Obvious things that suddenly registered to you.

[Soubriquet]

I like watching things like NCIS.

Over the years, I’ve heard the phrase watch your six and just let it fly over my head expecting not to understand it.

Literally the other day, it suddenly occurred to me…it means watch your back!!

Of course it does!

I have one - do you know why money spiders were considered lucky? People thought that if you put them in your pocket, they actually spun money! (Notes, not coins!)
I got that from a book of stories called the Ingoldsby Legends, which would've been very well known at one time (late 1800s/early 1900s maybe).

Currants, raisins and sultanas are all dried grapes, they are just made from different varieties of grape.

Mogwais

For me it was discovering the other day that pedestrian crossings have a secret cone underneath the red/green man display for blind people to touch, so when green man comes on in turns ao they know its safe to cross,. Always thought the blind just had to hope for the best when crossing !

Where?
The display is about 12 feet off the ground. I thought the 'beep beep beep' was for blind people.

I was trying to work it out and thought maybe it was rhyming slang - watch your sixpack for back.

And because we demonised veal in the UK there's an imbalance between milk demand and calf supply. Veal is a lovely meat, but very hard to get hold of in the UK. Drinking milk and not eating meat (and specifically not eating veal) can never be an ethical choice.

Me too

Off topic a bit but I recently found out that the day after tomorrow is called ‘overmorrow’

Her geography isn't the best. Having a main character nip over to Gt Yarmouth from King's Lynn for an evening event completely ignores the time it would take in a county with no motorways and very little dual carriageway.

(plus her wholesale reinventing of King's Lynn and ignoring the actual university centre, police station, museum, etc. in favour of making up new organisations/buildings on a whim)

On sphynx cats you can see them.

Ashamed to admit that after years of working in animal rescue and being around cats literally my whole life, I nearly took my first rescue sphynx to the vet because I thought he might have skin cancer (their belly buttons just look like a weird slightly raised lump)

After learning this I confirmed you can also see the belly buttons on Chinese crested and Xolo dogs 🐕

You know the expression "watch this space?"

As in "new company plans big things for the future, watch this space..."?

I first came across it in a magazine and proceeded to focus my eyes very intently at the end of the sentence. I thought an optical illusion or something would pop up and reveal more, but no!

Loving this thread
My one was the name Margaret.... To Pearl. That's a leap for my wee brain.
Also Sean for John but that one makes sense when I found out the Irish route(I think) but Ian for John still confuses me.

Well I’ll be buggered. I’m over 60 and have always thought it’s about knights and not nights.

Snap

I also can’t understand the buses staying upright - and what about huge cruise ships?!

Oh my god! Me too! Which makes no sense but I still briefly think it when I see it! 😂

Only realised in my 20s that it is impossible to create an accurate world map!

Something will always get distorted, as you are trying to represent a 3D sphere on a flat piece of paper.

The conventional world map has its roots in seafaring navigation, so the oceans are fairly accurate but land mass is distorted - notably Africa appearing much smaller than it actually is. Maps that represent land more accurately have distorted oceans.

Also, any country/continent could be shown at the centre of the map. The convention is to centre on the UK (Greenwich having been chosen as longitude zero for historical reasons) and everywhere else is measured in terms of degrees east or west of this, but this line could have been set anywhere, as it's a man-made concept to help navigation/timekeeping.

A Japanese architect created this world map in 1999, and it's acknowledged as the most accurate divised so far, but it doesn't appear to have caught on!

giving you advance notice

My father used to take parties of school kids on trips to the continent many years ago. He told me once that each time he was sorting out the paperwork beforehand, the name of the cross-channel ferry company left him vaguely wondering what seal ink was.

He'd kind-of always assumed it was something produced naturally by seals and exploited for commercial purposes, although he'd never heard of it being used for filling pens with - but even so, why on earth would anyone name a ferry company after the stuff?

The penny only dropped shortly after he retired.

I've never heard that phrase before either.

It only recently occurred to me that the name of the band The Beatles was a pun on the word beat. I previously just thought it was an alternative spelling of beetle

Shut. Up!

My mind is BLOWN. What!

No, but has anyone laboured under the assumption that it isn't?

In french it's pronounced double vay, so double v not u.

When hearing about scores on sport round-up type programs, I thought “so and so won 3-1 on aggregate” meant the playing surface was made up from that crushed up brick stuff. I wondered why as I had only ever seen grass pitches……

Like weebles, all the mass is at the bottom. In the case of buses and boats that's the engines, etc.

(I may be showing my age with this answer, waiting for the "What's a weeble?" comment)