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.

Lionel Shriver's a woman, to be fair...

@Airconfan there’s normally instructions about how much water to dissolve a tablet in

Robert Browning thought it meant a nun's headgear (wimple?) and put it in a poem. Nobody dared tell him.

Let's just say, your children weren't the only ones & leave it at that.

I'm an educated professional and it wasn't until my children were adults (and one told me) that I learnt narwhals weren't a mythical creature. In my defence, unicorns are...

Until I was well into my teens, I thought ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ at a police station meant that someone was doing a kind deed by voluntarily assisting them!

Erm, that potato salad is made out of potatoes, I thought it was made of, waves hands, something else… (I don’t know what!)

I've been watching the Namibia Desert watering hole webcam lately and I've learnt that ostriches do rely on gravity - they take a mouthful of water and then lift their heads right up to swallow. Giraffes OTOH can drink with their heads down.

So I think mammalian swallowing is different to bird swallowing, which wouldn't surprise me because birds do that regurgitated food thing to feed their babies.

I think Dick Van Dyke was responsible for that one!

Similarly, it took me a long time to realise what oxtail soup was made of, see also bone china.

My Google search is looking very random after this thread!

My DP is Persian and comes out with the most random things he’s been told growing up.
The funniest was when he believed if you ate honey and Melon together you would die a terrible death- apparently you could survive but only if you quickly had a drink of Whiskey.

He had never had a wank when we met (he was 30) as he believed that you would slowly go blind and your eyesight would deteriorate every time you indulged in a bit of “me time”.

He was terrified to walk through the woods near my house and I couldn’t work out why until he said he thought the woods were full of wolves 😆.

He had absolutely no idea about male or female anatomy and obviously didn’t have any sex education classes in school.
I didn’t realise how clueless he was until I mentioned there was only a small risk of pregnancy due to the time of my menstrual cycle after a condom split and then had to teach him basic biology.
It also took me a while to realise he was referring to my period when he kept asking if I was ill or going to be ill soon.
I suppose it’s not surprising when his mother was still having babies into her fifties because she had such a limited understanding of the menopause and she thought every woman just stopped having babies automatically in their mid forties.

He had never been taught any natural history because of the conflict with religion so the natural history museum was an eye opener and led to some interesting discussions!

He is also autistic so had taken so many things literally and despite being a very intelligent man it’s often hilarious some of the things he comes out and that I’ve had to correct him about.
This thread has taught me a couple of things though - mainly about not rinsing after brushing teeth and I also thought Rio Ferdinand was a football team 😂.

Indeed. I remember a test tube baby being born by caesarian. The mother had had difficulty conceiving because her fallopian tubes were blocked. I was taken back when a woman I worked with said that the blocked tubes meant that it was bound to be a caesarian birth!

I do this sometimes! (Only with ibuprofen though as they normally have a coating, which is what makes it possible to swallow them without water… And I only do it if I don’t have water to hand.)

“Fits as snugly as a nun’s…. What!

🤣😂 We really need that laugh emoji back! Did they manage to keep a straight face?

There's a similar bias in humans. 'Mankind' and phrases such as 'known to man'. The male is the default, unfortunately.

Really?

(investigates)

…ohhh!

To be fair, there are several actual real-life animals that you would assume would be far more likely to be fantastical and imaginary than just a horse with a horn on its head!

The word 'unicorn' was actually used for a real-life animal in the King James Bible - which might have confused some in modern times - but it was referring to the rhinoceros, which as the word etymologically suggests, does indeed have one horn and so can quite legitimately be called a 'unicorn'.

Gherkins are not small cucumbers any more than cherry tomatoes are not small beefsteak tomatoes.

Me, looking at the digital display on my new oven, very annoyed:

"I don't know what that number is, I haven't touched the damn thing, it isn't hot, I'm not cooking anything BUT IT KEEPS CHANGING!"

"That, my dearest, would be the clock."

Are you telling me my Granny lied to me? This is my Granny we are talking about. 5 foot nothing, mother of 7, whose blackcurrant jam tea with crushed aspirin could cure all known disease and several mystery diseases. That Granny.

no, wait, do they? Where is this? I would have thought they would cave in from the water pressure

diluted with what though?

I don’t know - I just know it freaked me out and I wondered how it could be! Really hope someone comes along with knowledge about them

I'm not saying your granny lied to you, as grannies absolutely never lie, but she might havd just been innocently passing on information she'd been told, assuming she didn't have the luxury of fact checking on the Internet.

Sadly, many posters on this thread don't have that excuse!