When the penny drops about dumb things that you should have known!

[malificent7]

For ages I thought there was a poster called Tia. I always used to think it was a bit weird that they would sign their name....not very anonymous. Now I realise it means thanks in advance.
I am 45.

That there's a little hose to use before you clean the washing machine filter so water doesn't go everywhere! Only learned this a few weeks ago.

Ohhhhhhh 😂

Wow! Thanks for that, interesting read. I live in one of the places mentioned in the article. I had considered the link between the removal of railings and the proximity to the steel works. Makes a lot of sense!

We used a sort of cloth nappy for our dog!

Banoffee pie is called that because it's made with banana and toffee NOT a fun word your mum made up (although that was my OH 😂)

Apples don't grow on your head if you swallow a seed.
For some reason, this one I really really believed, it still gets me now.
Cos... why would you say it then??!!

@diddl - it just didn’t really compute. I grew up in a very traditional working class home before going to Uni with a “set menu” every week (we’d probably call it meal prepping now lol).

Thursday was pork loin and chicken on Sunday - all served with some form of potatoes and boiled to death veg. Since my mother wasn’t the best of cooks, I just thought the pork was a different (overcooked) version of the “Sunday roast” chicken and never outwardly questioned it - until trying to make new friends at Uni 🤣🤣🤣

Ursa?

Wait…..there’s a filter on the washing machine that gets cleaned????? Mind.Blown.

Oh!

Hi Fidelty (I think!). Off topic but I am a nurse and once a wee lady who was getting surgery was told she’d be going to the “high dependency” unit after and I heard her telling her relatives she’d be going to the “high fidelty” unit!

All over the country there are walls with rows of plugged holes, many thousands of miles of railings were taken down and melted down to use in the war effort.

It's Ursus

Arctos is Ancient Greek for bear. Ursa/ursus is Latin for bear.

Until he was in his 20’s (51 now) my dh genuinely thought it was Piccalilli Circus not Piccadilly.
He’d led a sheltered life up until that point, bless him.

"Hang on - where DOES the word fortnight come from?

Now I know I don't know, I really need to know !!!
Fourteen nights. Fortnight."

They used to say 'se'nnight' for a week as well. Not sure where week came from.

When I was about 8 and trying to learn all the words to ‘We didn’t start the fire’ (which I did and still know preens) I was so confused about why a bunch of animal doctors were turfed out of their homes? So many that it was a thing that deserved a mention in the song.

Homeless Vets

Hi-Fi stands for High Fidelity. I don't know why though. My Nan always called it the High Fidelity, so I'm guessing there's some sort of old fashioned reason behind it.

Words and phrases that read the same backwards as forwards are called palindromes. I love them. The best ever is this one:

A man, a plan, a canal – Panama

There are lots of others.

I've mentioned before on innumerable similar threads that when I was a first year trainee accountant a long time ago, I went with a more senior colleague to audit a company selling office supplies. I had to check a sample from a huge folder of sales invoices. The invoices were computer printed and there was a box for customer address and another box for delivery address in case it was different. Over and over again the delivery address box said DEL ASAP, but there was no address given.

After a bit I commented to my supervisor that it was interesting so many of the customers were having their orders sent to this other business, Del Asap - was this a company that arranged onward transport? I didn't get as far as explaining what I'd been thinking - that the address didn't need to be specified because our client had such a close working relationship with them, and from the surname I was wondering if Mr Asap was Turkish ...

Auditing is very dull work and it must have brightened my supervisor's day no end to be able to fix me with a look and say 'Delivery as soon as possible'. Ah well. I didn't make that mistake again!

I am 60 years old,and only discovered 3 days ago that Portsmouth is an island.

I grew up thinking being 17 was going to be the most amazing time of my life. Why else would so many pop songs extol the joy of it? “Dancing Queen, only 17…”, “She was just 17, and you know what I mean….” and so on. I always supposed being 17 was supposed to be amazing because, if you weren’t going to university, it was your last bit of freedom before starting work full time.

I can’t remember exactly when it was (but it was way later than it should have been) that I realised there was absolutely nothing special about being 17 - “seventeen” simply has an extra syllable. “Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only siiiiiiiiixteeen” doesn’t fit. It’s purely about the notes in a song.

Still, at least admitting this has put some different songs in my head instead of “Hi Fidelity” by the Kids From Fame (read the answers before posting it for the 23rd time, people!!)

What??

I always thought he made it😂😂😂😂

This still seems to be debated online often (even though its actual science) and people are convinced boy and girl twins can be identical, even people who actually have twins. I can understand people not realising but I can't understand people trying to debate the issue 😂

Week's probably derived from the same source as "woche" (German for week). Guessing French "semaine" is similar to sennight. There are lots of examples in English with two synonyms, one from Anglo-Saxon and one from Norman French.