When I heard about the movie “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle”, I had no clue what White Castle was.
When the movie “Hostel” came out, I was thinking it was hostile. I’d never heard of a Hostel.
And in a recent ad they mention Aphrodite and Aphrodisiac. I’d never made the connection before.
Yes, I did grow up in a cave isolated from society, why do you ask? Anyway, what things did you learn about an embarrassingly long time after everybody else around you?
My dear late wife clued me in that “Realtor” was not just another term for “real estate agent”.
Apparently aspiring Realtors must undergo specialized training at some arcane seat of learning high in the Carpathian Alps before they are allowed to call themselves Realtors and learn the Great Secret and get a magic decoder ring and a license to sneer at mere real estate agents. They are also allowed to capitalize the word Realtor.
She also told me that Sherpas are a religious or social class in the Himalayas. I thought sherpa just meant “guy who schlepps gear up Mount Everest for the Western climbers and gets no recognition and damn little money for doing so”.
Don’t feel bad about White Castle. I’d never heard of them either because the closest location is 2100 miles away. They don’t advertise in Oregon for some reason.
I must admit I was a little embarrassed I didn’t quite remember how to pump my own gas when I was filling up in Vancouver, WA. I had to read the directions on the pump. Last time I pumped gas was 5 years ago!
Required to capitalize it, actually. Realtor is a trademark, and the National Realtor’s Association is very serious about it, and can fine any of its members that don’t play along.
As for me - that gibber and gibberish are related. I’d only read gibber in fiction (Lovecraft, anyone?) and pronounced it with a hard g in my head. Recently had a conversation with a friend about whether it should have a hard or soft g, before she pointed out, hey, same as gibberish, right? :smack:
When I first started using a fax machine, I thought that simply writing the person’s name and fax number on the paper being faxed would ensure that it reached that person. No dialing needed! Just press go!
I visited the US recently and spent a LOOOONG time in front of the gas pump, slack-jawed, tongue gently lolling, thinking hard. I finally gave up and went inside and asked the nice lady behind the counter.
When I was pretty young, (4th grade or so) I asked why it was called Great Britain.
My teacher explained that England was Great Britain and Scotland and Ireland, etc were the Lessor Britains (I figured at the time it was due to size.) I never questioned it, nor, if later in life I was taught differently, it didn’t stick.
I am 48 and only learned in the last decade that this is untrue. I had said something like: I have been to Great Britain, but would still like to go to the Lessor Britains. I was laughed at and made fun of (by Brits.)
OK, I am not sure I would say that I’m *really *embarrassed, because we all had a good laugh.
Yet, amusingly, they didn’t bother renaming it for the Australian release, despite the fact there are no White Castle restaurants or hamburgers here at all.
As for the OP: I’ve only just realised (courtesy of a computer game, of all things!) that “For Auld Lang Syne” means “For Old Time’s Sake”. I’d always associated it with Scottish expats (or people of Scottish ancestry) signing it and thought the title basically mean “For The Old Country”, in the “Scotland’s bonnie and green and awesome and we miss it” sense.
Speaking of “Auld Lang Syne”, a couple of years ago I was working in Scotland as part of an all-Spaniards team, and we kept hearing how this Burns dude was so awwwwesome because he wrote the lyrics to Ol-lansáin, don’tcherknow. Apparently this song was superfamous or something, but we had no idea which song it was, and daren’t ask.
Thanks to a quick google on that Burns dude, to YouTube and to Wikipedia, I was able to inform my teammates that it was “this song that in American movies gets played at lots of banquets, only apparently it means it’s New Year’s”, to play a snippet, and get a general “aaaaaaah” of recognition. We did identify it with “American banquets”, but not with “New Year’s Eve”.
No, it doesn’t get played in Spain; or at least, not outside movie theaters showing an American movie which involves New Year’s. But we still think that if we’d asked anybody in Scotland “ok, so which song is this Ol-lansáin?”, they wouldn’t even have comprehended the question - and if they eventually did, we might have ended up in the nearest canal for insulting their national poet or something.
