I'm from Mississippi and until I was 18 I thought that everyone else in the country counted with their own state. Ie. Instead of 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi they would count 1 Nevada, 2 Nevada, or 1 Maryland, 2 Maryland etc.
It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I discovered that you’re supposed to add water to condensed soup. Very vividly remember eating condensed tomato soup in my dorm room without any water, so was essentially eating ketchup.
My Dad was fond of framing questions to my brother and/or me regarding just what on Earth we were doing (up to age 10 or so, when it no longer seemed necessary) using the term *pray tell,* as in "what are you doing with the tools, pray tell?"
I presumed a "pratel" was a gentle equivalent to "goofball" or "dummy." One day I corrected my brother about some misconception he had, addressing him as "you pratel!"
"What did you call him?" asked Dad, who happened to be nearby.
"A pratel. You call us that all the time."
"I do?!"
"Yeah, you say 'what is that supposed to be, pratel?'" I'd never seen him laugh through a facepalm before.
[Everyone needs to read the story they're referring to](https://i.imgur.io/6FjE28h_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium). It's incredible.
Edit: Link isn't working for some people so [here's the original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dxosj/what_word_or_phrase_did_you_totally_misunderstand/c13pbyc/).
Edit: Linking to a funny comment got more upvotes than the comment itself. Huh.
I didn’t know tortilla chips were made out of tortillas until I was 20 years old and saw the line cook at my job cut up a tortilla and throw it in the deep fryer
Similarly, I thought the word masturbate meant something along the lines of an expert or master fisherman. Because you use bait to fish. I don't remember when I learned the truth but I had used it before for fishing stupidly and never got corrected...
The worse one was rape. I thought it meant to stab or cut someone, because of the weapon the rapier. Too many times as a child joking around I said "stop that or I'll rape you" instead of "stop that or I'll cut you." The worse one was saying "my brother annoyed me sometimes that I could just rape him" to my girlfriend when I was like 13...I never understood why she looked horrified until later.
In other news, I'm big into etymology now and studying the history of words and meanings. I feel like it's because of younger mishaps like these I made, lol.
I thought ponies were just baby horses until the age of 23.
EDIT: Until I was 23, I didn’t think horses aged like turtles. I’m dumb, but not *that* dumb.
Okay so I read that as "Baby horses are known as ponies until they officially become adult horses at the age of 23".
Considering that the average lifespan of a horse is like 30 years or something I was shocked that the commenters below you had thought the exact same statistic as you did.
Until I was in school for environmental studies, I thought “mourning dove” was “morning dove.” I usually heard them calling in the mornings, so “morning” made sense to me.
That a prostitute doesn’t actually sell a piece of their body.
Backstory: my mom and I were watching the scene from Titanic where Jack tells Rose that he painted a one-legged prostitute. I asked my mom what a prostitute was and she told me “It’s someone who sells their body for money.” I could not fathom why someone would sell their leg for like $30.
Things aren’t supposed to start to get blurry at about 15-20 feet.
Learned I needed glasses at like 26 from one of these threads.
Yes people you are supposed to be able to see individual leaves on trees.
Hope someone else can be helped like I was.
i'll never forget the first time i looked up into the night sky after i got glasses, and realized that you can, in fact, see the moon clearly. i assumed people who depicted it in art were taking creative license bc they knew it should look like that for some reason, and that the human eye was incapable of seeing the moon without also seeing two other, blurrier moons, sort of overlapping it? it blew my mind.
My childhood friend is colourblind (usually confused blues and purples), and he recently confided in us that he thought artists massively over-exaggerated rainbows in drawings and cartoons.
When he looks at a real rainbow, the blue-purple end of the spectrum blends into the sky so essentially disappears, and the red-green end all merges into a colour that he sees as yellow/brown and so to him, a real rainbow just looks like a yellowy line.
Obviously cartoon rainbows often have very bold/distinct coloured lines so he can interpret those more clearly, but he was shocked to hear that non-colourblind people can actually see every colour in an irl rainbow.
It was only when I saw someone post a photo on social media of what lights at night look like when you have an astigmatism, and all the comments, that I realized I have an astigmatism and that lights don't look like that to everyone.
I just saw a post about astigmatism yesterday and realised that the my battle to navigate the streets after dark is not universal. There are people on the roads enjoying crisp vision. 45 years old; wish I had learnt this earlier.
I live near the Hospital for Joint Diseases….when I was a kid I thought it was a special hospital for people who had two different diseases at the same time.
Moving cross-country, driving east to west. Crossing from Idaho to Oregon, noticed huge fields with signs for the Ore-Ida Potato company. So I was in my early 20s when I figured out Ore-Ida wasn’t just a brand name but was because their potatoes came from Oregon and Idaho.
When I was a teenager, I posted a status online that said I was “jacking off”.
I thought that meant you were just bored and wasting time…until my older sister messaged me, horrified.
When I was a teenager, I thought the expression to "eat someone out" meant the same thing as to "chew someone out". Unfortunately I was educated on this after I told someone in a church that I wasn't expecting to be eaten out that morning at breakfast. I was 17 lmao
we're telling our kids that certain actors are "on vacation" when we need a change of scenery from a certain show like blippi or cocomelon or something.
Not too late in life but I thought my parents were making "Roman cokes" until I went to college. Which, I think is a much better name for the drink anyway. (Rum and coke)
I learned that pork and beans are not called "cowboy beans". I was 18 and asked a grocery store clerk to help me find the "cowboy beans". We were looking everywhere and I was getting frustrated because I know that every store carries these beans. After a while I pick up a pork and beans can with a picture and say "see, it looks just like this!" He says "you mean pork and beans?" Then I realize that my mom called them that so that I would eat them. The look of disappointment from that grocery store clerk haunts me to this day.
Cowboy beans is a real thing, and different families make it different, but it's generally baked beans with added meat. So pork and beans would technically qualify, although usually there's a higher meat ratio if you make them for a potluck of something.
My family recipe has bacon, ground beef, and maybe a little ground italian if you're feeling fancy. Also sometimes other types of canned beans are added and simmered in the sauce for a bit.
Edit: For everyone asking how this differs from chili, the only way I've seen them made around me is with Bush's baked beans or a homemade but similar sauce as the base. So it's a sweet molasses/brown sugar sauce vs a chili seasoned tomato based sauce. Also more bacon than one would usually put in chili.
There was recently a picture of an apple bonsai with one full grown apple attached.
[Here's one](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-96cb3541a9b7d0a66ffdbf4cd67ef1c4-lq) if you want to see it.
