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 refuse to believe that "this little piggy" went to market to do anything oter than shop!

I never knew that pigeons have been domesticated for thousands of years and that it's only just recently that we abandoned them to the wild.

Hillsborough is a beautiful, and expensive, village in Northern Ireland.

@WrongWayApricot

ScotInExile
Kind of... but it's not about tags on clothing. You know the paper bits you see wrapped around fresh bundles of notes? Those are the tags they're talking about. Popping some tags is about busting open those wads of cash to spend it.

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.

If you read the lyrics from Poppin' Tags by Jay-Z from 2002 he's talking about spending loads of cash on designer gear. The Macklemore lyrics are a take on that from a poor guy's view. If you check out the lyrics you'll see neither of the songs infer popping tags to mean shoplifting and removing security tags.

What? Is this for real?

@ScotInExile I was not implying shoplifting. Do you leave tags on the clothes when you wear them?

www.yourdictionary.com/pop-tags

www.dictionary.com/e/slang/poppin-tags/

I thought Glamorgan was in Scotland as a kid.

Omg, thank you for this!!!
I’ve now also just discovered that you can get accents over the vowels, cedillas and tildes too.

I can't believe that some people think it is another thing coming. It really annoys me when people say that. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I also hating hearing on tenderhooks

@flapjackfairy @BigFatLiar Indeed! I'd never heard of a collection of marble artifacts referred to as marbles so I was thrown - ie "the marbles at the Vatican are something, aren't they?"or "my neighbour's marbles are a bit much for a semi d..." Having seen various large spherical objects decorating various Mediterranean buildings , I think the idea they were balls of marble somehow stuck with me without much thought. I know better now!

I realised about the baby vests- this may be because I had a very skinny but long child who managed to wriggle most of the way out of them that way a few times.

This is my (usually very intelligent and practical!) Dad's one- when I was a teenager so he would have been around 50, he had a new tube of antihistamine cream and was heading downstairs to get a skewer/knife to open the seal with. He said something like "it's a silly design- what are you meant to do if you are out and about and don't have a knife or anything". I took the tube off him and reversed the lid to break the seal. He looked pretty sheepish.

However, I didn't know where Exeter (apart from vaguely SW England) was until I was nearly 30 and moved to Devon.

On a slightly different note my DP's aunt used to say, after a pleasant excursion somewhere, "Well that was very adjacent". I never met her, no idea if she was ever corrected but now we all do the same as a nod to her - which will not doubt froth the mouths of some of the posters on here who seem very vexed at others who get things wrong.

Right, but I and another user are both telling you that your friends have just invented a new definition (2022) and it doesn’t overwrite the original definition (2004 onwards). In 2004, it was originally referenced to shoplifting, popping electronic tags off clothes. “Thrift Store” was released in 2012, where Macklemore talks about “popping tags” off new clothes, so people now believe it means that. In 2022, your friends are apparently now using it somewhere in the America, for dollars, like in your photo, or elsewhere (probably not the UK, since we shrink wrap our new bills in plastic?), to refer to removing the paper from around denominations of money, which is not referenced anywhere online or directly in any music as popping tags. So maybe your friends think that’s what it means, but it’s definitely not what it means in Thrift Shop, which is the most common reference and what most of us assumed this mother was asking about (she asked about music - not your friends). Gunna’s references are about as non-specific as possible. The way he uses it in the lyrics, it could literally mean anything (clothes, cash, drugs, sex, an organic kale green juice), but music usually tends to evolve from itself. You haven’t given any reason to assume your definition is the one used in any music.

Many years ago I informed my colleagues that I was looking forward to going ‘dogging’ to the Bay car park that evening. I had heard that a local car park was being used for dogging and assumed this was a ‘meet and greet’ for dog walkers so that the dogs could play…. It wasn’t

There's quite a few who don't have a commonly used adjective: Richard, William, Stephen, John etc. They all have adjectives from the Latin form, e.g. Johannine, Ricardian, but they're very rarely used.

In history writing, you most often see Carolignian reserved for the French dynasty and Carolean or Caroline used of the British kings. I suspect Caroline will fall out of popularity now Latin literacy is much lower and people most commonly associate it with the girls' name.

Have we had the one about pineapples yet?

It wouldn't be an "I didn't realise ..." thread without the pineapples.

Oops 😳me too

Really? 🤣 where are they?

I screamed at this! Help! 😂😂😂😂😂

Yes. And the picture posted looks like some crazy photoshopped fantasy world! 😂😂

Its check my tin opener
I'm guilty of having absolutely no clue about the 'another think coming'.I'm slightly embarrassed.
I did know about tenterhooks though!!

I need to check my tin opener*

FYI: The hoses at the petrol pumps are all long enough to reach around the back of your car and into the petrol tank opening on the other side in case you can't get a pump on the correct side or you just don't know what side it's on

This is an oft-trotted out MN myth. The ones that are long enough to stretch both sides say "extra long" on them. If they don't, they don't stretch that far.

Omg, what did they say when you said that?! 😂

Nope. Another thinK is coming; if you currently think [the wrong thing], you will soon be enlightened when another you have another think about the topic.

@TheEponymousGrub

Yes yes. Thank you. Dealt with this in the first few pages. Now on page 28. According to online dictionaries etc both are acceptable.