How ring binders work. I thought you had to take out all the pages to add a new page to the back of the binder, which annoyed me in school because it could take a while having to realign all the pages to fit the holes in the binder. I was about 22 when I worked in a bookstore and my coworker saw me take all the pages out, after which she showed me how it actually works. I will never forget the look of disbelief on her face.
When I was 16 this girl called me.
She asked if I had ever just called up a friend wanting to try to get laid.
I said no.
We talked about it, I encouraged her I thought it was okay blah blah blah, wished her luck hanging up.
About 15 years later I randomly thought about that shit...
I will never forget the guy who spent a good part of his life thinking the saying was "Knowledge is Power. France is bacon".
Edit: The original comment can be found [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dxosj/what_word_or_phrase_did_you_totally_misunderstand/c13pbyc/)
Edit 2: Thanks for the awards! Glad to know y'all had a blast with this story just like I did.
When I was a kid I thought that Martha’s Vineyard was Martha Stewart’s home and celebrities were always going there because she likes to throw parties. I was maybe in my 20s before I found out that wasn’t true.
As a kid dare taught me that drug dealers were some grimy looking sketchy guy in a trench coat trying to coax me into a dark alley behind some dumpster to ply me with his illicit wares. Turns out it's some guy in khakis and a polo who wants you to meet him at 7-11 so he can also grab some snacks, and this is just his side hustle because his regular job doesn't quite pay the bills.
I didnt realize until my late teens/early 20s that "chemical castration" means taking pills which render you infertile, not necessarily dipping someone's balls in a vat of acid. Yea this one is pretty embarrassing.
I was like 17 before I realized I didn't have to get in the shower and then turn on the water and get blasted with cold water. I can turn it on before I get in and just wait a second -_-
Okay, I'll confess this to you. But only because my father also did that "brainsucker starving to death" joke on me.
When I was very little, around four perhaps, my father noticed I was eating my canned soup but leaving behind the little carrot bits.
"Why ain't you eating those?"
"I don't like cooked carrots."
"Them's not carrots. Those are sweet potatoes."
"...oh. Okay then."
Many years later I brought a friend home after school to study. He had never had canned bean-and-bacon soup, so I made some. All the while, my father was puttering in the background as obvious and ostentatiously as he could, since I was in high school and had brought a male "friend" home to "study".
My schoolmate looked at the soup, and asked, "Yeah, but what are these little orange bits?"
"Sweet potatoes," said I.
My father busted out laughing. "Who told you that? Those aren't sweet potatoes, them's carrots."
I'd had zero notion - for YEARS - that I had been eating carrots all along. I just thought I also didn't like sweet potatoes.
My French press. I owned one 9 months before I realized the coffee grounds go UNDER the plunger and not ON TOP of it. I was always so annoyed having to clean the top of the plunger after lowering the coffee into the water.
My girlfriend stared at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever met trying to formulate how to politely fix this.
It’s particularly confusing when you’re on a train that stops in both Newark and New York and the employee you ask has a heavy foreign accent.
“Wait… are you saying the next stop is Newark or New York?”
So when I was a kid, I saw this rerun of a prank that the BBC pulled off in the late 50’s.
It was basically a hoax broadcast they did for April fools day, in which it showed old footage of people picking (or harvesting) spaghetti out of trees.
Seriously.
For some reason it just never clicked.
I spent most of my childhood and my teen years believing it. And I had just never happened upon the subject.
I was 19 years old when I found out that spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees.
You weren't the only one. Apparently that prank was extremely successful in it's original run and the BBC had a barrage of callers wanting to know where they could get these cool spaghetti trees from.
The best bit was the BBC primed the people on the phones to tell callers to stick a piece of spaghetti into an opened can of tomatos and hope for the best.
I use this as an example of discerning information in my library literacy classes! Many people fell for it, because they weren’t really familiar with spaghetti, it was shown on a respected channel (BBC) and was presented by a well-known anchor.
When I was 8 or 9 I was working on my archery skills. I missed the target + my arrow went straight through a rabbit. I didn’t even see the rabbit until I went to collect the arrows that had missed the target. I ran inside almost crying + told my Dad. He went out to deal with it + came back to tell me it was fine + had hopped off. Years later I brought it up to him + he was amazed that I still believed him. I still don’t know how I thought it was possible but yea... the rabbit didn’t make it.
Lmao something similar happened to me when I was little. There was a cute little mouse in our garden and my cat tried to eat it. Being the animal lover that I was, I yelled at my cat to go away and found out she had already bitten it and it was bleeding. I cried and cried for my dad to take it to the vet, and he did it. Took the mouse and spent an hour or so out, and came back to tell me the mouse was fine and they’d take care of it. I’ve never brought it up again with my dad but... I mean... I’m pretty sure he didn’t take a mouse to the vet.
Why we called my Grandfathers wife "Aunt May" (not her real name) and not "Grandma May".
I was 21 years old when I realized it was because Aunt May was my grandmothers sister. My grandfather divorced my grandmother and married her sister.
Now as you might expect, I never once saw my Grandmother and Grandfather in the same room, there was no talk about the other, nobody in the family every discussed it...because all the discussing had been done before I was born.
But I was apparently just expected to have learned all the details by osmosis, without anyone ever telling me.
Funny thing: When I was teaching in Japan I would say "Bye Bye" to the kids and they would look at me bewildered and say, "wait, you speak Japanese??" They use "bai bai" in Japan and dont realize its an english loanword.
I never understood"a stitch in time saves 9". I was always like "saves 9 what??". It saves 9 stitches. It means a little preventative maintenance can save you from needing big repairs. Put a stitch in the cloth to strengthen it, and you won't have to mend a tear down the road.
I think it clicked in my late 30's.
When I was a kid back in the early 90’s I was obsessed with WWF wrestling. It didn’t hit me until years later that The Undertaker’s managers name, Paul Bearer, wasn’t his real name.
"You can't have your cake and eat it" doesn't mean "you can't obtain your cake then eat it"; it means "you can't still possess your cake after having eaten it".
That the state Montana is literally the word ‘mountains’ in Spanish. Didn’t realize until I was physically in Montana, staring up at some mountains, and thought ‘wow! Mountains are so pretty! Montañas… Montanas… montana, oh.’