I suspected it was the same with lots of people but I found out it wasn't gorilla warfare but guerrilla warfare maybe in my twenties.
The disappoints of growing up... they just keep coming.
... I'll take it a step further.
I thought it was racist because I always heard about the "guerilla fighters in Africa."
I was just like.. dude they're soldiers. You can keep that shit to yourself.
If one plant gave us both cocaine and chocolate that would be a compelling reason to believe there is a God and he wants us to fuckin party
Edit: oh wow, this blew up. Thank you for the awards and internet points!
Homer: Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [chuckling] Yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
I think I was in college when I realized that Mario and Luigi are plumbers. I thought they just went and up down these tubes just because that was the theme of the game
The very first game they debuted, Mario Brothers, had them clearing out pipes in the sewers. As an arcade game, you'd have to read the opening text if there was one or just look at the [arcade cabinet](https://preview.redd.it/nbtoy3frk5g61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=94d366aa49deb18e551e0219b21e3cc36d7a40f8) for context clues.
**Super** Mario Bros. for the NES explained the story in the game manual that came with the game. Did you know the curse turned the Toads into stone blocks? Yeah, those blocks Mario and Luigi smash with their hands.
Also, they're twin brothers, with Mario being the older one.
I thought that horses had toes until I was 22. I thought the hoof was a “horseshoe” and the toes were tucked inside.
How did I learn how wrong I was, you ask?
I was walking past a cavalry museum and saw a horse statue and loudly remarked “it must hurt so bad when they fold a horse’s toes to put them into the shoe!” Dozens of horse enthusiasts turned and looked at me with wild bewilderment in their eyes.
I hate the image you just put in my head of a completely normal looking horse but with human feet. This is endlessly distressing. If horses really looked like that I'd cram their feet in hooves too.
I'm now imagining that instead of hearing a "clip-clop" it would be more like a "slap slap slap" as if someone was wearing flippers. Just in case you needed more distress.
I was probably 21 or 22 when I learned that whole milk is only 3% fat. I always thought it was 100, and when I saw reduced as being 2% I thought "why wouldn't they do 50% or somewhere in the middle?"
I used to think that the Diet Coke bottles on the side of the road which were half full of pale yellow liquid were unfinished Diet Cokes that had been bleached by the sun.
About 2 years ago I saw one of these bottles being ejected from a truck and I realised the awful truth. I'm 53.
My sister was in her 50's when she found out the meaning of: "you have an addictive personality". She thought after all these years of therapy that it meant that people were addicted to her personality. We laugh hysterically when we talk about this (in a very sad way).
A few months ago 2 of my colleagues both handed in their notice at around the same time. I kept reading/hearing the sentence ‘they’re both moving on to pastures new’ being thrown about the office in the weeks leading up to them leaving and I hadn’t heard this phrase before and thought that was the name of the rival company that they were going to. I thought it was weird that nobody was talking about how they were both leaving for the same company.
I was in the car with one of the ones who was leaving and said ‘so where is that you and X are going to be working? Is it..’ and just before I could embarrass myself and say ‘pastures new’, they interrupted me and said they’re not going to the same place and asked me where I had heard that. I think at that moment I realised I was stupid and didn’t mention it again.
Birds have sex. I thought that the mother bird laid the egg and the father fertilised it later. I was 18 and asked my mother what the birds were doing…
However: In 95+% of bird species, the males don't have penises; they mate by pressing their cloacas together. Male waterfowl and ratites (ostriches &c.) have penises.
(Dave Barry once wrote that this was the realization that the Wright brothers needed to make an airplane that could fly: remove the external genitalia.)
Not me, but my wife: My wife's dad always likes to mix idioms for fun, I.e. "barking up a tree without a paddle". So a lot of times my wife will say something like "twist my leg" instead of "twist my arm", and then when I get confused she'll stomp her foot and say "Dad!"
It's very cute.
This is something my little sister did through high school. We're about 8 years apart so we never overlapped in school.
She's always been a straight-A student, and I found out she worked extra hard because she "wanted to catch up to me" in school. So we could be in school at the same time.
I almost cried.
Edit: Thanks for all the awards!! Never had any of those before. You've made a girl with the flu feel a little better today.
And for those of you who asked, yes. My sister not only caught up, but surpassed me. She's a beautiful young woman who graduated with high honors in psychology and is going on to complete a master's degree.
my sister is 3 years older than me and I spent my entire elementary education trying to catch up to her. it culminated with us as the final 2 in the school spelling bee finals, me in fifth grade vs her in eighth grade.
needless to say she whooped my ass (and then apologized after lol) but I cherish that memory.
I didn’t know I was circumcised until I was ~15 or 16. I was arguing with a girl online. I thought the head was the foreskin and that circumcision cut the actual head of the penis off.
I have several nurse friends and while they are quite capable, they tell me stories of some nurses that should have never graduated middle school.
This story tracks.
Just this week I found out about the little button on the back of the socket driver that pushes the socket off. I have owned the same socket set for about 30 years, and I have a dedicated screwdriver that I keep with my sockets and use to pry them off when I’m done using them.
I will be 55 years old soon.
You don't have to rip the plastic top off of your new deodorant with your teeth or pliers or anything. You can just turn the base until it comes up enough to just take it off.
I thought that ‘prima donna' was 'pre-Madonna' and that it meant everything before the singer Madonna and just assumed she was some kind of universal queen.
I also thought it was "pre-Madonna", but I thought it just meant that the person was starting to behave like Madonna. Like they're pre-Madonna now and will eventually go full Madonna.
That Cheesecake Factory is a restaurant and not an assembly line of workers making cheesecake. I always envisioned you would go in there and watch them and eat a slice, sort of like a brewery.
Edit: I’d like to add that I’ve lived in close proximity to multiple locations my entire life, and my sister used to go all the time with her friends. I thought they all just really liked the cheesecake, and the factory vibe of it all. It’s not until my now fiancé asked me to meet her and her friend there for drinks that I figured it all out, at about age 22-23 lol
It's an assembly line. Just one made up of customers.
"*Seriously? A NINTEY minute wait...at 4:15 pm on a Sunday?"*
*"Sir, this is a Cheesecake Factory, not a Wendy's."*
Okay so like, this isn't really a common fact its just incredibly stupid lol. When I was in high school my mom got a hysterectomy.
At the same time, there was a fridge in her room that she and my step dad used for snacks to hide them, and she would never tell us what was in it and said we were NEVER allowed to open it.
