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.

@EnjoythemoneyJane surely @Airconfan meant just using the natural saliva that's already in your mouth. Always worked for me and I used to have to take about 14 tablets each morning!
I do prefer a drink now though, since I've realised being hydrated is generally a great starting point for many things!

I saw this in anatomy pictures many times but still didn't occur to me that an egg has to travel through the cleft and might get lost somewhere on the way! That's why there were cases of ectopic pregnancies growing on liver not in uterus and a few babies have actually survived this... Which is related to another thing I didn't know until adulthood - our bodies don't grow the placenta, it develops from a fertilised egg

I did it a few weeks ago at a pulp concert as I could feel the onset of period pains and I’d finished my drink. It was in a big field so wanted to keep my spot. Very unpleasant.

I recall drinig through an industrial area and seeing a huge sign saying TOILET, I only realised later that the I was an addition.

Not discovered as quite an adult but when I was about 16 my mother commented that I had the knife in my left hand when peeling an apple! We realised that I always use my left hand for some tasks when I am generally right-handed, it's called cross dominence.

I though there were two different states in America, one called Arcansas and one called Arcansaw up until about 5 years ago.

Didn’t they ever blow up, when the contents/steam expanded past the capacity of the tin’s seal? 😃 The only person I know in RL who did this (other than tragic or awful longtime bachelor characters in novels) was a friend of my father’s, now in his 80s, who prided himself on ‘not knowing anything about cooking’ and did it when his wife was in hospital.

The reason I remember it is ( it’s probably 30 years ago) that not only did he blow up a can of soup once, he also once, on another occasion when his wife was visiting her sister, put an unopened tinned steak and kidney pie in the oven, and blew the door off the oven.

And I have now learned that from you!

I thought islands were sort of floating. It didn’t occur to me until I was well into adulthood that they’re just the high bits of land visible above the level of the sea, joined to the lower bits of land that are submerged.

Another one: I thought how clever it was that toothpaste manufacturers managed to pack the toothpaste into the tubes so that it came out in that perfect shape, complete with stripe. (I believe I vaguely thought the same principle applied to poo, which lay coiled up inside me ready to be expelled a bit at a time.)

Me too - until I read your post just now!
Also (from a thread a while ago)... the little piggy didn't go to market to do his shopping 😞

My father's uncle and his family were farmers so when our uncontrollable city dog "went to live with Uncle Jim so that she can run around in the fields" I totally believed it as an 8 year old.
It was only in my 30s that I realised that dogs going to live on farms frequently meant something less happy

Same!

My uncle did it when he was a student, with a tin of baked beans......

I was well into my 30s, maybe, before I realised West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany. How emasculating for the DDR to have half of one of your major city belonging to another country.

Communal heating and hot water systems - i.e. hot water provided from a large central source and pumped around the town, not just a communal boiler in a block of flats - are common in many parts of Scandinavia, Germany and Austria.

In the pedestrianised centre of the town where I live the hot water pipes are located close to the surface and the heat melts the snow and keeps the pavements free of snow and ice in the winter.

I thought there were two places…one called Magaluf and one called Mallaguff. I was about 26 when I realised there was no Mallaguff 🤦‍♀️

DH is absolutely incredulous about the second one as I didn’t find out about anal sex until I was about 30. I sometimes pondered what gay men did in bed but concluded that it couldn’t be that exciting. Then, one day someone mentioned it and I was like ‘hold the phone…what?’ 😮 😮

Ah but cucumbers bred to be small are still small cucumbers, I would say! But I know what you mean, they’re not young normal-sized cucumbers

Did not know this, thanks @SoupSoup

Years ago my work colleagues convinced a fellow worker that Hertz Van Rental was a dutch footballer who was about to sign for Manchester United.

That’s kind of adorable.

My husband still has a big sip of water, swallows that then pops the pill afterwards. It’s got hard-wired in his brain. Possibly helps a little with swallowing but why not do it the normal way.

True, I was once lucky enough to see, not just a rainbow but a double rainbow from a plane.

Is he from the north west of England ,? I live in Bolton and
I have heard osscpicle ( hospital) Boccle ( Bottle ,Sangals ( Sandals )

It’s only VERY recently that I’ve fully understood why we only see one side of the moon. And I needed a lot of help from YouTube videos in order to visualise it. And I’m in my 60s. 🫣

Me too. DH had to show me on a map for me to believe it.

We own a rental flat in central London where the freeholder is the council and they provide hot water.
Not so much a didn't realise but a didn't think it through. My aunt died a couple of years ago and was buried and my mum died this year and the same chapel was used. My mum was cremated and I didn't think through the fact that we'd be walking out without her coffin, but we'd need to take off the flowers and picture (though to be strictly correct the funeral director did that). In my mind it was going to be the same as the previous funeral and we'd walk in and out with her coffin.