Things I'm embarrassed to have realised so late in life...

[OrangeFlowersAreLovely]

Those ID necklaces? I had absolutely never heard of the word "lanyard" until around 3 years ago. All my friend's children learnt this way before I did. If you had told me "Lanyard" was a European city - I'd have believed you.

That little press send arrow in the top right hand corner? It only occurred to me in my mid 30s that it is in fact a paper aeroplane. I just thought it was a dodgy triangle.

I was absolutely stunned to find out the woman who plays Amanda in Motherland is not Catherine Tate.

Any confessions to console me I'm not the only one failing at life?! 😃

I thought Skegness was in Scotland

Your not the only one

We have now entered the Carolean age, with Charles III. I didn't know this name either.

I once couldn’t for the life of me recall the name of a rhinoceros and kept just saying Rhinosaur, everyone thought something bad had happened to my brain. Not the spirit of the OP, but as an adult woman I was pretty shame faced to keep referring to it as a rhinosaur.

I've mentioned this before on here, but I was in my forties before I learned that birds don't sleep in nests.

Apparently birds nest in nests, but when the chicks have fledged they abandon the nests and cling to the twigs on their spindly little legs instead.

I was so incensed when DH told me this that I actually posted on MN about it, so sure was I that he was gaslighting taking the mickey out of me. Turns out that I was literally the only person who didn't know this. If it ever comes up in conversation now, people look at me first incredulously and then pityingly.

The worst part is that I'm actually a country girl and know quite a lot about wildlife but not nests apparently to the extent that people actually ask me questions about it. To this day I can't shake off the feeling this is a cunning joke of DH's and he's just seeing how long he can string me along for 😆

That when you've loads of tabs open and you can't figure out which one the music/noise/sound is coming from, it's the one that has a little megaphone symbol! I've had to close my laptop down to get it to shut up. Now, I'm like so cool and shit. 😎

That "Helmand Province" was "Hell-man's Province" and was just a nickname of an area of Afghanistan. I thought it was called that because that's where a lot of the fighting took place

My most embarrassing one is my dad's fault! As a young child I was the one who always asked questions. And so, seeing bright yellow fields in springtime as far as the eye could see I asked what it was. And he said "Mustard". Actually it's rapeseed. But I was well into my 30s before I found that out. I always wondered why we needed quite so much mustard...

That depends on how old your Dad is!! When I was a kid, fields were full of poppies and large swathes of yellow weeds which were some form of mustard. So while you probably were seeing rapeseed he might have been thinking about the yellow weeds of his youth.

In fact that brings me to mine, which was when rapeseed first started appearing as a crop, I couldn't understand why the farmers were leaving all the fields with weeds in them

That for the past 70 years UK should have been UQ - United Queendom

Took me Into my 40s (when I had Dutch colleagues) to know that Holland and the Netherlands are not the same thing, and that Holland is not a country.

North and South Holland are two provinces out of the 12 that make up the Netherlands.

I was a good age before I found out that a cattle grid was to prevent cattle from walking on to a road. I thought it was the opposite - a special walkway to help them across with their little hooves.

And here is a really dim one - I thought the term ‘read the riot act’ meant that if there was a disturbance, someone official would turn up and literally read aloud the riot act from parliament.

i always thought there were a lot of corporals called Lance :)

This has reminded me that I once commented about how many footballers for our local team had the same unusual surname of "Trialist".

Oh! And Eminem was not m and m!

😆That's like something I'd think!!!

When it was bought in, they did have to read it to the gathering

"Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King."

I’ve just learnt this by reading your post! Had to Google to confirm 🤣

Re "cling to the twigs on their spindly little legs instead" - most of them (passerines aka perching birds) don't actually have to do that. Wikipedia explains it better than I can:
"The leg of passerine birds contains an adaptation for perching. A tendon in the rear of the leg will automatically be pulled and tighten when the leg bends, causing the foot to curl and become stiff when the bird lands on a branch. This enables passerines to sleep while perching without falling off."

So they don't have to put in any effort like human hands would to hold on to a branch. No need for a nest if your legs don't collapse under you!

That when you see SLOW painted on the road when driving it stands for 'Speed Low Observe Warning' blew my mind that one did!

I thought for years that the Bradford and Bingley Building Society was set up by Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley.

I knew Halifax, Skipton, Leeds and Bradford were all places in Yorkshire, it just never occurred to me that Bingley also was until I went through it on a train.

When I was quite young & still at Junior School, there was a netball tournament that our older girls were playing in. I thought that the initials on their vests (GK, GD etc) were the actual initials of their names… not the position they played at…

I thought that the Disney props department working on Mary Poppins just couldn't make a very realistic-looking robin. Turns out that's what robins look like in America!

Ditto with badgers. I thought the animators for Robin Hood just couldn't get the stripes right so gave up.

I have a sister like that! Provides many an anecdote over the years 😂

My partying days were in the 90’s. It was only recently that it dawned on me that the track Searching For My Rizla was sung to the tune of Suzanne Vega’s song Tom’s Diner.