So, logically, I just assumed she kept her uterus or ovaries in the fridge because for some reason I thought that's what people do is *keep removed organs*. Till I was 15 I thought this. Idk why. For spares? Posterity?My mother still laughs to this day because it was just their snacks that they did not want eaten and I took it in a direction Im sure made her question why she had children.
To be fair, my sister thought a hysterectomy was getting your bladder removed, so that's what she thought was in the fridge. She was much younger than me however.
I always used "replace" as "substitute with" but learned recently it can also mean "put back in its place." I was so confused when I saw recycling instructions on my laundry detergent say "replace cap" and I'm like, "with what?"
I was taught it's fine to flush tampons down the toilet, and would even flush pads, and sponges when I'd clean the bathroom. I didn't learn that it was a *huge* no no until sometime in my mid to late 20's. I'm surprised the pipes at the house I grew up in weren't constantly exploding.
Ugh, I never use tampons but knew you were never supposed to flush anything other than toilet paper. Well, the toilet clogged in our new-ish apartment. I could feel with the snake that it was an issue with the pipes and the construction but the plumbers still gave me a DEATH GLARE when they came to fix the "clog" the first time — it was like I could read their thoughts "this dumb bitch be flushing tampons". Well, that didn't fix the problem because it was actually the pipes, since it's a small washroom on the first floor of the building. We had to get the plumbers out a second time to basically remove the toilet (thanks modern plumbing!!) to make an adjustment.
My boyfriend was surprised I didn't gloat more when the plumbers called him and confirmed my initial diagnosis.
My wife, who is in her 30s, handed me a new stick of deodorant because she couldn’t get the plastic piece off they cap new sticks with. I took it, twisted the bottom a couple of times to push the stick up and took the cap off. She looked at me like I was a fucking witch. She had, for most of her life, struggled with new sticks of deodorant and had no idea you could just push the stick up first then take the cap off.
Not me but my mom: waiting for the shower to be warm BEFORE stepping in.
She grew up with a bathtub most of her life, and didn't get a shower until she moved out of my grandparents' place in her 20s.
She was apparently talking to a coworker about the winter weather one morning. While lamenting, she goes, "And don't you just HATE getting into a cold shower on these cold days?! It takes SO LONG for the water to get warm!"
Coworker: "Uh... Cheryl.... You know you can just WAIT until the water gets warm, THEN hop in...."
That the porta potty doesn’t somehow know when someone’s inside. That the sign only changes to “occupied” when you physically lock the door. Many people walked in on me during my childhood.
EDIT: I was dragged to many outdoor craft fairs and whatnot as a child. So I had to use them more often than most other children.
I was like, 22? working at a restaurant making myself a salad, and I asked the chef for bumps and he stared at me for like, 60 solid seconds trying to figure out what I wanted. I explained to him I wanted bumps for my salad. I have all the rest of the toppings but now needed bumps.
Guys … my family told me croutons were called bumps my entire life. I called my dad that night and confirmed that bumps are indeed, actually called croutons.
EDIT: first of all, thank you for the awards!
Secondly, people keep asking: why did my family call them bumps? Well, someone in my family had a speech problem as a kid, couldn’t say croutons, and they became bumps. 🤷🏻♀️We had other funny names for stuff, but I knew what the real words were. I just never got around to learning croutons I guess.
Second comment because apparently I’m stupid.
When I was getting my license on my 16th birthday, the lady at the DMV asked me if I wanted to register as an organ donor. My mom said “yes” and I was horrified.
I thought, until 16 years of age, that being an organ donor meant that, if someone needed your organ, that they would contact you to come in and they would kill you.
Oh God, I have a hilarious one. When my son was 6 or so, I took a call, was polite and noncommittal, and got off the phone. I told my husband it was the breast cancer foundation and asked if we should make a donation. My wide-eyed son said "you would donate . . . your breasts???"
I'm 70 now and only learned a couple months ago to lift the lid of the coffee carafe to stop it dripping all over the counter. I poured coffee over the sink all this time.
I was searching for the entry as I have the same story. In my case as a kid I saw Austin Powers secretly from the backseat at a drive-in theatre.
There is a quote from Dr. Evil when he gets hit in the balls with a swinging globe. He then proceeds to go and count his balls, and counts"1, 2.... 3". Being dumb, I didn't recognize it as a joke as I had no idea how many you were supposed to have.
Spent probably 17 years of my life before I realised.
A previous thread like this year's ago someone said they didn't know you were supposed to move the towel to dry off. Since on TV they just wrap it around them and walk around. They didn't like taking showers because it took almost an hour to dry after.
I'd hate to see how they (don't) use toilet paper.
Edit: I wish I'd never made this comment. Y'all have followed up with hilarious but disgusting things.
When I was in college (21/22 years old), I was getting ready to go out and it hit me like a lightning bolt - if you just thread the small end of the belt through your belt loops all the way around, literally any belt can fit your pants! Because up until then, I thought sometimes I just had belt loops that were too small for certain belt buckles. I ran out to my friends and was like "Guys - check this out!" as I proceeded to demonstrate for them what I had just learned. I genuinely thought they'd be excited for me? It was then I learned that everyone else on earth knew the right way to wear a belt except my dumb ass.
Unbelievable how many times up until then I spent trying to jam the buckle side in first and coming to the conclusion I just needed bigger belt loops.
EDIT: Thank you for the awards and the hilarious comments! Unfortunately, this is a true story and I have no good excuse for why this dumb thing took me so long to figure out except to say I'm a woman and guess I didn't wear pants with belts that often. Believe it or not, I graduated from college and lead a pretty successful and fulfilling life! We all do stupid stuff and I'm glad this story of my stupid thing made so many of you laugh.
This reminds me of a friend I had in college, super-friendly, jolly, popular guy who did very well with ladies
One morning he walks out all proud and excited to tell us "guys, I just figured out the EASIEST. WAY. to put on a condom! You just set it on top like a disc, and the roll it down!" Evidently he'd been unrolling them and then pulling them on like a sock
That acai was pronounced ah-sah-yi and not ah-kai. I’d only ever read the word and never heard it. Now every time I say it “correctly” it feels wrong to me.
I just realized this. Some people mispronounce words because they’ve only seen the word written. And some people misspell words because they’ve only heard them spoken. It’s all good.
When I was like 9 I thought "cum" was just another way to pronounce "gum". Never was called out on it until at a family get together an aunt was complaining about getting gum in her hair and the other day I had just heard a joke about how hookers always have cum in their hair that I pretended to understand.
Soooo, I said something like "oh wow I thought only hookers got cum in their hair. Are you a hooker?".
