Oh, fine toothed comb!

[GraceUnderPresure]

I'm in my fifties and only yesterday realised it was 'fine toothed comb' and not 'fine toothcomb' - makes so much more sense!

Anyone else had lightbulb moments like this?

I knew that Bill Clinton was governor of “Ar-kan- saw” but I thought there was another place called Arkansas, pronounced phonetically.

It took me a while to link the two as well 😄

That was when I realised it was not Arkansas!

I'm in my 60s and only fairly recently realised how hyperbole is properly pronounced. Luckily it's not a word I regularly use so haven't shown myself up. 😊

I was about fifteen when I realised there were not two cities in America called respectively Los Angeles and Ellay.

Anyone else had lightbulb moments like this?

Yes, when I realised Houston wasn't a person but a place (as in "Houston, we have a problem")

And I've never seen Star Wars but didn't understand why they were called "light savers" - did you save people with them so they were savers that were lights? Or did they save light that was then used to light them up? Then I realised it was saber.

It was far too recent that I learned that discreet wasn't a misspelling of discrete.

It's only in the last few years that I understood that in the title "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" (by Jules Verne), the 20,000 leagues were the (horizontal) distance travelled underwater, not that the vessel went to that depth (which I think is physically impossible).

Well, I'm 56, and have just learned that from your post! Makes sense, of course, but it had never really occurred to me that it was anything other than depth

Yes, @budgiegirl , 20,000 leagues is over 100,000 km, and the Earth's diameter is only 13,000km! So it's a distance nearly 3 times round the Earth.

Wait, WHAT?

While I'm here, I've got a selection of more truths that others have confessed came as a surprise (lifted from an old MN thread). I'll start with these...

Geographical facts

The Channel Tunnel passes through the bedrock underneath the sea, it's not sitting in a tube resting on the seabed.

Edinburgh is further west than Liverpool and Bristol.

Portsmouth is on an island off the British mainland. Gibraltar is not an island.

Dunkirk is in France (not Scotland).

Budapest and Bucharest are different cities.

County Durham is in NE England (County Down is in N Ireland).

It was actually metric leagues I now discover from Wikipedia, so I'll correct my earlier comment to @budgiegirl and 20,000 leagues is closer to twice around the Earth.