoji on my phone keyboard

In 25+ years of listening to Pretty Vacant, this had never occurred to me:

The song gained attention for vocalist John Lydon's phrasing of the word "vacant", emphasising the last syllable to sound like the vulgar word cunt.

Lol really?

Huh, that never occurred to me, either.

This might not count since it's only been true for about three years, but I just learned today that Jerry Hall is married to Rupert Murdoch. Don't know how I missed it, guess I never pay attention to either one of them.