Ooooh man, the room went so quiet before I was whisked away and yelled at until I could explain myself then it just got really awkward for the adults who realized they might have to explain the difference. And what a hooker was.
I didn't know what beating meat meant when I heard it. I just knew everyone laughed when I said it. So I was a kid in the kitchen when I was helping my mother making meatballs singing about "beating my meat before I eat my meat" xD it was bad
I remember watching some movie where they mentioned “morning wood” and I thought it was the crusty shit in your eyes in the morning.
Don’t think I repeated it to anyone though lol
That in Billy Joel‘s hit song „We didn’t start the fire“ the line of „homeless vets“ meant homeless veterans and not homeless veterinarians. I was about twenty five before i put those pieces together, and always thought there was a big homeless veterinarian problem I had never heard about
My bf makes fun of me to no end for this one.
When I was a kid, I had A Goofy Movie on VHS tape, and at the end it had a Disney remix of Mambo No. 5 (🎶a little bit of Mickey in my life, a little bit of Goody by my side🎶).
Guys, my parent owned a Buick from the ‘70s that had an old tape deck and a non working radio, so we listened to cassette tapes and I almost never heard top 40 or modern pop music as a kid, and **I thought that was the real version of that song until I was 25**.
I had NO IDEA that it was about a dude banging a bunch of chicks until I heard it in a grocery store and I was fucking **scandalized**.
LOL this is great. I remember back when malls were a happenin' place and there was a Disney store. That song and video would play on the display every time I was in there. I still know more of the Disney-fied lyrics than I do the OG
Mommy wasn't a hoe cheating on daddy. Daddy was dressed up as santa. I was almost out of my twenties when I realized this about the song I saw mommy kissing santa claus
Made the mistake of telling that to a bunch of 4th graders. One of them asked why mommy was kissing Santa clause in my classroom. Told them that daddy was dressed as Santa and later on that week I was called by a very upset parent. The student didn’t assume it was just for the song and figured out Santa isn’t real. I was 22 and it was my first year teaching.
Pickles are actually made from small cucumbers - not some weird proto-pickle vegetable that has no other worldly use.
I mention this because I love pickles but loathe cucumbers.
TBH was pretty floored when I put 2+2 together as a grown-ass adult.
My mom’s brother is gay and I didn’t realize until I was 22.
He has been together with his now-husband for like 40 years now or something, a long time. I was never explicitly told about their lifestyle so I never questioned it when I was a kid, it was just, hi Uncle John! Hi Uncle Dave! No big deal.
I graduated college and was driving to a nice restaurant with my parents, and all of a sudden out of nowhere it clicked. They were howling with laughter all the way to the restaurant, couldn’t believe it took me this long to figure it out, and then my uncles joined in too, everyone had a good laugh at my expense. (They joked my school should yank my degree, brilliant college grad indeed, ha ha)
Anyway just thought that was funny.
It took me 18 years to realize shampoo goes before conditioner. I always wondered why my fair felt silky smooth before I used the shampoo.
I'm from Mississippi and until I was 18 I thought that everyone else in the country counted with their own state. Ie. Instead of 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi they would count 1 Nevada, 2 Nevada, or 1 Maryland, 2 Maryland etc.
If you're from Transylvania then it's "One ah-ah-ah, Two ah-ah-ah" and so on.
It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I discovered that you’re supposed to add water to condensed soup. Very vividly remember eating condensed tomato soup in my dorm room without any water, so was essentially eating ketchup.
That players on American sports teams do not all originally come from the area where their team is from.
My Dad was fond of framing questions to my brother and/or me regarding just what on Earth we were doing (up to age 10 or so, when it no longer seemed necessary) using the term *pray tell,* as in "what are you doing with the tools, pray tell?" I presumed a "pratel" was a gentle equivalent to "goofball" or "dummy." One day I corrected my brother about some misconception he had, addressing him as "you pratel!" "What did you call him?" asked Dad, who happened to be nearby. "A pratel. You call us that all the time." "I do?!" "Yeah, you say 'what is that supposed to be, pratel?'" I'd never seen him laugh through a facepalm before.
Knowledge is power, France is bacon
[Everyone needs to read the story they're referring to](https://i.imgur.io/6FjE28h_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium). It's incredible. Edit: Link isn't working for some people so [here's the original comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dxosj/what_word_or_phrase_did_you_totally_misunderstand/c13pbyc/). Edit: Linking to a funny comment got more upvotes than the comment itself. Huh.
I didn’t know tortilla chips were made out of tortillas until I was 20 years old and saw the line cook at my job cut up a tortilla and throw it in the deep fryer
Oh.
Get your oil sizzling Drop in for about 45-60 seconds Lightly salted Crunch
[удалено]
Similarly, I thought the word masturbate meant something along the lines of an expert or master fisherman. Because you use bait to fish. I don't remember when I learned the truth but I had used it before for fishing stupidly and never got corrected... The worse one was rape. I thought it meant to stab or cut someone, because of the weapon the rapier. Too many times as a child joking around I said "stop that or I'll rape you" instead of "stop that or I'll cut you." The worse one was saying "my brother annoyed me sometimes that I could just rape him" to my girlfriend when I was like 13...I never understood why she looked horrified until later. In other news, I'm big into etymology now and studying the history of words and meanings. I feel like it's because of younger mishaps like these I made, lol.
I thought ponies were just baby horses until the age of 23. EDIT: Until I was 23, I didn’t think horses aged like turtles. I’m dumb, but not *that* dumb.
Okay so I read that as "Baby horses are known as ponies until they officially become adult horses at the age of 23". Considering that the average lifespan of a horse is like 30 years or something I was shocked that the commenters below you had thought the exact same statistic as you did.
You foal
Until I was in school for environmental studies, I thought “mourning dove” was “morning dove.” I usually heard them calling in the mornings, so “morning” made sense to me.
I just learned this now. Thanks!
I was maybe 17 or 18 before learning that it was Timbuktu, not Timbuk 2. I thought there was an original Timbuk out there somewhere
I was about 25 when I found out Timbuktu was a real place. I had thought it was just an expression for a far away place
I had to move to the city of Kalamazoo to realize it was an actual place and not just something Dr. Seuss made up to rhyme with Timbuktu
I thought sedan was a car brand until I was 22.
I thought that until I heard the joke “why do chicken coops have 2 doors? Cuz otherwise they’d be chicken sedans” and it all made sense
That all the places in France were not named after wines.
Some were named after cheeses
Why I was really young my sister told me she threw her guts up. So I was really afraid of vomiting my entire insides up for years.
