Here’s one from this thread. My grandmother used to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but she’d always substitute “tea tray” for “diamond.” I had no idea until just now that it was a classical reference. I thought she was just senile.
It wasn’t until I read up on the French and Indian War that I learned that some of the major events in Last of the Mohicans actually happened.
I’d heard “Normal, Illinois” used (most memorably in Lee Marrs’s comix trilogy Pudge, Girl Blimp–incidentally, the best-ever depiction of early 1970s San Francisco), but was surprised years later when cashing a check for a customer to see a driver’s license indicating that it wasn’t just a joke name, like “Dacron, Ohio” or “Anytown, USA.”
Sounds a lot like this clip from the Simpons.
I remember hearing an ad for a TV show and thinking it was a joke ad. Because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Yeah, right. Next thing you know I’ll find out there really is a Spatula city.
I thought it was about some incident in the 1800’s. My jaw dropped when I read on these boards that it happened in 1975 when I was alive.
I know people who think that IIIIIIIIIIII will always love YYYYOOOOUUU was written for The Bodyguard. By Whitney Houston. My ex-boss asked to get the lyrics, and actually chewed me out for getting “the Dolly Parton one.”
When I was a kid, we had a Muppet Show album. At one point, Rowlf is singing a snatch of something and I was never sure if it was gibberish or if I wasn’t hearing it correctly.
I forgot about it for 30 years, but a few months ago I was poking around Wikipedia when – lo and behold – I find out that he was singing a line from a real (gibberish) song: The Hut-Sut Song.
Actually the comic was a parody (pastiche?/ homage?/ satire?) of various Frank Miller comics.
Primarily Daredevil - the Turtles’ mutation is caused by the same accident as Daredevil’s powers, and the Foot are a reference to the Hand…ironically, since I encountered TMNT first, I found the Hand utterly hilarious, since they brought the Foot to mind…little did I know…
There’s an argument to be made that the Turtles are actually sort of a spin-off of Daredevil.
Other than the last letter is a scheche, how does it not spell smersh? Even in the original book after bond gets a scheche carved on the back of one of his hands necessitating plastic surgery to fix it, he refers to it as a scheche representing smersh. [i am not going to putz around with unicode or copy and paste, I feel like crap, I have the second cold in 2 months after 3 years without one:(]
SMERSH is from Shmert’ Shpionam: Death to Spies.
My stoooopid-ness is that I thought Davy Crockett was a fictional character created by Disney.
FYI, the terms “idiot,” “moron,” and “imbecile” were actual classifications used by the medical profession to designate the degree of mental disability. Idiots had a mental age of less than a three-year-old, imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven-year-old, and morons had a mental age of a seven to ten-year-old. It’s easy to see how those terms could make into the common usage as epithets.
~VOW
This isn’t exactly the same as the OP, but sometimes there will be a commercial where there is some athlete or pop star in it and I often don’t know if it is a real celebrity, or just an actor playing a generic pop star or ball player. I have to ask my wife if that is a real celebrity or not.
This just shows how out of touch I am, but I can tell you that if there is ever a commercial for a product that features Tom Waits, John Prine and Art Monk, I will absolutely buy that product.
When I was a kid in the 80’s, I just assumed that the limousine hot tubs I saw in cartoons were a fabrication along with robot butlers. Some years later I saw one in the Phil Collins music video for “Take Me Home.” I was fairly startled.
I remember being surprised as a child that Timbuktu was a real place and not just a fictional “far away place.”
Another one, after I moved to Chicago - my girlfriend (now wife) would use jokey nicknames for various restaurants (Buona Beef was called “Boner Beef”, Chipotle became “Don Cheadles”, etc)… She would call a certain store “Gay Mart” and I thought it was just another joke name of hers, so I was surprised to learn there she was referring to an actual store with that name (and it’s a pretty great store).
After seeing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly I learned there really was a Confederate expedition to New Mexico.
But it is not virtually synonymous with Cerebal Palsy. The largest advocacy group in the US has always been called United Cerebal Palsy.
“Spastic” (adj) conjurs up images of people who are uncool and unsmooth, not suffering from some specific medical malady. A spasm is a jerky, uncontrolled motion with any number of causes. It’s like when you say that someone is “crazy” it is not referring to a specific medical condition. On their own “spastic” (adj) and “his cheese done slid off his cracker” have about the same medical significance.
In fact, the usage of the term as “generically awkward” and also “square, boring” go back to the 1950s. In sum the term “spastic” or the more familiar “spaz” are not closely associated with cerebal palsy in the US.
I’ve also noticed that not only is the usage different, but British people almost cannot grok that the term spaz is completely uncoupled from the concept of Cerebal Palsy. Most Americans have never heard the term “Spastic” (noun) as a term for someone with cerebal palsy.
This one may be a little backwards, but… some years ago I was surprised to discover that the term “Bungalow Bill” has come into general use in Britain as a slang term referring to someone who “hasn’t got much up on top.” I’m still not sure if it was actually invented by John Lennon (which I always assumed to be true) or if it was around before.
(In a somewhat similar vein, I was surprised and delighted to learn that the word “chortled” did not exist prior to Jabberwocky.)
Me, too.