Things only frequently heard on Mumsnet (lighthearted)

On MN nobody has any common sense.

Critical thinking means parroting group think.

Random women are told to leave their husbands.

Spending more than £15 on anything from a wedding to Christmas presents for all your family is over the top.

Performative under eating is commonplace.

I can’t stand the threads where a normal looking person in her 50s posts a picture and asks posters to guess her age.Then the self appointed thread police attack anyone who suggests she looks anything older than a young 31 y/o.

I’m fed up with the threads started by people who thought that finally earning £100k who mean they could live like a princess 24/7. Don’t they understand paying for school/ mortgage / etc adds up? We all have to budget and make sacrifices.

Suggesting a sleeveless, tight satin dress with a thigh high split,for an overweight woman who has stipulated that she wants sleeves and a flattering style!

I would assume they are different people out of the thousands that post here.

I find it weird how in MN everyone seems to be rich and poor at the same time. On the one hand everyone makes 6 figures but when someone posts to the travel section about having a budget of £15k and asking something, they told to read the room.

Yes, and it costs an incredibly huge amount of money to have regular lessons (not to mention how you do this with work patterns), buy and insure a car. In a lot of places I've lived it's far cheaper to get public transport and the odd taxi rather than maintain a car and find parking in an overcrowded city centre.

I do think driving gives you freedom and flexibility that is often essential for a lot of aspects of life, but if you don't have the money to do it then you're not going to prioritise it over rent/mortgage, food, bills etc.

Yes. This! I don't have a car, I've been told this in the driving threads about how I'm limiting job options. Gues what, if my job required a car. I'd buy a car. If I found a job outside the city. I'd buy a car.

And apparently you can only be a non-driver in major cities. I've never lived in a big city in my life and managed fine without a car. I wouldn't be able to live in the middle of nowhere, no, so I don't. But I don't live in central insert big city name, either. Nor do I beg lifts off all and sundry.

There was a real flurry a bit ago of posts claiming adults who don't drive are somehow defective failures. I read those and wondered how on earth I managed to be a functioning member of society with a job and everything.

Which is the other thing, on here it's always the extreme of 'if you can't/don't do as I do, you must be some incapable idiot in all aspects of your life'.

My house my rules, people are desperate to have children but only if they do what they say it seems

And someone will sneeringly say to the 22 year-old, “That’s all very well, but what would you do if you lived in a one-street village twenty miles from the nearest town and there was only a horse and cart service there twice a month?”

Erm… I’m guessing they’d either change their minds about driving or - far more likely - just not move there?

People adopting an insane contrary position and then expressing it in the most exaggerated, offensive and condescending language. To be fair I suspect most of them are trolls or troll-lite (not full fat trolls!) but it happens so often that there must be some who are genuinely batshit. Usually features phrases like "Give your head a wobble" which I detest and have never seen anywhere but here and "Wow" as a single sentence with an aggressive full stop.

Like this:

My house caught fire so I called the fire brigade.

Give your head a wobble. You should have tried to put it out yourself with some wet flannels and a hose pipe. It's people like you time-wasters straining public services.

Wow. You are such a climate change denier. Don't you have any awareness of what a waste of water that was. You should be ashamed of yourself.

So true! If I was having brain surgery and I found out that the person operating had had to take their exams 10 times I would be out of there! Driving is a good life skill to have but to suggest that everyone can and should do it, no matter how poor they are, is quite dangerous. I remember with horror my late father who learned to drive late in life, in his 50s, and was an appalling driver, we were nearly driven into a dock he was so bad.

The problem with those threads is always that the people debating about driving are always in totally different ends of the spectrum. We have a childfree 22yo living in the high street of the major city, and then there is someone living in rural Lancashire with 4 children and closest Sainsbury's is 20miles away. And then somehow these two debate on the necessity of driving.

Or those posts that say driving is a basic life skill. It took me years to pass my test and I barely drive as I get panicky, nothing basic about it.

Not the most common, but in any thread to do with driving there are always people that insist it's dangerous to stick to the speed limit because it requires constantly watching the speedometer instead of the road!

Maybe if you're a shit driver! Tbh any driving thread eventually becomes terrifying with all the "well this is how I've always driven and it's never caused me any problems" (middle lane hogging/undertaking/ driving at 40mph in any and every speed limit etc etc)

14 year old daughter has been having sex with her boyfriend, a little older. Hardly anyone advises the Mum to read the riot act and ban the boyfriend from the premises. Hardly anyone mentions the age of consent. Loads of posters tell the Mum that it is just normal teen behaviour and she should accept it and have a serious chat about contraception.

If a young teenager gets pregnant then we get tales from MNetters who had a baby at 15 or 16 and went on to be highly paid professionals. Assume they had to "work and slog their guts out"

I can never figure out what is appropriate for children to do anything. 0-12yo cant be left out of your sight at all. 12yo can't be left alone for more than 15minutes and even then they have to see you form the window. 13yo can't possibly take the bus by themselves. 14yo are too young to be alone for the whole evening. Yet all 14yo are getting drunk and giving bj's for alcohol so no need to be uptight. But then suddenly at 15, it is totally cool to let them interrail with their mates. Also asking 15yo to go on family holiday is borderline abuse and absolutely not a single teenager never ever has ever enjoyed a family holiday.

Also teen relationship. 15yo having sleepovers with bf/gf normal and encouraged. Teenagers bringing their bf/gf for family holiday is totally normal and expected. Barely adults moving their bf/gf to their parents house is the norm. Well, also I'm thinking in mn adult children living at home in general is overrepresented.

Missing the point here, but what is the MN thing about not having a toilet brush? How do you clean the toilet??

“Raise your bar” usually in response to some poor woman who has just discovered her husband has spent their life savings, sold the house out from under her and shagged her friend/sister/mother. That is something I’ve only ever heard on here. As is “read the room” for anyone who mentions spending more than 37p on anything.

Me being one of those people holding said grudges 🤣

“This happened two weeks ago and you’re STILL going on about it?! You even started a thread! I just couldn’t get worked up about it.”

In real life, normal people still want to punch people in the face for something that happened in 2003.

Nobody has a job. They all have'careers'.

I feel like a massive underachiever as I have only ever had 'jobs' .

Or sometimes "very rural".

I don't live in the UK but here you either live in a rural or an urban area, there are no shades in-between - and I suspect some people here live much more "very rural" than anyone in the UK!

When they have clearly stated their budget is 30 quid!

I loved the lockdowns. (Very much only on MN, I don't know a single person in real life who did.)

I loved lockdown but won’t count because I’m on mn!

I worked through it and so did DH and my sons.It gave me a chance to slow down and reset. I couldn’t double book myself as I had been doing, I actively saved the money I wasn’t spending on incidentals and saved 1000’s

It changed me and I’ve kept those changes and live a simpler life now.

Yeah this! The amount of posters who swear blind that they look 10 years younger than they are, and they constantly get people telling them this.