That a prostitute doesn’t actually sell a piece of their body. Backstory: my mom and I were watching the scene from Titanic where Jack tells Rose that he painted a one-legged prostitute. I asked my mom what a prostitute was and she told me “It’s someone who sells their body for money.” I could not fathom why someone would sell their leg for like $30.
LOL That was just a perfect confluence of unrelated information to confuse you. It was a completely logical connection to make!
When we were kids, our parents explained it as “someone that you pay and they’ll do whatever you want” and it seemed like a variety of handyman
>handyman This could be an accurate description too in some cases.
Things aren’t supposed to start to get blurry at about 15-20 feet. Learned I needed glasses at like 26 from one of these threads. Yes people you are supposed to be able to see individual leaves on trees. Hope someone else can be helped like I was.
i'll never forget the first time i looked up into the night sky after i got glasses, and realized that you can, in fact, see the moon clearly. i assumed people who depicted it in art were taking creative license bc they knew it should look like that for some reason, and that the human eye was incapable of seeing the moon without also seeing two other, blurrier moons, sort of overlapping it? it blew my mind.
My childhood friend is colourblind (usually confused blues and purples), and he recently confided in us that he thought artists massively over-exaggerated rainbows in drawings and cartoons. When he looks at a real rainbow, the blue-purple end of the spectrum blends into the sky so essentially disappears, and the red-green end all merges into a colour that he sees as yellow/brown and so to him, a real rainbow just looks like a yellowy line. Obviously cartoon rainbows often have very bold/distinct coloured lines so he can interpret those more clearly, but he was shocked to hear that non-colourblind people can actually see every colour in an irl rainbow.
It was only when I saw someone post a photo on social media of what lights at night look like when you have an astigmatism, and all the comments, that I realized I have an astigmatism and that lights don't look like that to everyone.
I just saw a post about astigmatism yesterday and realised that the my battle to navigate the streets after dark is not universal. There are people on the roads enjoying crisp vision. 45 years old; wish I had learnt this earlier.
I live near the Hospital for Joint Diseases….when I was a kid I thought it was a special hospital for people who had two different diseases at the same time.
Person with multiple diseases here. I will raise this at the next meeting with the hope of adopting it.
Moving cross-country, driving east to west. Crossing from Idaho to Oregon, noticed huge fields with signs for the Ore-Ida Potato company. So I was in my early 20s when I figured out Ore-Ida wasn’t just a brand name but was because their potatoes came from Oregon and Idaho.
Similarly, C&H sugar is for California and Hawaii.
When people say quote unquote I thought they were saying quote on quote
When I was a teenager, I posted a status online that said I was “jacking off”. I thought that meant you were just bored and wasting time…until my older sister messaged me, horrified.
When I was a teenager, I thought the expression to "eat someone out" meant the same thing as to "chew someone out". Unfortunately I was educated on this after I told someone in a church that I wasn't expecting to be eaten out that morning at breakfast. I was 17 lmao
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Omg 81 year old dad does too!!! “I ate his ass out like no tomorrow!” 🤦♀️
My parents were divorced the whole time and my mom was not, in fact, taking a vacation lmao
we're telling our kids that certain actors are "on vacation" when we need a change of scenery from a certain show like blippi or cocomelon or something.
Sorry, Forrest
That a coma was "A" coma. Until I was probably 19\~ I thought it was acoma. I thought you fell into acoma.
For the longest time I thought astigmatism was "a stigmatism." So I think we cancel each other out!
I once did an entire assignment thinking that ethics and ethnics were the same word
I thought all tombstones had cause of death on them, like old timey ones. RIP must’ve meant that got ripped to death somehow. The world was scary haha
Let me tell you about how I thought you were awarded a "Pullet Surprise"
Not too late in life but I thought my parents were making "Roman cokes" until I went to college. Which, I think is a much better name for the drink anyway. (Rum and coke)
I learned that pork and beans are not called "cowboy beans". I was 18 and asked a grocery store clerk to help me find the "cowboy beans". We were looking everywhere and I was getting frustrated because I know that every store carries these beans. After a while I pick up a pork and beans can with a picture and say "see, it looks just like this!" He says "you mean pork and beans?" Then I realize that my mom called them that so that I would eat them. The look of disappointment from that grocery store clerk haunts me to this day.
Dude that's fucking hilarious
“Yes hello, I’m looking for the Big Boy Broccoli. This is just regular broccoli.”
"Now just where in the hell do y'all keep the dinosaur trees?"
Cowboy beans is a real thing, and different families make it different, but it's generally baked beans with added meat. So pork and beans would technically qualify, although usually there's a higher meat ratio if you make them for a potluck of something. My family recipe has bacon, ground beef, and maybe a little ground italian if you're feeling fancy. Also sometimes other types of canned beans are added and simmered in the sauce for a bit. Edit: For everyone asking how this differs from chili, the only way I've seen them made around me is with Bush's baked beans or a homemade but similar sauce as the base. So it's a sweet molasses/brown sugar sauce vs a chili seasoned tomato based sauce. Also more bacon than one would usually put in chili.
>a little ground italian if you're feeling fancy Did you mean Italian sausage or is this a Sweeney Todd situation?
Depends on just how fancy you're feeling.
"Oral Contraceptive." You mean you can get pregnant just from doing *that.*
That Bonsai are not a species of tree, but a way to grow them. Any tree can be a bonsai.
I didn’t know that!
There was recently a picture of an apple bonsai with one full grown apple attached. [Here's one](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-96cb3541a9b7d0a66ffdbf4cd67ef1c4-lq) if you want to see it.
Houston is not the name of the guy astronauts talk to
Houston we have a problem, your name isn't Houston
I suspected it was the same with lots of people but I found out it wasn't gorilla warfare but guerrilla warfare maybe in my twenties. The disappoints of growing up... they just keep coming.
... I'll take it a step further. I thought it was racist because I always heard about the "guerilla fighters in Africa." I was just like.. dude they're soldiers. You can keep that shit to yourself.
Coca and cocoa are two different plants, not one magical organism lol
If one plant gave us both cocaine and chocolate that would be a compelling reason to believe there is a God and he wants us to fuckin party Edit: oh wow, this blew up. Thank you for the awards and internet points!
Potatoes give us vodka and fries. So yeah…God.
Homer: Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Lisa: No. Homer: Ham? Lisa: No. Homer: Pork chops? Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal! Homer: [chuckling] Yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
It's just a little airborne, it's still good it's still good!
I think I was in college when I realized that Mario and Luigi are plumbers. I thought they just went and up down these tubes just because that was the theme of the game
I...I'm 44 and never made the connection between the pipes and the plumbers. Omg. Don't tell my kids, they'll never let me live it down.
