What dumb thing has taken you forever to realise?

[muchalover]

Nights in white satin song was playing in the car today. A favourite song of mine so I was singing along and it dawned on me that the word is "nights," not "knights".

Whole song makes much more sense now 😳

I had a similar issue with "Toyota, the car in front" but it's a Nissan I'm behind (or other car brand).

And in the film Winnie the Pooh where the gopher says "I'm not in the book" and I thought it was the phone book😬 for decades!

I promise I'm intelligent.

I've always pictured Knights in White Satin. but wondered why they never reached the end.

And I embarrassed myself in school by thinking soliciting was done by solicitors. I was about 12 when I suggested solicit as an example of a soft - c sound for our spelling list. Mr Low had a hard time trying to keep the smirk off his face, and the boys in class were howling with laughter. I was genuinely confused.

https://www.plantea.com/nasturtium.htm
not quite according to this

Glad I was not alone in that one.

Never heard that before and born and still live in the north east

As a child, when I saw a 'To Let' sign I thought it was 'Toilet' but with an 'i' missing 🙄

My parents had a book from the RAC called “Motoring through Europe” which in my head I read as Yur-rope-pee, clearly a different place to the Yurop everyone talked about.

I used to not buy large or XL eggs on principle. I thought it was absolutely awful that farmers made the hens lay such big eggs and used to wince at the thought of it. (I had no idea how the farmers made them but I assumed they did).

It was only watching a documentary some years ago (I'm in my 40s) that I saw them sorting eggs out into sizes of what'd been laid that it clicked that it was simply a classification and not a quota

That the group ABBA is named after the first letter of each band member's name! I was 54 before I knew this lol

A gnetha
B enny
B jorn
A nni

Nights in white satin is from an album called Days of future passed and all the songs are related to parts of the day. Starting with The Day Begins and ending with Nights in White Satin. My dad had the LP and we listened to it a lot!

Trombolese....

Call me old. I always thought Flo Rida was a woman 😳

Had an argument about that Moody Blues song as I pointed out that it’s printed as “Nights not Knights in White Satin” on the record label !.

Nobody would accept that until we found an image of the record cover online.

And I’m not sure white satin sheet are entirely practical , certainly with what a 19 year old Justin Hayward had in mind.

Same era as trombolese....That song that went something like 'i miss you...like the deserts miss the rain', I thought it was 'i miss you...like the deserts mystery' which in my defence I think is reasonable because I live in Wigan so the deserts ARE quite mysterious.

It was a Toyota advertising campaign. It meant that Toyota was leading the market. I thought it meant it was the car in front of you on the road.

Took me ages to get it.

My daughter - now adult - thought that concentration camps were where people were forced to concentrate.

As a dyslexic child with undiagnosed ADHD she felt that was a cruel place.

For an embarrassingly long time I thought silicon Valley referred to the amount of plastic surgery there

As a child (but probably embarrassingly not that young), I can remember playing in the room while my Dad was watching a documentary or something about prohibition in America, half listening to it and being very shocked to discover prohibition meant (as my Dad helpfully explained) “drinking was banned”. Drinking? Banned? How did people… live?? Obviously I didn’t realise “drinking” in some contexts just means drinking alcohol, not all drinks including water etc. See also: “drink driving” (concerned my Dad would get arrested for swigging from a Coca Cola bottle down the motorway).

I thought exactly the same!
I sang it once infront of a friend and she promptly told me what the real lyrics were.

@Babbleoff

High-per-ber-LEE

I just called them dandelions! Thought the yellow flowers were just random weeds until I saw this thread 🫣

I’m guessing because it’s named after the Great British Bake Off due to its success and familiarity of the name. The “Great” part in everything like Great British Sewing Bee, Great British Pottery Throwdown and sayings like “Great British sense of humour” or “Great British weather” comes from the Great in Great Britain, and does not mean really good, or really big. However, due to the success of GBBO and becoming a well-known brand, and with the helpful addition of the word Great having a positive alternative meaning, it takes on a life of its own and uses parts of the brand so that people recognise off shoots such as the specials Great Christmas Bake Off and Great Comic Relief Bake Off. The fact that other countries such as Great Australian Bake Off and The Great American Baking Show etc use the “Great” part is one of the reasons I was incorrect in the first place- it runs off the tongue so naturally due to the familiarity of GBBO. But think about on the news when the newsreader talks about “the Great British public”- they’re not saying the public are great, they’re just talking about the public in Great Britain. A similar segment in Australia wouldn’t refer to the Great Australian public, just simply the Australian public.

I think when people say "The Great British summer", the word "Great" is being used with some sarcasm. Not because of Great Britain....

The funniest thing about this thread is it's got exactly the same realisations on it that these threads always have There's one about every 6 months. There are two of the usual things missing from this one though. Where are all the people who thought that the Channel Tunnel went through the water rather than under the ground and the ones who thought that all Centreparks locations were under a big bubble?

My dd thought they were called ‘babies and families’. I love how children mishear words and use their experiences to make them make sense.

You mean thunder isn't the sound of clouds bumping together?