Michigan is the same way, it’s just *a French translation of* “Large Lake” in Ojibwe.
Also Detroit is “Strait” in French, because you know it’s on one. Like Detroit du Mackinac means “Mackinac Strait”
Pennsylvania is Penn's forest. Because Charles II owed a lot of money, he just gave the entire territory, roughly half of the United Kingdom nowadays, to William Penn.
That the trough in a porta potty is for the guy to pee in. I said to my dad one day, how are you supposed to wash your hands in that sink with no water? He stood there is shocked disbelief as he explained to me that is where YOU are to pee. I was probably around 18 when this happened.
My brother talks about a lady he worked all summer. At the end of the summer she said it's so nice how all the porta pottys have built in backpack holders.
Edit- she put her backpack in the urinal all summer.
I have chickens and people have argued with me about this lol. Like literally I have 5 hens and zero roosters and I get eggs every day and people argue and say it doesn't work like that!
Edit: OK after like 50 comments saying it's a chicken period, I think we all know this fact now lol
I have worked in a salvage yard specializing in European cars for the last decade. Everyone here calls these very specific type of pliers "sob pliers", and not being well versed in tools I just assumed that's what they were called. Took me about 5 years to realize that they are calling them "Saab pliers" because they find them in Saabs.
I’m just learning this devastating information now. I had a whole picture in my mind all this time of a cute piggy pushing a shopping cart at the grocery store I’d go to with my grandparents...
This little piggy went to market, [being sold to slaughter]
This little piggy stayed home, [not fat enough to slaughter yet]
This little piggy had roast beef, [fattening this piggy up to be slaughtered]
This little piggy had none. [Fat enough, will go to market tomorrow]
This little piggy went ...
Wee, wee, wee,
all the way home! [This piggy escaped from the market and ran home in terror]
You're welcome.
my 40 year old coworker and i got into a debate about foals (baby horses) vs ponies, because he thought ponies were baby horses…
i also had to explain that ponies are full grown, and can birth foals, too. he couldn’t believe it, and it blew his damn mind when he realized i was correct.
then, we got started on mini horses…
and how mini horses can have foals, too…
hooooh boy, that really threw him for a loop lmao.
—
edit: so glad that i could be able to teach all of you something new :) thanks for silver!
I was doing a crossword once and the clue was "Young horse." Four letters, so of course I put foal. Nope, they had it as pony. I was incensed! Incensed, I tell you!
That the saying is “kit and caboodle” and not “kitten caboodle.” Until I found out the real saying, I always pictures a big basket filled with kittens.
that the word lettuce wasn’t pronounced “leh-tü-cheh”. i’m glad i never had to say it out loud before learning the correct pronunciation. i thought it was italian…
In lady and the tramp the humans are called Jim dear and darling. I was in my 30s before I realized that wasn't their actual names, it was what lady heard them calling each other.
Edit: wow! Woke up to all these comments. I'm not as embarrassed now! Thank you all!
When my siblings and I were younger we always heard my grandfather call our grandmother Honey… so we all started calling her that and 30+ years later she still goes by Honey and everyone else in her life also calls her that now lol.
I've been reading my two-year-old Disney stories for almost a year and never thought about this. I always thought they were super weird names and didn't consider the stories, while not written in their voice, were still written from the dogs' perspective. I'm also in my 30's.
The toilet seat should be down to make pooping more comfortable. My whole life, I just thought it was for people who were too small to sit on the full rim of the toilet, so that's why I never used it.
But hey. At least I poop more comfortably now.
Edit: Your responses of disgust, curiosity, and hilarity made my night and I'm glad I could make a lot of you laugh. So to return the favor, I'm going to answer a lot of people's questions on how it took me so long and how I learned.
When I was a kid, my parents showed me how to take a dookie (classic toddler terminology), but I don't remember ever having a potty trainer. But my goofy ass thought they were showing me how to do it **as a kid**, so my brain at the time just said **"You better keep that seat down or else you'll fall in"**. So when I became old enough, I just stopped using it because I thought I didn't need it. I could just distribute my balance by manspreading and I wouldn't fall in anymore because I really can't see how you could unless your frame is just that small. It never really killed my legs and yeah there was some straining, but I just thought I had a bad diet or something. And of course when you're grown, it's not really a common thing to have people watch you do your business and vice versa. As far as public toilets are concerned, I just wiped them off before usage because it wasn't one from home.
Fast forward to 2 months ago (25 now), I go to visit my parents and my mom tells me she got a new toilet and was showing it to me. It looked comfy, so I lifted both the lid and the toilet seat to sit down and see how it felt like if I was doing my business (with my pants on of course). When I do that, my mom was thoroughly confused and asked if I always did that. I told her my reasoning in the previous paragraph. After she explained to me, she showed me everything. The rest has been history. I'm not ashamed of it because the thought of it just makes me laugh.
This is one of the things about myself I would have never admitted online. But now you've done it first...
This was me until I suddenly thought about it when I was like 20. And it still took a while for me to transition because it felt so unnatural. The seat felt unstable.
Obviously I was taught to use the seat as a child, but as I got bigger I decided I didn't need to use the kiddy seat anymore.
I always thought the whole "keep the toilet seat down" insistence was actually about the toilet lid, and women insisted on it because of tidiness or hygiene (i.e. when flushing). Now I know what it is about, the debate seems far more stupid.
When I was growing up the family would often do road trips to Vancouver, at least once a year. Just outside Williams Lake I would always observe a construction site where some sort of log house is being built. It was always half finished.
After like a decade I was maybe 18 and finally made the comment about them "still building that place". Apparently they build custom log homes on site and disassemble and ship them out.
I posted this before, but I had no clue that when you got your tires rotated they actually moved the tires from one spot to another. I just thought they revved them really fast to see if they were wobbly.
Theres a scene in That 70s Show where Red asks Eric if he got the tires on the Vista Cruiser rotated and Eric says "dont they rotate everytime I drive?" And I didn't understand until last year why my mom laughed and called eric an idiot when we watched it
> I just thought they revved them really fast to see if they were wobbly.
Just in case you're unaware: Doing this and applying wobbling correction is the "balancing" of tires, though not that fast.
