To ask the most basic thing you knew knew/misunderstood until adulthood - take 2

[Smotheroffive]

the last one ran out of space OP, is it too rude to do a continuation here?

Not sure if this is a basic thing but it is a recent thing. watching brexit news past two nights and me and my wife were most confused by "eyes to the right, nose to the left"

Took googling to realise it's ayes and noes argh!! So obvious!

I used to think the band aid song was "thieves go nooooo" instead of feed the world
I thought it was a warning to criminals over Xmas not to steal

Into my forties I thought flora and fauna was flowering and non-flowering plants, Had no idea fauna meant animals until we went to the the zoo in Madrid and I asked why it was called Faunia!

I've never realised that about shorn the sheep aka Shaun

thieves go nooo

Oh my god that is brilliant

I feel incredibly silly posting this as I actually believed this up until a couple of weeks ago.

I always thought that the CBeebies presenters doing their bit between the shows was live and not pre recorded.

It only dawned on me that was not the case when we had a few days of more CBeebies when I noticed that one of the presenters had been wearing the same jumper for several days!

The 'Shorn' the sheep thing makes much more sense when you remember how we first met him in the ?90s in 'A Close Shave'. He accidentally got a shave in the knit-o-matic instead of just a bath. He came out shivering and with a plaster on him!

Oh I missed a bit - after the sheep comes out of the knit-o-matic, that's when Wallace decides to call him Shaun.

Another pun that I think goes over everyone's head is that My Fair Lady is meant to be the cockney pronunciation of 'Mayfair Lady'

So glad the eyes/ayes and nose/noes wasn't just me!

My own personal shame was discovering age 28 that they are called rawl plugs, not wall plugs

Rawlplugs is a brand name, like Sellotape and Hoover, so you're OK to say wall plugs.

(When I was a kid I thought the shoe shop Clarks was actually Clanks, because of the cursive r. Nobody corrected me, so with a bit of luck I never actually said it aloud to anyone and it was all in my ditsy head. Not in the spirit of the thread though, because I realised my mistake by secondary school)

*I honestly thought that Gibraltar was an island.

Is it not?? blush blush*

Didn't you read the previous thread?? There's a road acroos the runway to drive into Spain at La Linea, depending on how stroppy the Spanish border guards are feeling!
It's actually getting bigger as reclaimed land is used for building.

Loads believe its an island, even govt officials have referred to it as an island and if you go there you see how very narrow the land is that is the boundary, walking across its runway.

I think you can get away with calling it an island although strictly speaking its a peninsular.

"Graphista I was living in Edinburgh, where I was born and grew up. That probably makes it worse!
My new manager said I had to attend a meeting in Motherwell I panicked and thought 'How am I going to get to London!"

Oh dear. Could've been worse you could've been living in glasgow!

I've a fascination with name origins especially surnames, yet only learned recently watching a tv show that "sawyer" means "one who saws" d'oh!! And there I thought I was all clever cos I knew the meanings of names like cooper, Bailey, chandler, farrier etc

Portsmouth is an island - as I learned on MN years ago.

I too thought Gibraltar was, and I grew up thinking Center Parcs was in big domes..

When I was little and my mum used to have the radio on, she used to listen to Womens' Hour, presented by Suma Gregor.
My MIL kindly informed me, about 10 years ago that it was Sue McGregor (as we had been having a conversation about unusual names and Suma came up).

As a child I thought all music on the radio was played live. So the musicians would turn up, do their song and then leave again until the next time they're song had to be played when they had to come back and do it again even then I knew it didn't make sense

Stuck in a traffic jam once next to an enormous articulated lorry with the advert 'vitacress' on the side, I commented to dh that there must be a lot of cress in there. He was incredulous that I had spent my whole life just assuming that lorrys are carrying what is written on the side what a muppet !!

hoho a bit of an insider secret (which belongs on a parallel thread, vitacress lorries are full of vitacress. In between college years I did some casual work in a cress organisation, filling the lorries, with....cress! and we used to have water fights because the polystyrene boxes they were packed in often got rain soaked and held water. It was the only fun to be had with a job like that! I didn't cut it for long, could only spend so long stuffing polystyrene boxes with punnets of cress