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.

On maths I only just found out that "x" % of "y" is the same as y% of x.

For example 10% of 80 = 8 which is the same as 80% of 10 which also equals 8 or for another example
17% of 36 = 6.12
36% of 17 = 6.12

And so on.

I'm rather nervous about asking this, but ... those of you who thought thunder is the sound of 'clouds banging together' - what do you think clouds are?

I've been in a plane, so I know you can fly through them. I know they are water vapour.

But in my mind there was sort of a science, water tension, answer. Like how water is as hard as concrete if you land at certain angles.

So maybe the lightning agitating the water gave it a temporary membrane or something, to make all the water inside rumble.

Lancastrian here and never heard of that.
We say, "Not so well"
Your school sick note would even say this.
"Julie/Susan/Sharon is off school today as she is not so well" 😁

this is fairly embarrassing but when I was a kid i thought Disney was pronounced "Disnep" because the logo made the Y look like a P at the end. I realised much later in my adult years that it was a Y but with a stupid curl 😶I always avoided talking about Disney with anyone because i couldn't figure out why no one called it or spelt it as the logo did - Disnep 🤐

Interesting - thanks for answering, Lyla. I can see how you might get to that idea.

Woah!!!! It's not knights???

We sold our house when I was quite little and I remember hearing my mum saying we were ‘putting it on the market’. I thought we had to take it down to the market and couldn’t understand how the hell we we’re going to get it there.

Didn't you count the time between thunder and lightning as a kid? The closer together they are the nearer the storm is to you.

If you time the difference and divide by three it will give you an approximate distance in Km, if you divide by 5 it does the same in miles.

Yes I have always done that.
I thought (and I can't remember who told me) it was 330m per second. So if the thunder sounded 3 seconds after seeing lightning it had struck about km away.

My primary school teacher (RAF school in Hong Kong in 1969) explained to us that thunder was the sound of God stamping his feet because He was cross with something happening on Earth.
I believed that! It wasn't even a religious school!

we always did this but I never understood it until my physics teacher explained about sound and light travelling at different speeds, so the same thing can be seen and then heard with a time delay.

On maths I only just found out that "x" % of "y" is the same as y% of x.
Wow @1dayatatime Does that definitely work every time?

I was in my 30s when I learnt that Wales was formed into a kingdom much later than England and Scotland. I thought all three had always coexisted.

I also used a lot of phrases like ‘nitty gritty’ without knowing their origin, and so not really understanding why I was using that phrase. I think that’s where a lot of eggcorns must come from.

Knights in white Satin 😹

It's seems like half the country thought it was knights... (including me).

Yes

You can prove it with algebra.

(x/100) * y = A

xy/100 = A

(y/100) * x = A

Once when my parents were watching The Bill I asked them, "just how many kids does that woman have and why did they all decide to be Police together". They were very confused until I said, well they all keep calling her "mam".

I think Lancashire is one of those places where the colloquialisms change from town to town, I’ve never heard ‘not so well’!

The first time I heard ‘sloe gin’ (without seeing it written down) I thought it was gin that had been slowly distilled.

It took me a couple of years to find out what a spin class was.

I imagined a kind of aerobics class where people were spinning round like whirling dervishes.

I thought that they must get very dizzy and wondered why those classes had suddenly become very popular.

I had a neighbour in the early 90s, who was very artistic. She made mosaics, did macrame, crochet etc and made us some macrame hanging baskets.

I saw her in gym gear several times and she said she was going to her spinning class. I thought she was making wool....

Oh my god ... THAT'S what it means? I always thought that was a bit rude to the Wombles. I'm 56 FFS.

Ye gods, I had to google "spin class" and it sounds atrocious!

Love it… I'm a copyeditor and I might start using this example when people try to tell me (as they frequently do) that punctuation doesn't matter. 😄