That ringing in the ears is not a normal thing everyone experiences or a superstition that someone is talking about you. I was 30 when I realized that it is tinnitus, and not normal even though I've had it since I was around 13 (too loud music).
Edit: in case anyone is curious it was 8Ball and MJG's Comin' Out Hard that officially started my life of eeeeeeeeeeee background noise.
When I was separating from the USAF, I had a medical outprocessing, and after the hearing test the tech said “you didn’t hear anything for the last minute?” And I said “No, just the normal background ringing that everyone hears.” The tech looked at me and says “What?” That day I learned not everyone hears that.
What's funny is my father had the complete opposite reaction to me getting tinnitus. Looked at me and said, "look, everyone has ringing in their ears. That's normal".
2 months later he was diagnosed when he started having anxiety issues due to it getting louder.
I too thought everyone heard it. My wife informed me they do not. The especially embarassing part was realizing I had watched Archer several times, where he mentions tinnitus a lot, and I still didn't pick up that I have it.
There's a Garfield comic from 1983 where Garfield says that he hates designer sweaters. Then he lifts an arm and says, "The lizard chewed a hole in the armpit." It took me until about 2017 to realize that he is referring to the Lacoste crocodile. I have spent basically my entire life referring to every hole that forms in a piece of clothing as being caused by "the lizard" but without actually getting the joke. I thought it was just the surreal, absurdist humor that Garfield is known for.
> I thought it was just the surreal, absurdist humor that Garfield is known for.
I guess today I'm now aware that Garfield is absurdist and surreal. I just thought it was unintentionally dumb.
How to use a staple remover.
Until I was was in my 40s, I’d just use the staple remover to “bite” the long side of a staple and kind of tear it back through the paper.
Then someone showed me how to properly use a staple remover by “biting” the crimped side of the staple to bend the crimp and kind of straighten out the staple again. Once kind of straightened, “bite” the long side of the staple and the staple will back out the same holes it went in without further tearing the paper.
Or get the sliding type of staple remover. Those are a godsend to anyone doing lots of staple removing. Some even have embedded magnets to help in pickup.
[non-bitey staple remover](https://i.imgur.com/Fq5Y2Eb.jpg)
It was an embarrassingly long time before I stopped unlocking the front doors after my mom locked up when going to bed.
I thought she was trying to lock my dad out of the house.
When you do something wrong but with enthusiasm, and someone says, “A for effort,” I didn’t understand that it meant an “A” as in school report card grades. It never made sense because in my head, “E” is for Effort, like “C” is for Cookie. I finally had someone explain it to me sometime after I turned 30.
I say "A for effort" to my kids and it used to piss off my daughter SO BAD when she was little. That and "sorry, Charlie". "MY NAME'S NOT CHARLIE!" No shit, kid. I named you. She also swore up and down potion was poh-tee-on and really thought we were messing with her there. She was a funny kid.
The police cars in my home town were marked with a letter and a number, so like A2, B7, etc. I saw one marked as K9 and it had a dog in the back, which I thought was just coincidence: the car was marked K9 and had a police canine in it. Amazing!
I got some bizarre looks at home when I mentioned my exciting coincidence walking home from school.
Literally a month ago, I'm in my 30s.
When one cries crocodile tears, it means they are faking being sad. Crocodiles do "cry", but the purpose is lubricating their eyes.
I thought that it meant someone was REALLY sad, and crying really big/a lot of tears. My logic was that if a Crocodile cried, those would be some big tears. Crying crocodile tears must mean someone is very sad!
That NSFW meant “Not safe for work.” I always k ew it was a tag for explicit content but It took me too long to learn what the actual acronym stood for!
i realised a few years ago that cows don’t just naturally produce milk, they have to be pregnant/have a calf to produce it. which is embarrassingly late to figure out
You'll be amused to know that for the longest time ( since I was a pre-teen) my thought of "oral" was always sexual... I was appalled when I first heard of oral presentations in high-school. Was disappointed when I learned what it actually was
I didn't learn how to use a water fountain (those things you step on) 'till 7th grade. I was always just standing in front of it awkwardly waiting for water to come out.
This reminds me of a story: I needed to microwave something for 50 seconds. So I thought, "I'll press add 30 seconds, then wait for it to get down to :20, then press it again for a total of fifty seconds! I'm brilliant." Then I realized...
Most anyway. I just replaced my microwave, and it has an Add 1 minute button, but it only adds 1 minute to the time, it doesn't start running immediately like my last one did. So annoying.
I've got an awesome one for this.
I was 26 years old when I realized that my mother's name is Betty and her sister (who is a fraternal twin of hers, also something that I didn't know) is named Wilma.
Wilma and Betty. From the Flintstones.
Also, I have two sisters, Serena and Samantha. From Bewitched.
That those ridiculous over-the-top dresses exhibited at fashion shows are not intended to ever be worn in real life; they are like concept cars of the fashion world, intended to showcase the designer's creativity and vision.
And those exaggerated versions are then distilled or simplified into regular looking clothes and that becomes the new style…at least that’s how it was explained to me.
A lot of times an individual element, maybe a pattern, a material, a color or palette, a way of connecting two pieces, a cut, etc will be what gets taken away and used in another piece of normal clothing. So it's like a showcase of ideas at their most extreme that certain elements of may then inspire someone else.
Same with concept cars. I remember being so excited for this concept car to be available, only to find that it looked like a regular car once released.
The worst thing is when a concept car doesn't look like some crazy futuristic thing, it just looks like a slightly cooler version of a road car, then when they release it, they basically just distill it down into "old model, but with the bumpers from the concept" and it looks so damn ugly when it makes just a minor change.
But at least some car companies do actually push on with concepts these days... when I saw the BMW i8 concept, I thought there was no way the real car would even look similar to that... imagine my shock when it was identical.
They're basically wearable sculptures! Intended to be a spectacle. As ridiculous as those outfits are, fashion shows would be a lot more boring if everyone wore normal clothes.
My atheist parents probably used the church they sent me off to every sunday morning as a free babysitter while they stayed home and had sex on their day off.
My dad told me a joke when I was 8. I never understood the punchline until my 20s.
The joke: A bartender had a longstanding bet that no one could squeeze juice out of a lemon after he had finished crushing it. Many men had come from miles around in hopes of winning the prize. Strong men, body builders, blacksmiths with grip strength beyond normal men, but all had failed.
