What obvious adult discoveries made you feel a bit of a plonker?

[Airconfan]

What’s something you learnt as an adult that made you think that’s completely obvious and yet I have never considered that….i feel like a bit of a plonker?

Mine was when taking tablets, the more you drink with it the better it will dissolve. I think alot of tablets are testing with the assumption people will drink 250ml alongside it.

I thought it was common knowledge. That's why you can never find the crock of gold, the rainbow doesn't have an end.

Same!!

Yeah I have never heard the chicken crossing the road to the other side meaning walking to its death......

Re the "sheep are all female" - what did you think ewes were?

But ox tail soup and stew are made from the skinned tail of cattle. I buy the tail and cook it in the pressure cooker.

The meat is sweet and the (ample) bone constituent makes the dish gelatinous.

I once returned some car oil to the garage as it was clear and I needed the black oil.
(It was black on the dipstick when I tested it)

@AbzMoz we have a tortoise and my dear mum (who looked after him for many years) used to have a recurring dream that he was leaping out of his shell, jumping up on a table and scurrying madly across the tabletop, before repeating the whole manoeuvre 😂

She also used to be firmly convinced that the Tintin animated cartoons that were shown on TV in my childhood years began with the dramatic line 'Thursday's adventures of Tintin!' One day she asked me in great puzzlement why they were showing it on a Tuesday…I had to explain that it was 'Hergé's adventures', not 'Thursday's'….

It doesn't help with the confusion re cows, though, when the name referring specifically to only one sex of the species is generally used as the overall word for both sexes.

Without using the non-everyday word 'bovine', if somebody asked what a bull was, you would probably say a male cow (so technically a male-female bovine!); but nobody would ever describe a cow as a female bull. Just like a bitch (although often avoided completely, because of its use as a slur to women) is 'a female dog' but nobody would ever say that a dog was a 'male bitch'. It's the same with ducks, peacocks and probably many more.

It would be much easier if all animals had commonly-used words like sheep (all of them), of which they're either ewes (females) or rams (males); but it seems that we prefer the confusion!

The linked Wikipedia photo shows slices of ox tail. I just didn't have the heart to tell the PPs discussing it!

Though in fairness I have lived in houses so dilapidated you could be forgiven for thinking that was the case.

Despite living in Australia for a few years i never new there were camels in Oz !

DH thought that the 1970s music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test was about sheepdog trials. A couple of years ago I explained what the programme was about.
We lived through the 1970s.

Every day is a school day..i never new this!

It totally depends on whether the cleaning submarines have passed over that section recently to clean the silt off. You can even see the underside of ships if it's clear, but you often have to crane your neck.

(A 52 year old boyfriend- a graduate with a big professional job- believed every single word of this. I was quite proud of myself 😆)

In fairness, while, despite not having grown up in the UK and never actually seeing the programme, I knew The Old Grey Whistle Test wasn't One Man and His Dog (😀) and I knew it was a music programme, I didn't know until well into adulthood why it was actually called that.

And to be honest, to this day, when I come across references to it, what comes into my head is not Tin Pan Alley doormen in grey whistling the catchiest tunes, but a rather glum, tarnished PE teacher whistle...

what?!

I can't stop doing it. Don't like all the bubbles left in my mouth if I don't rinse

My mum and I once had a conversation about the singer Alma Cogan....
'Who's he?' I said
'Alma Cogan?'
'Yes, who is he?'
What do you mean?'
'Al McCogan - who is he?'

Cue me then realising it was a woman called Alma, not a bloke called Al.....

That bumper stickers saying things like "honk if you love pizza" etc weren't being literal.

Potassium tablets are especially bad for this.

Made me laugh! 😂

I'm expecting Trump to do this any day now.

🤣🤣

I (think I) remember a passage from Adrian Mole, I'm paraphrasing: Last year I was so unsophisticated that I thought Evelyn Waugh was a woman. I know now that he's a man; I read it in an essay by his daughter Auberon

Yes i do. Don't struggle at all to believe that.