Stuff you were embarrassed that you didn't know

There really is a Lesser Britain, but only one: Britannia Minor, better known in English as Brittany.

Several decades ago my best friend was getting married, and asked me to be his Best Man. I hadn’t been to a wedding since I was a kid, and just assumed the only thing a Best Man had to do was hand him the ring. I knew nothing of bachelor parties or tuxes or toasts, and just showed up at the wedding wearing a suit, and was totally oblivious about a Best Man’s function.

The strange thing was that nobody clued me in about anything, not even his other friends, who probably put together a bachelor party without me. It wasn’t until years later that, little by little, I learned about all my faux pas.

Well, there’s apparently this song by “They Might Be Giants”…

Hand to god, I was positive she was legal.

I’m 28. Having fallen into every part-time job I’ve ever had, and being recruited into a PhD program, I’ve only ever really applied for one thing: my master’s program. Now that it’s time to start applying for actual real jobs, I’m still wondering what exactly a cover letter is supposed to contain.

And then there is Little Britain.

Just include some rearrangement of any lyrics of a song by They Might Be Giants, you’ll do fine.

I know about the group, and I know a song or two from them, but not anything that relates to this thread.

The first time I used a fax machine I was fresh out of high school (15 years ago) and working as an office temp. The office was tiny and I was the only one there most of the time. The boss gave me a stack of papers and asked me to fax them to so-and-so and left. So I marched over to the fax machine and faxed that stack of documents…on page at a time. I bet it was well over 20 pages and after one page sucessfully went through, I’d load one more page in, dial the number and wait. I can’t imagine what the people on the other end thought.

When I realized years later that you actually can put the whole stack of papers in the machine I was retroactively embarrased.

Second grade, but I thought of myself as an advanced student. We were new kids in town. When the fastidious principal of the new school was showing us around on the first day, he said, “Now I’ll show you all the lavatory.”

I was very excited, and asked if I could use the microscope.

For a kid who prided himself on his vocabulary, that was humiliating. It was a long time before I realized that it might be an affectation to use “lavatory” when talking to second graders.

Oh, this is embarassing. I’m 40 years old. I have heard the euphemism for a period as Aunt Flo for probably 30 years. I just thought it was just a goofy thing to say. This year - it clicked, Aunt Flo, menstral flow…yeah. I felt dumb.

I thought that turkeys could fly.

Yes, they can. Well, the wild ones, anyway.

I have a feeling I’m about to embarass myself, but … huh? :confused:

Earlier post

I’m guessing **tdn **only recently learned pineapples don’t grow on trees.

I had no idea ragout wasn’t pronounced “rag out” until I was about 40.

Long outstanding in-joke about people here who thought pineapples were like coconuts and grew on trees instead of bush-like plants. (Me included!)

Well, see, now I’m embarassed that I didn’t know that. So … there’s my contribution to this thread.

(Oh. And also, I got called out in another threadsomewhere recently for not knowing that you can set up Outlook so if people click reply to an email you send, the reply can get sent to a third address. Ignorance fought, and all that.)

I learnt from a similar thread on this board that a pony is not baby horse, but a small horse. I was forty at the time. I’m 41 now, and much wiser than I used to be.

I’ve known about the pineapple thing for a few years now, but whenever we have a thread like this, there’s always at least a few people who didn’t.

This I didn’t know. It would have come in handy a few years ago.

There’s no embarrassment in not having known that. Every time it comes up here there’s always people going “WTF? No way!”. I was one of them once, dear reader.

I wonder why so many of us just assumed that pineapples grow on trees?