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?! 😃

Well that's certainly one of the many explanations of the source for the phrase. It also refers to spending large amounts of money on shopping, see here: www.dictionary.com/e/slang/poppin-tags/
I came across the expression from people I know who literally do this with actual money and boast about 'popping tags' on the weekend and coming home with shit-loads of expensive stuff that they bought with their stacks of cash.
So maybe you accept that it means removing tags from shoplifted clothes, maybe that's what it once referred to, but it's certainly not a meaning that everyone universally agrees on.

I never came across the word lanyard until about 5 years ago where everyone had to wear their ID badge around their neck in my new work. I thought it was landyard with a D for ages and then everyone in my team started saying it as a gentle piss take and now it has just become landyard for me.

My kids (teen and pre teen) don't realise bath towels are for actively drying themselves. They seem to think they are a kind of post-bath/ shower toga for lounging in. I was the same for ages. Not sure when the penny dropped for me.

@Yumyumgin maybe your sister in law laughs at you for calling it “curb” instead of “kerb” 😁😁😁 (unless you’re American 🙂)

This has been explained many times on here already. It really is 'have another think'. As in 'you thought that was OK? You need to have another think'. Truely.

Twawmyarse · Yesterday 17:06
One I read recently and hadn't realised myself (despite being a huge fan) is that the Beatles are the BEATles as in "beat", not the Beetles. Blew my mind that! 😂

They were originally The Beetles

A long time ago (18 ish years) I went to a Subway (sandwich shop) with friends. My friends went first, then I ordered my sandwich and joined them at a table. One friend said "that looks nice, did you get yours toasted?" to which I innocently replied "no, I've never liked the idea of toasted salad". Both friends sat and stared at me and I realised what I'd just said. Until then I'd never been to Subway because I thought they built the sandwich including the salad, before toasting it.

I was in my late 20s at the time and never lived it down.

This one made me laugh! I can see why you’d think that though 😆

Me too 😂

I used to think it meant “shitbox”
😧

Also - I was certain that Jo Malone and Bobbi Brown are men. Like certain CERTAIN.
Found out quite recently that they are not.

It's not that, it's clothing tags. He's only got 20 dollars in his pocket remember. He's up for hunting, looking for a bargain. Definitely not a wad of notes being ripped open.

I too thought it was to restart breathing.

At the start of covid, they were saying not to mouth to mouth; but I have no idea whether this is still the case.

Laughing my head off here at 'gay acorn' 😂

Going back to 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' and modern uses of it - Mozart also knew the tune and used it as the basis of a set of variations in the early 1780s. Only it wasn’t yet called 'Twinkle, twinkle little star', which it only became in English in 1806; he knew it as the French folk song Ah vous dirai-je, Maman.

And it’s definitely ‘another think coming'!

I didn't know that Easter Island was a real place, I thought it was made up for the film Hop. My 10 year old looked at me in astonishment, now every Easter someone brings it up!

Most people open up the handles of the tin opener, put the cutter over the lip of the tin and then squeeze the handles closed again to pinch the cutter onto the tin and get the cut started. You don't hook it over the lip of the tin with the handles closed together.

I thought people who said "another think coming" were the same people who pronounced something as somethink and nothing as nuffink!

I also thought a wolverine was a made up animal like a werewolf. Then I watch the show "Alone"

Chest compressions are far more important to keep blood flowing and oxygenate the person’s organs (not just the brain). But again, these will only buy you time. Drives me mad the number of films/TV programmes/books that have people being resuscitated with CPR alone. You’ll only restart someone’s heart if you have a defibrillator. The survival rate if someone arrests outside of a hospital is extremely low. That’s why we now have defibrillators available in many public places.

So is that why peanut packets say ‘may contain nuts’?

Yes, people can be allergic to tree nuts but not peanuts.

Is it even possible to open a tin without opening the handles first?! I can’t imagine how that would work.

Also Natasha Bedingfield mispronounces it in "These Words". Makes me wonder every time how no-one picked it up.

@PuppyMonkey I hadn't overly considered the centre parcs dome but if you'd pressed me I think I imagined it a bit like the Truman Show or a scaled up version of that place in Cornwall under the biodomes. It's a bit disappointing to realise it is just the pool!

I had never heard of this and as pps have said it doesn’t seem logical. I googled and this does seem to be what some police forces and speed awareness courses say it stands for! I suspect (although I haven’t yet found any evidence for this) that this is an example of a backronym i.e. where someone has taken a word and made up a phrase to fit the initial letters, and it has spread so people think that the backronym is the original meaning. It makes far more sense that slow just means slow!

For years I thought pork scratchings were just really tasty crisps like puffed corn sort of thing. Can’t eat them now knowing what they are 😢

Queen Victoria - Victorian
Elizabethan
carolean
Georgian
etc

… what do we call it when there is a king Henry? This is really bothering me

I spent an embarrassingly long time in tertiary education as kept on changing careers but there are a load of very basic things that took me far too long to realise:

• I thought drawers was a somewhat outdated spelling and that draws could work too.
• I was in my 20s before I realised RayBans are called that because the sunglasses ‘ban’ the ‘rays’.
• that narwhals are real animals - why did they never feature in any books or wildlife TV shows when I was a kid? 😂 Why do so many people have this shared experience of not knowing about them?