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.

There was so much cut down and they were never used. No one knows for sure what was done with them and they were dumped in hidden places in the war, but they didn't have the infrastructure to process them in the quantities provided.

It was a "do your bit" exercise in the end.

I never realised that segue is the pronounced 'segway'. I thought the word was seeg.
Also Americans pronounce Louis as Lewis, so it's not St Looey, it's St Lewis.
There's a place in Essex called Theydon Bois, which I always pronounced Bwa, like the French, only to realise that the locals call it Theydon Boys

I did the exact same thing in Germany and thought the town "Ausfahrt" must be huge. 😂

The poster who originally said that said the cannon had been turned into streetlights, not bollards — I think it was that @BMW6 was querying.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought Ausfahrt was a massive town. It seems so obvious looking back. 😂

Obviously it was so that they’d have someone to chat to in elephantese, leopardese, sheepese, etc. It’d be a bit lonely otherwise.

Wow! I had other plans, but now I'm going home during lunch break to check that! Life-changing!!

I am fairly certain the black plague thing is a myth (started in the 20th century afaik).

It's a while since I knew this but I had to explain it to someone this Christmas past. The word to we wish you a merry Christmas are to you and your kin not to you and your king

This dawned on me on holiday last yr

It blew my mind when I spotted a field of pineapples out the car window on a trip in E Africa. I couldn't believe it (but I did not mention this to my fellow travellers).

When i was a kid I was surprised to see all the swearing on the labels of frozen Turkeys.

Ready basted

@ProfessorplumBilliardroomCandlestick I did not know that about bears/ no bears, Arctic/ Antarctic. Love it!

At a guess i would say it’s from ‘14 nights’.

I always thought that when pictures were in black and white that the world was also in black and white🥴 Edited to add this was when I was a child🤣

Oh, love this! I had no idea.

I was in my thirties when I realised that Ray Ban sunglasses weren’t named after a guy called Ray.

Eek! My world has been rocked!

I think I was about 40 before realising that to unlock a door I should turn the key clockwise. Before that I was randomly jiggling it before I got 'lucky'.

This one is a bit niche, but many years back when I was in sixth form, my friend and I were gossiping during a rather boring Careers Support session. I’d said something like, “Sod all this - can’t we just marry rich men?” She’d replied, “Yeah! I could marry Warren Croft - he must be rich!”

I looked at her like she’d gone mad. She said, “You know, Warren Croft! He owns everything around here. The Warren Croft Health Centre, the Warren Croft Bakery, Warren Croft Fish and Chips…”

I nearly burst a lung laughing. To be fair, most people generally called it “The woods”, but she’d somehow got to the age of 16 without realising that the bit of scrubland where we’d played as children (and sat drank cheap cider after dark a bit later) was called… Warren Croft.

Manual cars have gearboxes that work on the same principle as bicycles. Your ability to pedal has an optimum number of rotations per minute which is your best balance of power delivery and energy efficiency, and the different size gears enable you to move off from a standstill through to cruising at a higher speed.

Automatic cars automate the process of changing gear for you.

Electric cars have a wider range of efficient power delivery so don't need a gearbox. There is a more direct relationship where "motor spinning faster" translates to "road wheels turn faster".

Hybrid cars sometimes have a thing called a CVT, continuously variable transmission. Imagine the drive shaft is connected to an elastic band that is wrapped around a cone. The tapered end of the cone is like the lowest gear, the wider end of the cone like high gear. Instead of cogs which have steps between them (where you feel the car change gear) it's seamless. Some have gearboxes.

Goodness, I must be such fun at dinner parties. 😳🙄

@AngryMoan my family still mercilessly take the piss out of me because I once said, as a child "how on earth do they recycle toilet paper?".

And chewing gum doesn't wrap round your innards and you die, a thing we were told as children to either stop us from swallowing it or from using it at all!

I would have advised him to change his email address to TherapyWales @ whatever dot com.

I for one am most appreciative of the explanations about electric car engines, and that Arktus referred to The Great Bear constellation and all the other slightly nit-picky clarifications of facts.

Not sarcastically, genuinely.

My trivia-fuelled brain is much happier with clear explanations than "un-bear region" stuff that sounds plausible but a bit unlikely.

(If I had a catchphrase it would probably be "It's a bit more complicated than that", so I too am an absolute hoot at parties)

It's the home of lost bra wires! I found out the hard way that I needed to really firmly close the filter afterwards, every towel in the house sopping wet to mop up the water.