Apparently, today (well, yesterday now, by my watch) a bunch of folks all over the world decided to wave signs and say things, and stand around a lot in an effort to… well, they all obviously thought they were accomplishing something, at any rate.
Me? First I heard of it was on the boards, about two hours ago.
My wife would occasionally mention an obscure writer called “Nitizich.” I thought nothing of it until one day we were reading something and I said something to the effect of, “That Nietzsche, what a card!” and she said, "Oh, you mean ‘Nitizich.’
Oh, I had fun with her on that one.
But then, she’d always had fun that I always pronounced “Armageddon” as if it were a kind of dinosaur: “Ar-meg-ga-don.”
Until I was about 35 and had seen the movie every year for thirty years I didn’t realize that Dorothy dreamed the whole trip to Oz.
My kids absolutely forbid me to speak when they’re friends are in the house.until I was
"until I was. . . "
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to be continued. . . ?!
Oh, so many.
Of course, there are always funny ones from childhood, as when I thought ‘pregnant’ was the opposite of ‘ignorant’.
I just found out recently that there is a little holder for the cover to my gas tank right on the inside of that little door on the car—how convenient!
I also did not know until about 5 years ago that homeowners had to purchase insurance.
I’m sure I’ll think of more.
I think I’ll tell on a couple of friends to help me work up to my own DUH.
I had friends in college who had “moments of realization” about spatula and epitome, similar to those mentioned above.
My boyfriend in college was astounded to find out how girls “got all that hair through the rubberband”–he’d never seen a girl put her hair in a ponytail before.
Ok, now me…
To my embarrassment, I didn’t connect the phrases “brown nose” and “kissing ass” until well into my 40s. I knew that they both meant obsequious behavior and were somewhat synonymous. I just didn’t connect them…
But even worse, I was 50 when I realized the ABC song, Baa Baa Blacksheep and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star have the same tune. I’m still in denial about this.
You only have to pay property tax on cars in certain states. In Ohio you only pay about $30 a year for plates, while in Indiana it is a percentage of the cost of the car. Which is why you can find a large number of cars in Indiana as much as 60 miles from Ohio that have Ohio plates.
Most of mine are the wrong pronunciation type. Naive being knave for several years.
This is a great thread. I loved the Jerry Lewis / Jerry Lee Lewis one, and the one about Letters to the Editor pages all having some guy called ‘Ed’ working on them. Priceless!
I can relate to the Martin Luther / Martin Luther King confusion. It’s not that I ever thought they were the same, but in history class it took me a long while to remember which was was.
My own contributions could fill a book. When I first owned my own car, I had no idea I had to put some oil into it from time to time. This is very embarassing for a man to admit.
My special genius is not so much mis-pronouncing words in my mind as mis-parsing phrases. I’m very good at not working out where the breaks or ‘spaces’ come in a phrase.
There’s an old Margaret Rutherford ‘Miss Marple’ movie set on board a ship called ‘Murder Ahoy’. The first few times I heard about this film I just assumed it was called ‘Murderer Hoy’, as in some guy called Hoy who hacked people. Why did I think that, instead of the much more likely ‘Murder Ahoy’? I have no explanation. It’s just a quirk in my head.
Likewise, the famous Stranglers track ‘Golden Brown’ refers to ‘through my manchirons’. I honestly wondered what ‘manchirons’ were, until a friend said ‘through my mind she runs’.
I was in my early teens when I first heard of ‘Simon & Garfunkel’, but I didn’t realise it was a double act. I just naturally assumed there was a recording artist with the unusual first name ‘Simenon’, as in Simenon Garfunkel. (I’m not making these up.)
Well, there was the argument I had with my sister about 5 years ago about truffles. She, silly fool, kept insisting that the expensive chocolates were NOT made from the expensive mushrooms.
Oh. :o
Then, back in the early 90s, when Apple was on the verge of releasing the first “Power Mac” machines based on the PowerPC chip instead of the Motorola 680x0-series chips used up until that time, I kept reading issued of Info-Mac Digest and running across references to “68K” versions of software or “68K” machines, and I kept wondering – and eventually posted the question – “What does 68K refer to? I can tell from context that you are referring to the older architecture machines that use the 68000-series processors, but what about them has, or is, 68 kilobytes or 68 kilo-whatever? I don’t get it…”
:smack:
I thought my mother was getting my father a CD by Holland Oats. :rolleyes:
I didn’t know I had a crumb on my face until someone told me.
A friend of mine’s car (well, really a friend of a friend’s) broke down a couple years ago. She called my close friend from the side of the road. Hearing her describe it, it sounded like a dead battery or something else electrical, I asked “Did you try to jump it?” I get a pause, then gales of laughter. “She asked if you have to open the lid to do that, because she dosen’t know how.”
And, um, as a child I thought Walter Cronkite and Winston Churchill were the same person.
assuming that BTW does mean By The Way then about ten minutes ago. If not…
It wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I learned that “buttercup” is not another word for daffodil. Hey, it makes sense, right? I mean, they’re yellow, and they have that cup-shaped thing…
My mom played a lot of older music when I was growing up, so I was at least in fifth or sixth grade before I completely grasped that The Doors, The Beatles, Etta James, and Bing Crosby were not all contemporaries and still producing hits.
They aren’t the same thing? :smack:
Hahaha - I thought much the same thing about “Business Frontage Road”.
In my defense, when I was a kid we lived in a rural community so there was only one sign on the highway that said “frontage road” so I thought it was just that one road. Later on I noticed that just about all the towns on the highway had a road called “business frontage road” but I didn’t really put it together until I was about 25.
I always wondered why so many towns thought Industrial Park was a good name for a public park. 
I recently found out Mick Jagger is bi-sexual.
I don’t know what silver dollar pancakes are. And I never heard of David Thompson, although I grant I might have if I went to NC State.