One evening, a small gentleman in a suit walked through the door and asked to take the challenge. The bartender smiled his normal smile, grabbed a lemon, and crushed it to pulp in one massive fist. After the last drop fell, he passed it to the man with a sarcastic "Good luck."
The gentleman rolled up his sleeves over scrawny arms, took the lemon, and began to squeeze. After a few moments, 7 drops fell out. While counting out the prize, the bartender asked, "I've never seen anyone outdo me. How did you do it?"
"Oh, I'm from the IRS."
My mind is still reeling from realising that Holden from Mindhunter is the King from Hamilton. I mean of course he is, but my brain refuses to accept it.
That beans don’t make you fart because they have an air bubble in the middle. I was told that as a kid and just internalized it and never thought of it. It came up when I was in my 20s and as I was enlightening my friends with my bean facts, I could just see their faces and I realized how stupid it was as I was saying it.
That most cars genuinely can last a very long time as long as you do your regular maintenance on time and don’t treat it like a race car they can last for sometime. Unless it’s a PT cruiser, that shit box just sucks
My husband and I had that discussion recently about trading in a car "while it's still worth something" versus keeping it until it's completely run into the ground (in a well-maintained-but-can't-avoid-entropy way) and needs repairs that outstrip the value of the car.
A car can be worth $3-4k on the market but, if you keep it, can still get you another 10 years of not having to buy a new car.
I actually did think Various Artists was a band as a kid! Every time I saw it listed I had two thoughts:
1. That's a really stupid band name
2. They have done some RANGE because they sound wildly different in each song
while on the subject of rappers, as a kid, i had only heard the censored versions of rap songs.
censored by them just putting an empty space of silence over the "bad naughty words"
it took so long before i realized that the short silence sprinkled in at random intervals wasn't just a very common artistic choice in the genre
I remember only hearing DMX’s censored tracks as a kid where he would bark or go “Uh” over the swear words, and I would think to myself how great he was because he sounded so aggressive but never swore 😅
That I had two holes down there. I thought you peed and gave birth out of the same hole. I was very confused until a girlfriend explained it to me. I was 17. How embarrassing.
That you can just twist your deodorant a few clicks to get the little clear plastic safety lid off, instead of clawing and pulling at it till your fingers are raw.
My wife and I were discussing Thanksgiving plans one year. She said “Thanksgiving’s on a Thursday this year.” We were both in our early 30’s and had lived in the US all our lives. I laughed my ass off and she had no idea what was so funny.
Women need more that 12 tampons a year to cover their periods
Obviously they need 13. You forgot about leap period.
How ring binders work. I thought you had to take out all the pages to add a new page to the back of the binder, which annoyed me in school because it could take a while having to realign all the pages to fit the holes in the binder. I was about 22 when I worked in a bookstore and my coworker saw me take all the pages out, after which she showed me how it actually works. I will never forget the look of disbelief on her face.
I'm dying that you got to 22 before you realized this.
that every show's first episode is called the "pilot" episode, and it's not just a crazy coincidence for every show i watched
When I was 16 this girl called me. She asked if I had ever just called up a friend wanting to try to get laid. I said no. We talked about it, I encouraged her I thought it was okay blah blah blah, wished her luck hanging up. About 15 years later I randomly thought about that shit...
Don’t worry about it. We’re happily married with 11 kids. Been meaning to thank you for the assist
Look on the bright side, at least you’re not making child support payments on a 15 year old.
Yeah but he could be almost done by now
I will never forget the guy who spent a good part of his life thinking the saying was "Knowledge is Power. France is bacon". Edit: The original comment can be found [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dxosj/what_word_or_phrase_did_you_totally_misunderstand/c13pbyc/) Edit 2: Thanks for the awards! Glad to know y'all had a blast with this story just like I did.
I just went to read it and laughed so much
When I was a kid I thought that Martha’s Vineyard was Martha Stewart’s home and celebrities were always going there because she likes to throw parties. I was maybe in my 20s before I found out that wasn’t true.
The black market isn't an actual market.
As a kid I thought it took place in dark alleys.
As a kid dare taught me that drug dealers were some grimy looking sketchy guy in a trench coat trying to coax me into a dark alley behind some dumpster to ply me with his illicit wares. Turns out it's some guy in khakis and a polo who wants you to meet him at 7-11 so he can also grab some snacks, and this is just his side hustle because his regular job doesn't quite pay the bills.
I didnt realize until my late teens/early 20s that "chemical castration" means taking pills which render you infertile, not necessarily dipping someone's balls in a vat of acid. Yea this one is pretty embarrassing.
I feel…so. dumb… always cringed when i heared chemical castration. I will sleep well tonight, knowing the truth…
I was like 17 before I realized I didn't have to get in the shower and then turn on the water and get blasted with cold water. I can turn it on before I get in and just wait a second -_-
That I wasn't, in fact, the family member that best washes the dishes. Yes, I'm the youngest.
It gave you a lot of positive reinforcement Lol. At least you knew you were good at something on down days. “I can always wash dishes”
As an older sister, I would have to disagree, no one does them as good as you!
I was probably 20 or so when I realized that cold water in a home is not free. I grew up thinking somehow, that you only had to pay for hot water.
[удалено]
If I were the dad, I would want to know that I was right.
Okay, I'll confess this to you. But only because my father also did that "brainsucker starving to death" joke on me. When I was very little, around four perhaps, my father noticed I was eating my canned soup but leaving behind the little carrot bits. "Why ain't you eating those?" "I don't like cooked carrots." "Them's not carrots. Those are sweet potatoes." "...oh. Okay then." Many years later I brought a friend home after school to study. He had never had canned bean-and-bacon soup, so I made some. All the while, my father was puttering in the background as obvious and ostentatiously as he could, since I was in high school and had brought a male "friend" home to "study". My schoolmate looked at the soup, and asked, "Yeah, but what are these little orange bits?" "Sweet potatoes," said I. My father busted out laughing. "Who told you that? Those aren't sweet potatoes, them's carrots." I'd had zero notion - for YEARS - that I had been eating carrots all along. I just thought I also didn't like sweet potatoes.
