To have just got 'lefty Lucy, tighty righty'?

[passemoilevin]

Lefty LOOSEY! Not Lucy! I say it every time I'm unscrewing a screw. Never understood the whole Lucy thing until I just heard ant or Dec say it on IAC. Lightbulb moment!

Share your last similar ridiculously obvious realisation

They both begin "marm..." and, as I said, I was a fast reader, so I probably completed the word with something familiar to me - marm...ite - and skipped to the end of the word, which finished with an e, this confirming my prediction. I was 7 FGS!

@Frogletmamma nope, I can't figure it out you're going to have to enlighten me?!

I got the horses doovers.

I thought elemenohpee was one letter until I was about 4

I thought a Pride of India(flowering shrub) was called a Private Incher, like some sort of stealthy soldier creeping round the garden.

Hors d'oeuvres?

Thank you to whoever posted the diagram of the circular screw, illustrated my point exactly!

The Righty tighty thing just gets on my nerves because it assumes that you start at 12 o’clock. And you do automatically, don’t you, but WHY do you do it automatically? No-one specifies that you must start at the top. If someone says “turn it to the right” you automatically start from 12 o’Clock/north/zero degrees.

Wonder if it’s just built in to our brains somehow....

over thinking this big time

Bugger, I thought this thread was going to be full of people saying that "righty tighty" makes no sense. I was going to send it to DH to prove that it MAKES NO SENSE. Because it doesn't make sense, but he thinks I just say that to annoy him.

When the 12 o'clock point is going right the 6 o'clock position is going left. It is equally right and left regardless of what way you turn it, or no one would have invented the word "clockwise".

YES, French!! Some people aren’t seeing it! We are the special ones.

Someone asked upthread if I’m autistic. No, I’m not. Just very pedantic about nonsense “helpful” phrases!

Well, presumably even if you don’t know which way to screw/unscrew something, once you start going you don’t need further instruction?! That’s why lefty loosey works - you START to unscrew by going left.

If you need further instruction after that you’re probably a lost cause

I wondered why my mum used to order pecking duck from the Chinese. Took me a good while to realise Peking and pecking are not the same thing.

Lefty loosey righty tighty doesn't work for bike pedals, I discovered

It works for the right hand pedal - the left goes the other way - it's so it doesn't unscrew itself when you ride along

I thought the chorus of "Give me oil in my lamp" was "zinga zanga" and sang this happily through primary school. It wasn't until I started secondary school and saw it written down in the hymn book that I discovered it is in fact "sing hosanna" which makes much more sense!

You don't start by going left though. You start by going anti clockwise which is equally right and left.

Not getting into this any more - my 3 year old calls his toy screwdriver a righty tighty, so I have this argument with DH at least once a week.

I used to read 'helluva' almost like The Mask's awooga - he-loo-va. Only figured out this year it's hellofa. I'm 34.

French you are turning your hand which is holding the screwdriver to the right. Or left.

Tricky - Noel Streatfeild wrote the original version of "ballet shoes" based on that! It's called "the whicharts" and it's a darker version (eg the girls all have the same philandering father who dumps them on his long suffering ex mistress)!

My parents also used, on occasion, to call me "a daft ape-uth".... and it was a long time before I realsied it was ha'p'orth as in "half a pennyworth"

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha%27p%27orth

However, they also said "horses' doofers" but both we and they did know that it was actually hors d'oeuvres .

Calatonia, I always imagined some kind of big daft orangutan when my parents said apeuth!

I'm crying laughing at France is bacon

It is the space between 9 and 3 (the top half) which is turning left or right surely?

I love these threads as I usually have a lightbulb moment.
DD used to think the rhyme went "Mary had a little lamb, its feet were white as now". I'm not sure she knew the word "fleece" when she first heard it so just accepted it as feet. I only realised when she was about 5 and we had a random conversation about sheep's feet and she said that they must be white because they are in the song.
When she first started writing stories (also aged about 5) I could never understand the first sentence even if I tried to read it phonetically and then realised that she thought "once upon a" wasn't three words but two which were "once up" and "on a". Add reception age phonetic spelling and all of her stories started "wonsup onner".

Harold Witchart

I'm surprised how many people had to sing hymns/carols at school without the words on an OHP. Must've been a nightmare!

Radio 4. I know its called Crossing Continents. All i hear is Cross Incontinents