Not really a basic fact of life, but I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face when he first saw UB40 on television. He’d been listening to their albums for years and he was amazed to find out the lead singer is a white guy.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I learned, too, but at least it was just my husband and I in the car… :0)
It was just relatively recently that I’ve trained myself to not, when reading the word ‘indicted’, pronounce it in my head in-dickted.
I would search but trying to search for “cats” or “dogs” would yield a clusterfuck of responses. I just remember a thread about things you thought when you were young and there were a lot of “cats were girls and dogs were boys” and a lot of “women gave birth out of their belly button” kind of responses.
Not only white, but white and from Birmingham in the UK. 
Well, speaking of James Dean, I had always thought (until about two years ago) that he was at fault in his fatal accident, but apparently he had the right of way, and the other driver didn’t yield.
My ring is platinum (yes, I’m sure) and I get the same thing if I wear it all the time.
Not exactly like the Earth does. Unlike the Earth, the Sun is not solid. The Sun and other stars experience differential rotation. This means the stuff at the equator rotates faster than the stuff at the poles.
Their names were:
Quarrymen
The Beetles
The Beatals
Johnny and the Moondogs
Long John and The Beetles
The Silver Beatles
The Beatles
I’m trying to think of some of my own misconceptions, but all that’re coming to mind for me right now are a couple of religious ones that I dispelled for a friend years ago. FWIW, she was a Catholic-turned-atheist.
She thought that Noah loaded up the Ark with animals in pairs so that everyone would have a friend. The idea of them mating and repopulating the Earth didn’t cross her mind.
She thought that the line in the song Silent Night was “Round young virgin.” Because she was young. And round. Because pregnancy makes you round.
Oops. Just this one little thread makes me realize I probably still have a number of these buried in my head somewhere waiting to be unearthed like a rotting flower bulb that never took root. I won’t be so quick to make fun of some people because this is one thing of several that I learned just now.
Yeah, I’ve spent half this thread saying “I can’t believe he didn’t know that!”
I’ve spent the other half saying “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.”
I don’t think there are very many people who really think that cats and dogs are the same species, but somehow it just seems natural to refer to dogs as he/him and cats as she/her in the same way that ships are always feminine.
[knot pendant nitpick]
This is a “reef knot” AKA a “square knot”, this is a “single slipped reef knot”. The knot folks use to tie their shoes is a “double slipped reef knot”.
It’s much easier to retrain yourself to tie the first part of the knot.
If you usually pass the free end over and away from you and pull it under and towards you (like this) reverse that (over and towards you under and away) and finish the same way you always would.
It’s much easier to change that, than the rest of the way you tie the knot.
The reef/square is a* knot* and not a bend*, it should never be used to tie the ends of two lines to each other, “Knotting authority Clifford Ashley claimed that misused reef knots have caused more deaths and injuries than all other knots combined.”
*A bend is a knot used to join two lengths of rope into a single length of rope.
[/knot pendant nitpick]
CMC fnord!
It’s easier than that. Tie your granny knot or reef knot or whatever you want to call it. (For purposes of this description, assume you’re holding the fixed loop in your left hand and the lace in the right hand is the one you wrap around the left loop and pass through the hole.) Then, before you pull the two loops tight, take the loop you just created and wrap it around the left loop a second time, then pass it through the hole again, then pull the loops tight.
OK, the explanation doesn’t make it sound very easy, but the knot itself is. It’s the same knot, but you pass the loop through the hole twice instead of once, and your shoe will never come untied until you pull on the free end (the aglet).
I was having an argument when I was about 15 or 16 with my 25 or 26 year old brother as only a teengal can have when I yelled at him, " You’re not om-knee-poh-tent."
Yeah, he laughed and laughed at me for that one.
It’s om-nip-oh-tent
I got in a conversation with someone the other day who kept talking about a movie starring Kiefer Sutherland and Forest whi-TAY-ker.
Because I don’t watch much TV, especially meta-programming, I really don’t know how to pronounce lots of things like this. I am uncertain how you say “Brett Favre” or “Steve Carrell”. I only just learned that ‘Segway’ is prounounced like ‘segue’ and not “Sedgeway”.
growing up, I always thought that the reason people said “finish college the first time around because it’s really hard to go back and finish later on in life.” (after the normal period when you’re supposed to go to college ie 18-22) was because they were lazy, or didn’t have the drive or ambition which made me think ‘how stupid, school isn’t that difficult it just takes effort.’ Fast forward to me now at 25 trying to go back to school having not finished when I first started and realizing that it has nothing to to with drive or ambition when it comes to college later in life. The reason it’s difficult to go back to school is because universities make it nearly impossible to pull off a full time credit load while working full time. There aren’t enough classes and the vast majority are morning and midday. So whoops, I fucked up. lol.
I just learned yesterday how to make a trash can liner fit snugly with the top of a waste bin in an office. drop the bag in, size up the top of the bag with the rim of the can and grab the excess in a hand, then pull it out and tie a quick knot in the excess. Then just put it back on.
This whole time I’ve been trying to tie the excess off while it was on the can, and it never worked.
When I was a kid I thought boxers defended themselves with their fists. That is, to block a punch, they hit the other guy on the fist. Fist-to-fist.
Well…it made sense at the time.