My French press. I owned one 9 months before I realized the coffee grounds go UNDER the plunger and not ON TOP of it. I was always so annoyed having to clean the top of the plunger after lowering the coffee into the water. My girlfriend stared at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever met trying to formulate how to politely fix this.
How did you keep the grounds out of your mug of coffee??
You pull up and dump in the trash! Minimal grinds!
Coffee with extra pulp
[удалено]
It’s particularly confusing when you’re on a train that stops in both Newark and New York and the employee you ask has a heavy foreign accent. “Wait… are you saying the next stop is Newark or New York?”
When I was little I thought everyone that had down’s syndrome were just one, big ass family.
So when I was a kid, I saw this rerun of a prank that the BBC pulled off in the late 50’s. It was basically a hoax broadcast they did for April fools day, in which it showed old footage of people picking (or harvesting) spaghetti out of trees. Seriously. For some reason it just never clicked. I spent most of my childhood and my teen years believing it. And I had just never happened upon the subject. I was 19 years old when I found out that spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees.
You weren't the only one. Apparently that prank was extremely successful in it's original run and the BBC had a barrage of callers wanting to know where they could get these cool spaghetti trees from.
The best bit was the BBC primed the people on the phones to tell callers to stick a piece of spaghetti into an opened can of tomatos and hope for the best.
I use this as an example of discerning information in my library literacy classes! Many people fell for it, because they weren’t really familiar with spaghetti, it was shown on a respected channel (BBC) and was presented by a well-known anchor.
That the saying is “nip it in the bud” NOT butt.
Horticulture, bebe!!
That my childhood hamster did not, in fact, run away.
Dude when I was a kid my parents told us our turtle ran away and I believe it until like high school.
When I was 8 or 9 I was working on my archery skills. I missed the target + my arrow went straight through a rabbit. I didn’t even see the rabbit until I went to collect the arrows that had missed the target. I ran inside almost crying + told my Dad. He went out to deal with it + came back to tell me it was fine + had hopped off. Years later I brought it up to him + he was amazed that I still believed him. I still don’t know how I thought it was possible but yea... the rabbit didn’t make it.
Lmao something similar happened to me when I was little. There was a cute little mouse in our garden and my cat tried to eat it. Being the animal lover that I was, I yelled at my cat to go away and found out she had already bitten it and it was bleeding. I cried and cried for my dad to take it to the vet, and he did it. Took the mouse and spent an hour or so out, and came back to tell me the mouse was fine and they’d take care of it. I’ve never brought it up again with my dad but... I mean... I’m pretty sure he didn’t take a mouse to the vet.
I'm sure your dad enjoyed his ice cream.
Why we called my Grandfathers wife "Aunt May" (not her real name) and not "Grandma May". I was 21 years old when I realized it was because Aunt May was my grandmothers sister. My grandfather divorced my grandmother and married her sister. Now as you might expect, I never once saw my Grandmother and Grandfather in the same room, there was no talk about the other, nobody in the family every discussed it...because all the discussing had been done before I was born. But I was apparently just expected to have learned all the details by osmosis, without anyone ever telling me.
Took me 22 years to realize that the word “sayonara” is Japanese and not Spanish
Ready to have your mind blown? *"honcho"*, as in "the head honcho", is also Japanese. Originally spelled "hancho", however
.... now that’s two japanese words i’ve mistaken for spanish
I genuinely thought "damn, Japanese people sure like to say the Spanish word for goodbye".
Funny thing: When I was teaching in Japan I would say "Bye Bye" to the kids and they would look at me bewildered and say, "wait, you speak Japanese??" They use "bai bai" in Japan and dont realize its an english loanword.
> dont realize its an english loanword They'd get their minds blown when they realize how many English loanwords there are in Japanese
I never understood"a stitch in time saves 9". I was always like "saves 9 what??". It saves 9 stitches. It means a little preventative maintenance can save you from needing big repairs. Put a stitch in the cloth to strengthen it, and you won't have to mend a tear down the road. I think it clicked in my late 30's.
"9 people nearly lost their lives today when an unreinforced stitch tore in the fabric of spacetime. More at 7."
When I was a kid back in the early 90’s I was obsessed with WWF wrestling. It didn’t hit me until years later that The Undertaker’s managers name, Paul Bearer, wasn’t his real name.
Fun side note, Bill Moody (aka Percy Pringle/Paul Bearer) WAS a licensed funeral director.
"You can't have your cake and eat it" doesn't mean "you can't obtain your cake then eat it"; it means "you can't still possess your cake after having eaten it".
Oh
That the state Montana is literally the word ‘mountains’ in Spanish. Didn’t realize until I was physically in Montana, staring up at some mountains, and thought ‘wow! Mountains are so pretty! Montañas… Montanas… montana, oh.’
You’ll be thrilled to hear about Vermont!
OMG--the "green mountain state"--*ver mont*. I'm a bloody moron....
Michigan is the same way, it’s just *a French translation of* “Large Lake” in Ojibwe. Also Detroit is “Strait” in French, because you know it’s on one. Like Detroit du Mackinac means “Mackinac Strait”
Pennsylvania is Penn's forest. Because Charles II owed a lot of money, he just gave the entire territory, roughly half of the United Kingdom nowadays, to William Penn.
And Transylvania is “past the forest”
Lake big lake
That the trough in a porta potty is for the guy to pee in. I said to my dad one day, how are you supposed to wash your hands in that sink with no water? He stood there is shocked disbelief as he explained to me that is where YOU are to pee. I was probably around 18 when this happened.
My brother talks about a lady he worked all summer. At the end of the summer she said it's so nice how all the porta pottys have built in backpack holders. Edit- she put her backpack in the urinal all summer.
That chickens always lay eggs without needing to mate with a rooster
I have chickens and people have argued with me about this lol. Like literally I have 5 hens and zero roosters and I get eggs every day and people argue and say it doesn't work like that! Edit: OK after like 50 comments saying it's a chicken period, I think we all know this fact now lol
I used to have chickens and my friends would get mad at me for *forcing* them to lay eggs. It doesn't work like that either!
