Nancy stories is a local idiom, it means bullshit. Like telling people the check is in the mail, or that you know I had your money but I got abducted by a UFO and they stole my money! Stuff like that, I’ve even used the phrase without thinking about it.
One day for whatever reason I was like who the hell is Nancy anyway in my head…oh.
The meaning of the word “blouse”. I’d gotten the impression as a kid that it was a synonym for “dress”, probably since it’s most often a term used for female clothing. And I never really thought about it until it must have been some time in my 30s, when I read a military sci-fi novel that used a phrase like “he pulled on his uniform blouse” and noticed what I was reading. My eyes had probably skimmed over similar phrases dozens of times over the years before I finally noticed.
It took me something on the order of 18-20 years of my life to figure out that the verb “gyp” was not an innocuous, ethnicity-neutral word spelled “jip.”
No matter how badly I want to grab somebody’s head, look into their ear and see if the hamster is still on the wheel - don’t. People tend not to appreciate it.
You’re not alone! I was a fearless atheist crusader, and it took losing a bunch of friends before I learned how to tone that shit down.
It took me far too long to realize that it doesn’t matter how well you did in high school, because everyone else at college did almost as well in high school as you did (if not better), and they probably also have better study skills than you.
It took me far too long to understand that, no matter how large the tribulation seemed to me, other people really don’t care about my life. Except my mom.
Life is short, can change really fast - and some1 should spend more time enjoying the moment rather than planning (and worrying so much about) the future. I’d trade 1/2 of my accumulated savings for a more adventurous & fun youth. Forgoing vacations, always working, and not having fun trips & adventures with your friends while you’re young will haunt you later in life. A hard life lesson learned late is that we’re rarely sorry for the chances we took - it’s the ones we were **afraid **to take that cause restless nights.
While that has an element of truth, I would trade at least a couple of my overseas trips that I spent all my money on in my twenties for a nice pot of savings right now.
My thing- I’ve been hearing commercials for years for Wells Fargo, and their tagline, “together, we’ll go far”. I just thought they were saying “use our bank, and stick with us over the long haul”. Just a couple months ago I realized the “we’ll go far” was a play on “Wells Fargo”.
My head-smacking moment was not all that long ago when I figured out that signs saying “no standing” referred to cars. I had always assumed they were telling people they could not stand there. Like loitering on a street-corner. It never occurred to me that a car could “stand.”