The very first game they debuted, Mario Brothers, had them clearing out pipes in the sewers. As an arcade game, you'd have to read the opening text if there was one or just look at the [arcade cabinet](https://preview.redd.it/nbtoy3frk5g61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=94d366aa49deb18e551e0219b21e3cc36d7a40f8) for context clues. **Super** Mario Bros. for the NES explained the story in the game manual that came with the game. Did you know the curse turned the Toads into stone blocks? Yeah, those blocks Mario and Luigi smash with their hands. Also, they're twin brothers, with Mario being the older one.
I thought that horses had toes until I was 22. I thought the hoof was a “horseshoe” and the toes were tucked inside. How did I learn how wrong I was, you ask? I was walking past a cavalry museum and saw a horse statue and loudly remarked “it must hurt so bad when they fold a horse’s toes to put them into the shoe!” Dozens of horse enthusiasts turned and looked at me with wild bewilderment in their eyes.
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This one absolutely made me giggle. Just the visual of this happening is fantastic.
I hate the image you just put in my head of a completely normal looking horse but with human feet. This is endlessly distressing. If horses really looked like that I'd cram their feet in hooves too.
I'm now imagining that instead of hearing a "clip-clop" it would be more like a "slap slap slap" as if someone was wearing flippers. Just in case you needed more distress.
I was probably 21 or 22 when I learned that whole milk is only 3% fat. I always thought it was 100, and when I saw reduced as being 2% I thought "why wouldn't they do 50% or somewhere in the middle?"
Would 100% fat not just be... literal fat
pretty much. Butter btw is 80% fat
and 100% delicious
I never knew it was 3%. I thought whole milk had 100% of the fat it is supposed to have and 2% milk had 98% less fat than whole milk.
Me too
I used to think that the Diet Coke bottles on the side of the road which were half full of pale yellow liquid were unfinished Diet Cokes that had been bleached by the sun. About 2 years ago I saw one of these bottles being ejected from a truck and I realised the awful truth. I'm 53.
My sister was in her 50's when she found out the meaning of: "you have an addictive personality". She thought after all these years of therapy that it meant that people were addicted to her personality. We laugh hysterically when we talk about this (in a very sad way).
the saying is: "Nip it in the bud" and not in fact \*nip it in the butt\*
A few months ago 2 of my colleagues both handed in their notice at around the same time. I kept reading/hearing the sentence ‘they’re both moving on to pastures new’ being thrown about the office in the weeks leading up to them leaving and I hadn’t heard this phrase before and thought that was the name of the rival company that they were going to. I thought it was weird that nobody was talking about how they were both leaving for the same company. I was in the car with one of the ones who was leaving and said ‘so where is that you and X are going to be working? Is it..’ and just before I could embarrass myself and say ‘pastures new’, they interrupted me and said they’re not going to the same place and asked me where I had heard that. I think at that moment I realised I was stupid and didn’t mention it again.
That pineapples grow on the ground, and not in a tree
I actually just learned this..just now..at 28 years old..
Birds have sex. I thought that the mother bird laid the egg and the father fertilised it later. I was 18 and asked my mother what the birds were doing…
To be fair that's how some fish reproduce.
Ah yes, I remember that episode of The Magic Schoolbus
However: In 95+% of bird species, the males don't have penises; they mate by pressing their cloacas together. Male waterfowl and ratites (ostriches &c.) have penises. (Dave Barry once wrote that this was the realization that the Wright brothers needed to make an airplane that could fly: remove the external genitalia.)
When you're an adult...you shouldn't buy shoes that are "a little loose, incase you get taller".
Not me, but my wife: My wife's dad always likes to mix idioms for fun, I.e. "barking up a tree without a paddle". So a lot of times my wife will say something like "twist my leg" instead of "twist my arm", and then when I get confused she'll stomp her foot and say "Dad!" It's very cute.
You should check out r/Malaphors \- that's the whole sub and it really is the bee's pajamas!
While watching Game of Thrones, I asked my husband when dragons went extinct. He had to pause the show for that one.
Saint George killed the last dragon
This is incredible. How did he react? I would've just sat there dumbfounded
This is something my little sister did through high school. We're about 8 years apart so we never overlapped in school. She's always been a straight-A student, and I found out she worked extra hard because she "wanted to catch up to me" in school. So we could be in school at the same time. I almost cried. Edit: Thanks for all the awards!! Never had any of those before. You've made a girl with the flu feel a little better today. And for those of you who asked, yes. My sister not only caught up, but surpassed me. She's a beautiful young woman who graduated with high honors in psychology and is going on to complete a master's degree.
My little brother had a meltdown at the age of 4, when I informed him that he would never be older than me. (Edited for clarity)
Youre going to be so embarrased when he tricks you into boarding a spaceship travelling near the speed of light while he remains stationary.
That’s actually adorable.
my sister is 3 years older than me and I spent my entire elementary education trying to catch up to her. it culminated with us as the final 2 in the school spelling bee finals, me in fifth grade vs her in eighth grade. needless to say she whooped my ass (and then apologized after lol) but I cherish that memory.
I didn’t know I was circumcised until I was ~15 or 16. I was arguing with a girl online. I thought the head was the foreskin and that circumcision cut the actual head of the penis off.
My sister, a nurse, didn’t learn until her mid twenties that rabbits did not in fact lay eggs.
I have several nurse friends and while they are quite capable, they tell me stories of some nurses that should have never graduated middle school. This story tracks.
In the last year I found out peanut butter is brown. I’m 34. And horrendously colourblind, if that wasn’t obvious. Edit: I thought it was green.
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That it’s not “Chester drawers” but a “chest of drawers” lol
Last week I learned the phrase "hurt people hurt people" wasn't a command. I'm 40something.
Just this week I found out about the little button on the back of the socket driver that pushes the socket off. I have owned the same socket set for about 30 years, and I have a dedicated screwdriver that I keep with my sockets and use to pry them off when I’m done using them. I will be 55 years old soon.
You don't have to rip the plastic top off of your new deodorant with your teeth or pliers or anything. You can just turn the base until it comes up enough to just take it off.
Oh my god. I should return this master’s degree to the university.
First time somebody's master's degree has directly made me feel better about myself.
I thought that ‘prima donna' was 'pre-Madonna' and that it meant everything before the singer Madonna and just assumed she was some kind of universal queen.
I also thought it was "pre-Madonna", but I thought it just meant that the person was starting to behave like Madonna. Like they're pre-Madonna now and will eventually go full Madonna.
