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.

@NigelGresley I have always called them dandelion cocks 🤷🏼‍♀️

Oh and it wasn’t until I was well into my thirties and moved jobs that realised about remuneration. I was confused why this massive global corporation had their salary display spelled incorrectly on their system

Minuscule is another. I’m sure when I was younger it was miniscule!

Stevie Wonder is blind.

@Happyhusband oh my, I now know why the pink rabbit advertises Duracell batteries

@RubyWho

Because not much is known about the period - not many records have survived.

Thank you for being on my team! I felt like such a lemon.

I love this. Grid Blyton really got me laughing.

When I was young, I asked my mum why there were flowers on a lamppost and she told me it was where someone died in an accident. I spent a lot of years wondering why they hadn't found an alternative to lampposts since they were obviously so dangerous.

Also I always thought that inside big lorries were basically loose versions of the product so a Walkers branded lorry just had many multipacks of crisps inside, no boxes or big pallets or whatever they do have (not an expert on how they actually are stored inside but at some point worked out that it wouldn't be very good logistically 😂)

I wish I could remember the user who's husband thought countless tortoises were being murdered just so we could have terracotta pots in our gardens.
He thought his wife was unspeakably cruel when she started eyeing up a new plant pot. "Won't someone think of the tortoises!!!!"

Oh god I remember that!! I think I laughed myself stupid when I read that

I was in my thirties when I learnt that golliwogs were meant to be black people. I thought they were a mystical creature, like an elf or a leprechaun.

I was also in my thirties when I realised giving presents at Christmas might have something to do with gifts being brought to the baby Jesus.

I knew a trainee nurse whose mind was blown when she found out that urine doesn't come out of your vagina and the bladder and the uterus are not as one. I hope to fuck she never worked in gynaecology.

That the fridge dial isn't the temperature

What? What’s it for??

I thought Penelope was pronounced Pen-elope.

It is, in French.

Absoluepower Can you explainit please? For a umm friend!

Thought Fred Astaire was Fredda Stair for years

My brother in law always thought is was " open says me"

My eldest daughter only found out at Xmas this year (22 years old) that the partridge in a pear tree is not another type Of pear but a bird.

My husband when I first met him saw his first sprout tree on our first Xmas and asked what it was. I told him and blew his mind, he had thought for 26 years farmer's grow cabbages and go out to the field when they were very small and cut them all out to make sprouts.

I made a fool Of myself at a garage once with my diesel car which dh told me to get fixed and I told them my glowsticks needed replacing. It's not a rave love I was told and corrected to whatever the hell they are, still. Don't recall, glow rods, sticks, poles? Who. Knows.

I thought it was a light saver in Star Wars

And that there were 2 illnesses ''pneumonia'' and ''neunonia''

There was a similar thread to this a while ago and one particular one has stuck with me and I keep repeating it as it's so funny - someone said she had thought that when she heard about people killing themselves by putting their head in the oven, that they had cooked their heads to death. She didn't realise they didn't actually light the oven and it was the gas that killed them. And she was always puzzled why someone would choose such an uncomfortable way to die.

This is the funniest thing I've ever heard

re the oven suicide thing - pretty much all ovens were gas in the olden days, & before we got north sea gas the coal gas from gasworks was toxic.

I was born in 1951 & can remember as a child hearing that someone had "put their head in the gas oven" & (somehow) knowing what it meant.

Just found this interesting snippet:

A few breaths of 1% carbon monoxide is enough to knock you out; a few minutes breathing it will kill you. With coal gas running 10% carbon monoxide, it's not hard to see why one psychologist called old fashioned coal gas ovens "the execution chamber in everyone's kitchen."

The switch from coal gas to natural gas also had one unexpected effect. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, about half of the suicides in Britain were by coal gas. By the ‘70s, when the transition to natural gas was complete, the number of gas suicides had dropped to zero and the overall suicide rate was down a third. Even the suicidal appreciate convenience.

You had to make sure you'd put enough coins in the slot meter though...

My biggest one is Arkansas.... which I was convinced was pronounced Our-Kansas, and the there was a whole other place called Arkansaw

Oh well if we are going to compare how we thought names were pronounced:
Deborah. Not DEB OR AHH.

Nope. Not at all.

Simon. Not SeeMon.

I’m not English. Does that help?

I realised at the tender age of 25 that the saying ‘six and two threes’ actually meant the same thing, different way

I still remember saying “oh it’s six and two threes” and then looking at my DP in shock/excitement exclaiming I figured the saying out!! DP has not let me forget it.

Funnily enough my DP is the one who comes out with these corkers - although my pregnant brain is not remembering any right now!

ITS NOT OURKANSAS?

Fuck me.

These are hilarious! Reading after a long day at work

Up until I was about 19 I genuinely thought Reindeer were mythical creatures. A friend of mine told me Reindeer got brought to his university as part of some Christmas festival type deal and I was like "what? do you mean they dressed deer like Reindeer" "erm, nope, actual reindeer," and I exclaimed "but they don't exist!" Oh the embarrassment

Incredibly outing probably but when I was younger I used to begin stories with "Once a put on a time" I used to read all the time so no idea why it didn't twig that I was wrong! It doesn't even make sense!

Also when I was about 13/14 I was on holiday with my friend and her mum in Wales. We were going to get the bus to the town centre and arcades etc on our own and we got to the bus stop before I suddenly panicked and said "oh god how are we going to get the bus, we don't have any Welsh money!" She laughed at me for ages and years after it still got brought up I thought Wales was a different country ffs

Probably have loads more but can't think of any atm

I thought there were two musical instruments called a zylophone and an ex-lophone

@crochetcrochetcrochet- thank you that is kind of pleasing!

Hahaha, I've just remembered my teenage sister calling W.H.Smiths "Wuh-Huh-Smiths"

WHY IS THE BUNNY PINK???? (Google won't tell me).

WHAT IS THE FRIDGE DIAL FOR THEN??

(I must know the answer to these two!!)

Oh! Oh! A lady in my NCT class thought that’s what the term “in the club” referred to.