To ask the most basic thing you never knew/misunderstood until adulthood

[ChanandlerBongsLeftShoe]

I feel like a completely ridiculous excuse for an adult but the other day I found out the difference between cottage pie and shepherds pie.

I am in my 30s and gobsmacked (also feel a bit stupid now it's so obvious). I genuinely thought they were the same thing.

Is there anything you discovered as an adult that was just common knowledge to everyone else? Or perhaps there's a phrase you've found out you have been saying wrong all this time etc...!

Help me feel a bit better.

Well I've learnt ergin marbles aren't the stones the world's heaviest men lift

All the geography ones have enlightened me.

I didn't realise you could spend English money in Scotland until I was in my 30s

I thought The lyrics in the hymn abide with me were - fresh water fishes oh abide with me, not help of the helpless oh abide with me.

My dh thought for 39 years (until last week) that different cows made different products cows for cheese, cows for butter etc. he didn’t know it was all made from milk.

Undies1990
What??? Is that true?? I'm 44 and thought it rotated too!!

We conned my BIL once that cows produced different flavour milk from each teat. (Not the sharpest pencil in the box bless him)

Little Miss Muffet eating the curtains away

I'm the other way around! When I was 15, I knew all about the periodic table, what an ox-bow lake was (don't even know if I've spelt that right! Would have when I was 15!). I knew all about the planets, the significant events in history and pythagorus theorum.

Now I'm 49, I know nothing!!.... At all!

PLEASE move this into classics. It's cheered me up no end.

We’ve always called veggie shepherds pie “Sheep Turd” pie, because that’s what 1980s soya protein looked like.

The dome at Centre Parcs exists. One of the contractors we use at work do the roped access inspections.

And I remembered another (can't believe I'm admitting this one) -

When my friend (at uni...) told me you don't pee out of your vagina.

I once went to Liverpool with my friend and we went on the ferry across the Mersey,my friend thought the otherside of the water was Manchester!. We had passed through Manchester on the train 40 miles back so I don't understand how she thought that.

Quinoa is pronounced keen-wah and not quin-Noah

I thought dwarves were not real until I was in my late teens. I thought they were fairytale animals like unicorns and angels.

I had no idea ducks could fly until I witnessed about 30 of them fly away from my dog. I genuinely nearly shat myself and wondered what the fuck just happened. I must have spent a good few minutes staring at the sky waiting for them to fall out because they couldn't really be flying, they were ducks?!

I thought it was actually illegal to have the lights on inside a car until I was about 18.

My sister thought the dial on a toaster was for the amount of toastiness and not the number or minutes.

Sheakspare: what is the difference between a comedy and a tragedy.
A comedy starts badly and ends well and the tragedy starts well and ends badly.
Explained by my DC, age 10.

Been laughing at so many if these, mine relates to balloons. When my dad was 60 I was blowing up balloons to decorate and couldn't understand what I was doing wrong, they were all sitting on the floor with me not floating away like they do in pictures - my OH nearly choked laughing when I told him they were broken
🎈

@RumAndCock My sister thought the dial on a toaster was for the amount of toastiness and not the number or minute

Naaaaaaah! That's why I burn them all!!!!

It only just clicked with me that Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith called their children (Jaden and Willow) after the opposite sex parent.

🤯🤯🤯 I never noticed that until you said! I'm not a huge celeb follower but still, duh!! ...... 🤦‍♀️

When I was younger, I’d watch PG videos that would always say ‘this film contains some mardasway words’ I never knew what it was.

Until I was about 25 and realised it was milder swear words.

I thought the Channel Tunnel was built on the sea bed. How everyone laughed when I told them that was the reason I wouldn't travel through it...

@7Pip did the name "Union" not give it away? That's it's the combined flags? it does our collective Celtic head in when Englandeers think it's all theirs!

*A friend thought that restaurants advertising a pre-theatre meal meant you had to be going to the theatre to eat there. He thought you would have to show your ticket to be allowed to order from that menu.
Oh, I just learnt this

@itsbritneybiatches

Filet mignon

Love this thread.

OH was an adult when he realised that it actually IS winter in Australia when it's summer in UK.

I was an adult when I realised that limes and lemons are not the same fruit at different stages of ripening. (But to be fair I grew up in France and they call them citron and citron vert - like, lemon and green lemon)

BishooWishoo

Weeps. 😂

My daughter, who was well in her 20s thought Robins only came out at Christmas time, because they appear in Christmas cards. So much for the 1st class degree!

This isn't me but a friend of a friend posted on Facebook last Halloween that they were taking the kids out treacle treating 😆

I'm 52. At the age of 45 I genuinely believed that unicorns were extinct. I mean, I knew that they didn't have magical powers, but genuinely believed that a white horse with a horn existed, but went the same way as the dodo