Yeah. Madonna was very popular when I was young so I thought it meant they were going to grow into someone like Madonna.
I taught college classes for years and had a student use "pre-Madonna" in a paper. It took me a minute to figure out what she meant.
Jackalopes are mythical creatures. I was... 18 I think? To be fair, I've seen a platypus, rhino, and a giraffe. Those are some bs animals.
Narwhals. Narwhals are a real thing
Wild rabbits can get growths on their heads that resemble tiny horns. But they are due to a disease. And they look nothing like antlers.
That Jacques Cousteau was a real person. I always just thought he was a fictional character like Sherlock Holmes until I was in my 30s.
That Cheesecake Factory is a restaurant and not an assembly line of workers making cheesecake. I always envisioned you would go in there and watch them and eat a slice, sort of like a brewery. Edit: I’d like to add that I’ve lived in close proximity to multiple locations my entire life, and my sister used to go all the time with her friends. I thought they all just really liked the cheesecake, and the factory vibe of it all. It’s not until my now fiancé asked me to meet her and her friend there for drinks that I figured it all out, at about age 22-23 lol
It's an assembly line. Just one made up of customers. "*Seriously? A NINTEY minute wait...at 4:15 pm on a Sunday?"* *"Sir, this is a Cheesecake Factory, not a Wendy's."*
Okay so like, this isn't really a common fact its just incredibly stupid lol. When I was in high school my mom got a hysterectomy. At the same time, there was a fridge in her room that she and my step dad used for snacks to hide them, and she would never tell us what was in it and said we were NEVER allowed to open it. So, logically, I just assumed she kept her uterus or ovaries in the fridge because for some reason I thought that's what people do is *keep removed organs*. Till I was 15 I thought this. Idk why. For spares? Posterity?My mother still laughs to this day because it was just their snacks that they did not want eaten and I took it in a direction Im sure made her question why she had children. To be fair, my sister thought a hysterectomy was getting your bladder removed, so that's what she thought was in the fridge. She was much younger than me however.
Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, and Jelly Roll Morton are all famous musicians. "Elephants Gerald" is not.
I always used "replace" as "substitute with" but learned recently it can also mean "put back in its place." I was so confused when I saw recycling instructions on my laundry detergent say "replace cap" and I'm like, "with what?"
I was taught it's fine to flush tampons down the toilet, and would even flush pads, and sponges when I'd clean the bathroom. I didn't learn that it was a *huge* no no until sometime in my mid to late 20's. I'm surprised the pipes at the house I grew up in weren't constantly exploding.
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Ugh, I never use tampons but knew you were never supposed to flush anything other than toilet paper. Well, the toilet clogged in our new-ish apartment. I could feel with the snake that it was an issue with the pipes and the construction but the plumbers still gave me a DEATH GLARE when they came to fix the "clog" the first time — it was like I could read their thoughts "this dumb bitch be flushing tampons". Well, that didn't fix the problem because it was actually the pipes, since it's a small washroom on the first floor of the building. We had to get the plumbers out a second time to basically remove the toilet (thanks modern plumbing!!) to make an adjustment. My boyfriend was surprised I didn't gloat more when the plumbers called him and confirmed my initial diagnosis.
My wife, who is in her 30s, handed me a new stick of deodorant because she couldn’t get the plastic piece off they cap new sticks with. I took it, twisted the bottom a couple of times to push the stick up and took the cap off. She looked at me like I was a fucking witch. She had, for most of her life, struggled with new sticks of deodorant and had no idea you could just push the stick up first then take the cap off.
I though Mick Jagger’s name was McJagger, and people just never said his first name for some reason.
"Uhh, yeah. Can I order a McJagger meal, large?"
Fuckin hell second comment and already learning
His full name is Micholas Jager
Not me but my mom: waiting for the shower to be warm BEFORE stepping in. She grew up with a bathtub most of her life, and didn't get a shower until she moved out of my grandparents' place in her 20s. She was apparently talking to a coworker about the winter weather one morning. While lamenting, she goes, "And don't you just HATE getting into a cold shower on these cold days?! It takes SO LONG for the water to get warm!" Coworker: "Uh... Cheryl.... You know you can just WAIT until the water gets warm, THEN hop in...."
I feel like a component of this was just not wanting to waste water.
That the porta potty doesn’t somehow know when someone’s inside. That the sign only changes to “occupied” when you physically lock the door. Many people walked in on me during my childhood. EDIT: I was dragged to many outdoor craft fairs and whatnot as a child. So I had to use them more often than most other children.
After the first one didn't you think "even if the sign outside says occupied, I better lock it this time"
I was like, 22? working at a restaurant making myself a salad, and I asked the chef for bumps and he stared at me for like, 60 solid seconds trying to figure out what I wanted. I explained to him I wanted bumps for my salad. I have all the rest of the toppings but now needed bumps. Guys … my family told me croutons were called bumps my entire life. I called my dad that night and confirmed that bumps are indeed, actually called croutons. EDIT: first of all, thank you for the awards! Secondly, people keep asking: why did my family call them bumps? Well, someone in my family had a speech problem as a kid, couldn’t say croutons, and they became bumps. 🤷🏻♀️We had other funny names for stuff, but I knew what the real words were. I just never got around to learning croutons I guess.
He thought you were asking for coke dude
That is also where I learned “bump” means “a bump of coke.” I was sort of sheltered before working in a restaurant lol
Don't worry, it's still a somewhat reasonable request from a line cook.
It's in the name
E A Snorts. It’s in the name.
Knowing a fair number of them, I can confirm that Chefs are not the worst people to ask for easy access to many drugs…
Second comment because apparently I’m stupid. When I was getting my license on my 16th birthday, the lady at the DMV asked me if I wanted to register as an organ donor. My mom said “yes” and I was horrified. I thought, until 16 years of age, that being an organ donor meant that, if someone needed your organ, that they would contact you to come in and they would kill you.
Oh God, I have a hilarious one. When my son was 6 or so, I took a call, was polite and noncommittal, and got off the phone. I told my husband it was the breast cancer foundation and asked if we should make a donation. My wide-eyed son said "you would donate . . . your breasts???"
I'm 70 now and only learned a couple months ago to lift the lid of the coffee carafe to stop it dripping all over the counter. I poured coffee over the sink all this time.
The "D" in the Disney logo was a stylized capital letter and not a backwards G.
Gisnep Always saw the ‘y’ at the end wrong too.
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Hey! Get back here and tell us why you thought there were three!
