Things you didn't know but everyone else did

Based on responses to a thread I started today in IMHO, everyone except me knew not to look at the welders and why.

In the ER one night while I was pregnant with my son, I had to have blood drawn. Afterwards, my arm began to bleed around the edge of the bandaid.
My husband very helpfully asked me if I needed a “gau” to clean it up.

A gau? I had no idea what he was talking about until he handed me a piece of gauze. Yes, my husband thought gau was the singular form of gauze.

I…umm…can’t think of any about myself. :wink:

Okay, maybe one…until very recently, I didn’t realize that toasters had a removable “crumb catcher”. I found out by accident while moving the toaster one morning and knocked it open. Imagine my surprise when 4 years worth of breadcrumbs came pouring out!

I just now found out, from this very MB, that the universe is NOT Geocentric. Imagine my surprise!

I also didn’t realise my ass is as big as it is. :eek:

Greywolf, you stole mine! With me it was a toaster oven and I’d spent the better part of an hour trying to clean the dern thing when I managed to pop open the little trap door.

Also, my sister referred to a single stocking as a ‘panty ho’ and had never considered that wasn’t the right word.

Hehehe, oh my little sis would kill me if she knew I was posting this… But the temptation is just too great :smiley:

You know that song that Christina whats-her-face and all those others did called “Lady Marmalade”? Well, my uncle was asking me what “Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir” meant (since I had had French in school), and my sister indignantly replied “Duh you guys, it’s not French, it’s Spanish!” It took us two or three minutes to convince her otherwise! So now my uncle always sings “Voulex vous coucher avec moi, senor
I can’t do the little dealy over the “n” but you get what I mean.
Hehehe… we still laugh about this one.

ñ Ñ

Instructions

Perhaps I’ve said this before somewhere else.

I just learned about a year ago that Elton John is gay. I guess it was just one of those things that everyone assumes everyone else knows, but nobody tells anyone else.

I beg to differ, having actually done it.

We did remember to put the machine on COLD, though.

I had a boyfriend in high school who didn’t know women went through menopause. He thought we had periods until we died.

I pointed out to him that you don’t see a lot of 80 year old mothers.

Funny thing was, he had three sisters.

This one isn’t about me, but my usually amazingly intelligent partner (who sometimes posts on here so I must be careful…).

Until he was at University, he thought the air guitar was a REAL instrument.

He only worked it out when someone started playing along on the air drums!

To this day, despite having lived in University towns a lot, there’s still a lot of drinking-related lingo that I don’t know. I see things advertised all the time like “call brands” and have no idea what they mean. I’ve never been much of a drinker.

well, the number of things I didn’t know that other people did is vast. The clue bus never stops in my neighborhood.

Here is just one example: I had no idea until I actually bought a car (age 19) that cars needed to be “registered” or that you paid something called “personal property tax” on them.

I never knew until another Doper told me LAST YEAR that Passover and Easter aren’t just coincidentally around the same time. I didn’t know that the last supper was a passover seder!

I was in my thirties before I realized that the written word “segue” was the verbal word I’d been hearing.

There are a lot of things I was clueless about–just can’t recall more right now.

MY whole life I never knew what biscuit gravy was until I told my bro-in-law about this weird white spicy sausage soup I had at Thanksgiving in college.

About five years ago I had a friend whose boyfriend worked for Microsoft. And I had to do a school project with her, and noticed that when she wanted to open a document on her computer, she would save the changes and close the one she was working on, open the new one, then close it and re-open the original one.

She didn’t know that you could have more than one document open at once!

I asked her just what she thought ‘Windows’ meant …

I had a lot of those – I was a voracious reader, but didn’t get a chance to use these words in conversation.

So I was humiliated over epitome, which I had been loftily pronouncing eh-PI-tome, and ennui, which I was offering as en-YOU-eye.

Both of those were high-school moments I’d rather forget.

  • Rick

I had not a clue about how to do things like Ø, ä, or ® until NoClueBoy’s fine post.

No longer will I have to mutter to myself when posting, “Yeah, my writing doesn’t need those cutesy thingies. Yeah, that’s why I don’t use them.”

Signed:
ƒ_ÇÉ»±§

I had a boyfriend in high school who was valedictorian of his class. Yet he (at age 18) didn’t know the difference between a dress and a skirt. He thought “dress” just meant it was long and a “skirt” referred to everything above the knee.

Bricker,
I feel ya- My mom was the one who caught me sometime around age 12 discussing how one of the heroines in my latest novel had been “mizzled” (misled)…I was floored, I knew that “miss-led” was a word too, it had just never occured to me that the similarity in meaning indicated a certain…relationship. She still laughs at me sometimes. Sigh, the curse of being young and well-read.

There’s an old joke:

Pete and Repete were in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left?
Repete, of course.
Pete and Repete…

As a child, I loved that joke. I thought the humor came from being asked who was left, when it was so obvious who was left. I would tell it with either boy falling out. I didn’t get it until I was 15. Repete? Repeat? Ah ha ha ha! I felt more than a little stupid.