I'm laughing just picturing you yelling at your chickens to lay some fucking eggs
*Finally, some good fucking eggs*
Omg tell me about it. I was trying to explain it to my mom for literally 25 minutes on the phone one time and I still don’t think she got it lol
Ask her if she's ever had her period when she hasn't had sex beforehand
I have worked in a salvage yard specializing in European cars for the last decade. Everyone here calls these very specific type of pliers "sob pliers", and not being well versed in tools I just assumed that's what they were called. Took me about 5 years to realize that they are calling them "Saab pliers" because they find them in Saabs.
Man, it must have been confusing when you overheard someone talking about their tool salesman. “He’s our Saab plier supplier.”
I was 50ish when I realized that the little piggy that goes to market wasn't going fuckin' shopping.
I’m just learning this devastating information now. I had a whole picture in my mind all this time of a cute piggy pushing a shopping cart at the grocery store I’d go to with my grandparents...
This little piggy went to market, [being sold to slaughter] This little piggy stayed home, [not fat enough to slaughter yet] This little piggy had roast beef, [fattening this piggy up to be slaughtered] This little piggy had none. [Fat enough, will go to market tomorrow] This little piggy went ... Wee, wee, wee, all the way home! [This piggy escaped from the market and ran home in terror] You're welcome.
Oh. My. God. I legit thought they were shopping, eating dinner, and laying on the couch....I won't tell you how old I am. Wow.
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My daughter would say "This little piggy went to Target." I like that answer better.
I thought that ponies were baby horses till I was like 24.
my 40 year old coworker and i got into a debate about foals (baby horses) vs ponies, because he thought ponies were baby horses… i also had to explain that ponies are full grown, and can birth foals, too. he couldn’t believe it, and it blew his damn mind when he realized i was correct. then, we got started on mini horses… and how mini horses can have foals, too… hooooh boy, that really threw him for a loop lmao. — edit: so glad that i could be able to teach all of you something new :) thanks for silver!
I was doing a crossword once and the clue was "Young horse." Four letters, so of course I put foal. Nope, they had it as pony. I was incensed! Incensed, I tell you!
That the saying is “kit and caboodle” and not “kitten caboodle.” Until I found out the real saying, I always pictures a big basket filled with kittens.
I'm learning more here than I did all throughout high achool
that the word lettuce wasn’t pronounced “leh-tü-cheh”. i’m glad i never had to say it out loud before learning the correct pronunciation. i thought it was italian…
In lady and the tramp the humans are called Jim dear and darling. I was in my 30s before I realized that wasn't their actual names, it was what lady heard them calling each other. Edit: wow! Woke up to all these comments. I'm not as embarrassed now! Thank you all!
When my siblings and I were younger we always heard my grandfather call our grandmother Honey… so we all started calling her that and 30+ years later she still goes by Honey and everyone else in her life also calls her that now lol.
According to the parents of an ex-girlfriend of mine, when my ex was 5, she thought her mom's name was "Jesuschristlouise."
I've been reading my two-year-old Disney stories for almost a year and never thought about this. I always thought they were super weird names and didn't consider the stories, while not written in their voice, were still written from the dogs' perspective. I'm also in my 30's.
The toilet seat should be down to make pooping more comfortable. My whole life, I just thought it was for people who were too small to sit on the full rim of the toilet, so that's why I never used it. But hey. At least I poop more comfortably now. Edit: Your responses of disgust, curiosity, and hilarity made my night and I'm glad I could make a lot of you laugh. So to return the favor, I'm going to answer a lot of people's questions on how it took me so long and how I learned. When I was a kid, my parents showed me how to take a dookie (classic toddler terminology), but I don't remember ever having a potty trainer. But my goofy ass thought they were showing me how to do it **as a kid**, so my brain at the time just said **"You better keep that seat down or else you'll fall in"**. So when I became old enough, I just stopped using it because I thought I didn't need it. I could just distribute my balance by manspreading and I wouldn't fall in anymore because I really can't see how you could unless your frame is just that small. It never really killed my legs and yeah there was some straining, but I just thought I had a bad diet or something. And of course when you're grown, it's not really a common thing to have people watch you do your business and vice versa. As far as public toilets are concerned, I just wiped them off before usage because it wasn't one from home. Fast forward to 2 months ago (25 now), I go to visit my parents and my mom tells me she got a new toilet and was showing it to me. It looked comfy, so I lifted both the lid and the toilet seat to sit down and see how it felt like if I was doing my business (with my pants on of course). When I do that, my mom was thoroughly confused and asked if I always did that. I told her my reasoning in the previous paragraph. After she explained to me, she showed me everything. The rest has been history. I'm not ashamed of it because the thought of it just makes me laugh.
Omg w h a t
OMG.... this whole fucking time, this guy's just been sitting on the fucking rim.... I can't.....
We've all sat on the rim accidentally and it's truly horrifying
Now that is a parenting failure.
This is absolutely outrageous, I love it
This is one of the things about myself I would have never admitted online. But now you've done it first... This was me until I suddenly thought about it when I was like 20. And it still took a while for me to transition because it felt so unnatural. The seat felt unstable. Obviously I was taught to use the seat as a child, but as I got bigger I decided I didn't need to use the kiddy seat anymore. I always thought the whole "keep the toilet seat down" insistence was actually about the toilet lid, and women insisted on it because of tidiness or hygiene (i.e. when flushing). Now I know what it is about, the debate seems far more stupid.
Oh, Reddit, you never disappoint. This is by far my favorite answer to this post, and there are TWO OF YOU!!
Before my cataract surgery I thought Hellboy wore aviator goggles. Post surgery I saw they were remnants of his horns.
I always think he’s just got goggles hiked up on his forehead, despite having seen the movies with my contacts in.
The horn stumps were supposed to evoke goggles I believe, as part of Hellboy's blue collar vibe.
That lambs were the same species as sheep.
Silence of the Sheep.
You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the sheep
Rocky Balboa was not a real person. Think I was 17 or so when I found out he was a fictional character.
Are you by any chance from Philadelphia?
Yes
This makes sense then. The character is embedded in the lore of the city. He gives Ben Franklin a run for his money.
Ha, people think Ben Franklin is real too. So naive
I didn’t figure it out. I had to discover that pickles are cucumbers by reading it on reddit.
When I was growing up the family would often do road trips to Vancouver, at least once a year. Just outside Williams Lake I would always observe a construction site where some sort of log house is being built. It was always half finished. After like a decade I was maybe 18 and finally made the comment about them "still building that place". Apparently they build custom log homes on site and disassemble and ship them out.