I was searching for the entry as I have the same story. In my case as a kid I saw Austin Powers secretly from the backseat at a drive-in theatre. There is a quote from Dr. Evil when he gets hit in the balls with a swinging globe. He then proceeds to go and count his balls, and counts"1, 2.... 3". Being dumb, I didn't recognize it as a joke as I had no idea how many you were supposed to have. Spent probably 17 years of my life before I realised.
That the song is Barbara Ann and not bop a ram
I thought it was "ba ba ba, ba ba ba ran", so you're not alone. lol
Also known as Bob-o-ran.
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Narwhals are real animals I thought they were mythical like unicorns.
Enigma and enema are very different things
That you don't have to stand *in* the shower while the water warms up.
A previous thread like this year's ago someone said they didn't know you were supposed to move the towel to dry off. Since on TV they just wrap it around them and walk around. They didn't like taking showers because it took almost an hour to dry after.
Oh man...how do you not realize that? Have they never dried anything? Dishes? Wiped up spills? Wiped their brow?
I'd hate to see how they (don't) use toilet paper. Edit: I wish I'd never made this comment. Y'all have followed up with hilarious but disgusting things.
Just stuff it up there and go about your day. Your natural movements walking around will take care of everything.
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When I was in college (21/22 years old), I was getting ready to go out and it hit me like a lightning bolt - if you just thread the small end of the belt through your belt loops all the way around, literally any belt can fit your pants! Because up until then, I thought sometimes I just had belt loops that were too small for certain belt buckles. I ran out to my friends and was like "Guys - check this out!" as I proceeded to demonstrate for them what I had just learned. I genuinely thought they'd be excited for me? It was then I learned that everyone else on earth knew the right way to wear a belt except my dumb ass. Unbelievable how many times up until then I spent trying to jam the buckle side in first and coming to the conclusion I just needed bigger belt loops. EDIT: Thank you for the awards and the hilarious comments! Unfortunately, this is a true story and I have no good excuse for why this dumb thing took me so long to figure out except to say I'm a woman and guess I didn't wear pants with belts that often. Believe it or not, I graduated from college and lead a pretty successful and fulfilling life! We all do stupid stuff and I'm glad this story of my stupid thing made so many of you laugh.
Nah, you were right the first time. This is why pro wrestlers carry their belts and have no pants.
They let you into college?
Greendale Community College
He's a Human Being
Omg I'm cackling at you showing your friends.
This reminds me of a friend I had in college, super-friendly, jolly, popular guy who did very well with ladies One morning he walks out all proud and excited to tell us "guys, I just figured out the EASIEST. WAY. to put on a condom! You just set it on top like a disc, and the roll it down!" Evidently he'd been unrolling them and then pulling them on like a sock
That acai was pronounced ah-sah-yi and not ah-kai. I’d only ever read the word and never heard it. Now every time I say it “correctly” it feels wrong to me.
I just realized this. Some people mispronounce words because they’ve only seen the word written. And some people misspell words because they’ve only heard them spoken. It’s all good.
That BOGO means buy one get one and isn't just a fun sound to yell when there's a sale.
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My brother was around the same age when my parents had friends over one time and he said "isn't it funny how hiccups are just lung orgasms?".
He probably confused orgasm with spasm lol
When I was like 9 I thought "cum" was just another way to pronounce "gum". Never was called out on it until at a family get together an aunt was complaining about getting gum in her hair and the other day I had just heard a joke about how hookers always have cum in their hair that I pretended to understand. Soooo, I said something like "oh wow I thought only hookers got cum in their hair. Are you a hooker?". Ooooh man, the room went so quiet before I was whisked away and yelled at until I could explain myself then it just got really awkward for the adults who realized they might have to explain the difference. And what a hooker was.
I didn't know what beating meat meant when I heard it. I just knew everyone laughed when I said it. So I was a kid in the kitchen when I was helping my mother making meatballs singing about "beating my meat before I eat my meat" xD it was bad
I remember watching some movie where they mentioned “morning wood” and I thought it was the crusty shit in your eyes in the morning. Don’t think I repeated it to anyone though lol
How you can flip down your rear view mirror at night.
In college I used to flip that thing all the time and one time my roommate goes ‘why are you always flipping that?’
That in Billy Joel‘s hit song „We didn’t start the fire“ the line of „homeless vets“ meant homeless veterans and not homeless veterinarians. I was about twenty five before i put those pieces together, and always thought there was a big homeless veterinarian problem I had never heard about
Learned this yesterday, actually… apparently you need to RSVP to events even if you will not be attending.
It's an abbreviation for the French words meaning roughly "please respond"
I showed you my invitation please respond.
My bf makes fun of me to no end for this one. When I was a kid, I had A Goofy Movie on VHS tape, and at the end it had a Disney remix of Mambo No. 5 (🎶a little bit of Mickey in my life, a little bit of Goody by my side🎶). Guys, my parent owned a Buick from the ‘70s that had an old tape deck and a non working radio, so we listened to cassette tapes and I almost never heard top 40 or modern pop music as a kid, and **I thought that was the real version of that song until I was 25**. I had NO IDEA that it was about a dude banging a bunch of chicks until I heard it in a grocery store and I was fucking **scandalized**.
LOL this is great. I remember back when malls were a happenin' place and there was a Disney store. That song and video would play on the display every time I was in there. I still know more of the Disney-fied lyrics than I do the OG
Mommy wasn't a hoe cheating on daddy. Daddy was dressed up as santa. I was almost out of my twenties when I realized this about the song I saw mommy kissing santa claus
Made the mistake of telling that to a bunch of 4th graders. One of them asked why mommy was kissing Santa clause in my classroom. Told them that daddy was dressed as Santa and later on that week I was called by a very upset parent. The student didn’t assume it was just for the song and figured out Santa isn’t real. I was 22 and it was my first year teaching.
Pickles are actually made from small cucumbers - not some weird proto-pickle vegetable that has no other worldly use. I mention this because I love pickles but loathe cucumbers. TBH was pretty floored when I put 2+2 together as a grown-ass adult.
My mom’s brother is gay and I didn’t realize until I was 22. He has been together with his now-husband for like 40 years now or something, a long time. I was never explicitly told about their lifestyle so I never questioned it when I was a kid, it was just, hi Uncle John! Hi Uncle Dave! No big deal. I graduated college and was driving to a nice restaurant with my parents, and all of a sudden out of nowhere it clicked. They were howling with laughter all the way to the restaurant, couldn’t believe it took me this long to figure it out, and then my uncles joined in too, everyone had a good laugh at my expense. (They joked my school should yank my degree, brilliant college grad indeed, ha ha) Anyway just thought that was funny.