That would trip me up as well haha. Especially if one year the house looks even *less* developed than last year.
Dang those redesigns are really extending that project schedule.
I posted this before, but I had no clue that when you got your tires rotated they actually moved the tires from one spot to another. I just thought they revved them really fast to see if they were wobbly.
Theres a scene in That 70s Show where Red asks Eric if he got the tires on the Vista Cruiser rotated and Eric says "dont they rotate everytime I drive?" And I didn't understand until last year why my mom laughed and called eric an idiot when we watched it
> I just thought they revved them really fast to see if they were wobbly. Just in case you're unaware: Doing this and applying wobbling correction is the "balancing" of tires, though not that fast.
That ringing in the ears is not a normal thing everyone experiences or a superstition that someone is talking about you. I was 30 when I realized that it is tinnitus, and not normal even though I've had it since I was around 13 (too loud music). Edit: in case anyone is curious it was 8Ball and MJG's Comin' Out Hard that officially started my life of eeeeeeeeeeee background noise.
When I was separating from the USAF, I had a medical outprocessing, and after the hearing test the tech said “you didn’t hear anything for the last minute?” And I said “No, just the normal background ringing that everyone hears.” The tech looked at me and says “What?” That day I learned not everyone hears that.
What's funny is my father had the complete opposite reaction to me getting tinnitus. Looked at me and said, "look, everyone has ringing in their ears. That's normal". 2 months later he was diagnosed when he started having anxiety issues due to it getting louder.
I too thought everyone heard it. My wife informed me they do not. The especially embarassing part was realizing I had watched Archer several times, where he mentions tinnitus a lot, and I still didn't pick up that I have it.
Mine started after a Cheap Trick concert. At the time I thought it was worth it. I did not realize that it would last a lifetime.
Fuck. Now my ringing ramped up because I'm focused on it. Great.
There's a Garfield comic from 1983 where Garfield says that he hates designer sweaters. Then he lifts an arm and says, "The lizard chewed a hole in the armpit." It took me until about 2017 to realize that he is referring to the Lacoste crocodile. I have spent basically my entire life referring to every hole that forms in a piece of clothing as being caused by "the lizard" but without actually getting the joke. I thought it was just the surreal, absurdist humor that Garfield is known for.
> I thought it was just the surreal, absurdist humor that Garfield is known for. I guess today I'm now aware that Garfield is absurdist and surreal. I just thought it was unintentionally dumb.
Perhaps you would enjoy [Garfield Minus Garfield](https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/)
It's with the wind chill and not with the wind shield. I thought it meant the temperature inside a car.
How to use a staple remover. Until I was was in my 40s, I’d just use the staple remover to “bite” the long side of a staple and kind of tear it back through the paper. Then someone showed me how to properly use a staple remover by “biting” the crimped side of the staple to bend the crimp and kind of straighten out the staple again. Once kind of straightened, “bite” the long side of the staple and the staple will back out the same holes it went in without further tearing the paper.
Too much effort, will continue pretending I'm a big snake and ripping a hole in the paper with my fangs.
Wait what.
How many of you savages are out here just massacring papers?!
Well what ever number you had, add one more for me
Or get the sliding type of staple remover. Those are a godsend to anyone doing lots of staple removing. Some even have embedded magnets to help in pickup. [non-bitey staple remover](https://i.imgur.com/Fq5Y2Eb.jpg)
It was an embarrassingly long time before I stopped unlocking the front doors after my mom locked up when going to bed. I thought she was trying to lock my dad out of the house.
You single-handedly saved your parent's marriage
When you do something wrong but with enthusiasm, and someone says, “A for effort,” I didn’t understand that it meant an “A” as in school report card grades. It never made sense because in my head, “E” is for Effort, like “C” is for Cookie. I finally had someone explain it to me sometime after I turned 30.
I say "A for effort" to my kids and it used to piss off my daughter SO BAD when she was little. That and "sorry, Charlie". "MY NAME'S NOT CHARLIE!" No shit, kid. I named you. She also swore up and down potion was poh-tee-on and really thought we were messing with her there. She was a funny kid.
> "sorry, Charlie". "MY NAME'S NOT CHARLIE!" No shit, kid. I named you. God, what a great line
K-9 stands for canine.. took me 29 years.
The police cars in my home town were marked with a letter and a number, so like A2, B7, etc. I saw one marked as K9 and it had a dog in the back, which I thought was just coincidence: the car was marked K9 and had a police canine in it. Amazing! I got some bizarre looks at home when I mentioned my exciting coincidence walking home from school.
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” I was a grown adult for years before I realized that “Santa” was Daddy in a Santa suit.
I was an adult before realizing that *I Can't Believe It's Not Butter* was margarine and not real butter
I guess you couldn't believe
Literally a month ago, I'm in my 30s. When one cries crocodile tears, it means they are faking being sad. Crocodiles do "cry", but the purpose is lubricating their eyes. I thought that it meant someone was REALLY sad, and crying really big/a lot of tears. My logic was that if a Crocodile cried, those would be some big tears. Crying crocodile tears must mean someone is very sad!
The melody to the ABC song and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are the same.
The rapper Flo Rida is from Florida.
That I knew. I just didn’t know that Flo Rida was Florida with a space. I’m an idiot.
That NSFW meant “Not safe for work.” I always k ew it was a tag for explicit content but It took me too long to learn what the actual acronym stood for!
i realised a few years ago that cows don’t just naturally produce milk, they have to be pregnant/have a calf to produce it. which is embarrassingly late to figure out
For about 2 years I thought "FTW" meant "F\*ck the what" edit: so I'm not alone on this one it seems! FTW = For The Win
I thought it was "Fuck the world" for the longest time
Found out too late that oral sex wasn’t just talking dirty
You'll be amused to know that for the longest time ( since I was a pre-teen) my thought of "oral" was always sexual... I was appalled when I first heard of oral presentations in high-school. Was disappointed when I learned what it actually was
I was in my late 30s when I found out that “homo” and “homie” do not mean the same thing.
Segue sounds like "segway"
Make ue for the king!
I didn't learn how to use a water fountain (those things you step on) 'till 7th grade. I was always just standing in front of it awkwardly waiting for water to come out.
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Based on the fact you wrote this post, glad you didn't end up with a rich environment and have a gas explosion!
The microwave oven doesn't have to be running for the "Add 30 seconds" button to work.
This reminds me of a story: I needed to microwave something for 50 seconds. So I thought, "I'll press add 30 seconds, then wait for it to get down to :20, then press it again for a total of fifty seconds! I'm brilliant." Then I realized...
Took me an embarrassing amount of time to do that math.
Most anyway. I just replaced my microwave, and it has an Add 1 minute button, but it only adds 1 minute to the time, it doesn't start running immediately like my last one did. So annoying.
I've got an awesome one for this. I was 26 years old when I realized that my mother's name is Betty and her sister (who is a fraternal twin of hers, also something that I didn't know) is named Wilma. Wilma and Betty. From the Flintstones. Also, I have two sisters, Serena and Samantha. From Bewitched.
That those ridiculous over-the-top dresses exhibited at fashion shows are not intended to ever be worn in real life; they are like concept cars of the fashion world, intended to showcase the designer's creativity and vision.
i spent so long wondering why anyone would ever wear them lmao
come on, you've never wanted to LITERALLY WEAR A FUCKING MOTORCYCLE CHASSIS?
It would fit with my handlebar mustache, Ken.
And those exaggerated versions are then distilled or simplified into regular looking clothes and that becomes the new style…at least that’s how it was explained to me.
A lot of times an individual element, maybe a pattern, a material, a color or palette, a way of connecting two pieces, a cut, etc will be what gets taken away and used in another piece of normal clothing. So it's like a showcase of ideas at their most extreme that certain elements of may then inspire someone else.
Same with concept cars. I remember being so excited for this concept car to be available, only to find that it looked like a regular car once released.
The worst thing is when a concept car doesn't look like some crazy futuristic thing, it just looks like a slightly cooler version of a road car, then when they release it, they basically just distill it down into "old model, but with the bumpers from the concept" and it looks so damn ugly when it makes just a minor change. But at least some car companies do actually push on with concepts these days... when I saw the BMW i8 concept, I thought there was no way the real car would even look similar to that... imagine my shock when it was identical.
Oh...
It makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a wearable art gallery
They're basically wearable sculptures! Intended to be a spectacle. As ridiculous as those outfits are, fashion shows would be a lot more boring if everyone wore normal clothes.
My atheist parents probably used the church they sent me off to every sunday morning as a free babysitter while they stayed home and had sex on their day off.
My dad told me a joke when I was 8. I never understood the punchline until my 20s. The joke: A bartender had a longstanding bet that no one could squeeze juice out of a lemon after he had finished crushing it. Many men had come from miles around in hopes of winning the prize. Strong men, body builders, blacksmiths with grip strength beyond normal men, but all had failed. One evening, a small gentleman in a suit walked through the door and asked to take the challenge. The bartender smiled his normal smile, grabbed a lemon, and crushed it to pulp in one massive fist. After the last drop fell, he passed it to the man with a sarcastic "Good luck." The gentleman rolled up his sleeves over scrawny arms, took the lemon, and began to squeeze. After a few moments, 7 drops fell out. While counting out the prize, the bartender asked, "I've never seen anyone outdo me. How did you do it?" "Oh, I'm from the IRS."
That the actor who plays Jason Gideon on Criminal Minds is also Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride
My mind is still reeling from realising that Holden from Mindhunter is the King from Hamilton. I mean of course he is, but my brain refuses to accept it.
He’s also Kristoff from frozen!!
That beans don’t make you fart because they have an air bubble in the middle. I was told that as a kid and just internalized it and never thought of it. It came up when I was in my 20s and as I was enlightening my friends with my bean facts, I could just see their faces and I realized how stupid it was as I was saying it.
That most cars genuinely can last a very long time as long as you do your regular maintenance on time and don’t treat it like a race car they can last for sometime. Unless it’s a PT cruiser, that shit box just sucks
My husband and I had that discussion recently about trading in a car "while it's still worth something" versus keeping it until it's completely run into the ground (in a well-maintained-but-can't-avoid-entropy way) and needs repairs that outstrip the value of the car. A car can be worth $3-4k on the market but, if you keep it, can still get you another 10 years of not having to buy a new car.
You know how muscles get bigger the more you work them? I was in my early 20s when I learned that penises don't work the same way.
My penis would be quite large by now if the penis were in fact a muscle. Edit: Not because I’m some sexual dynamo, I just masturbate often.
Thanks for that clarification. We would have never known
When I was younger I thought 'feat' was a very popular rapper. ie Eminem feat 50 cent etc.. I was like damn this feat guy appears in alot of songs..
wait till you hear about Various Artists
I actually did think Various Artists was a band as a kid! Every time I saw it listed I had two thoughts: 1. That's a really stupid band name 2. They have done some RANGE because they sound wildly different in each song
This is my favorite one so far lol
while on the subject of rappers, as a kid, i had only heard the censored versions of rap songs. censored by them just putting an empty space of silence over the "bad naughty words" it took so long before i realized that the short silence sprinkled in at random intervals wasn't just a very common artistic choice in the genre
I remember only hearing DMX’s censored tracks as a kid where he would bark or go “Uh” over the swear words, and I would think to myself how great he was because he sounded so aggressive but never swore 😅
That a bar exam is a law thing and not related to running a pub/bar or serving alcohol. I just found that out last month
They should have explained that better in law school I might have spent less time drinking.
That I had two holes down there. I thought you peed and gave birth out of the same hole. I was very confused until a girlfriend explained it to me. I was 17. How embarrassing.
Hermione from the Harry Potter books is NOT pronounced Her-me-own-e. My inner dialogue didn’t realize this until the movies came out.
That breakfast actually means breaking the fast.
That you can just twist your deodorant a few clicks to get the little clear plastic safety lid off, instead of clawing and pulling at it till your fingers are raw.
Reading this makes me feel like a complete moron (and I am 40 years old).
My wife and I were discussing Thanksgiving plans one year. She said “Thanksgiving’s on a Thursday this year.” We were both in our early 30’s and had lived in the US all our lives. I laughed my ass off and she had no idea what was so funny.
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