What things in life had you never noticed (and never had reason to notice), but once somebody pointed them out to you, you see them all over the place?
Here are two examples of what I am talking about:
Hubodometers
They are found on wheel hubs on big trucks. Here is one in situ. It is a weighted little round gadget that spins freely on a wheel hub. As the tractor trailor drives, the hubometer’s heavy side stays down, allowing it to measure wheel revolutions.
I learned about these here in this thread a while back, but had never looked.
Today on the New Jersey Turnpike I saw them all around me. Every fifth truck or so had a hubometer.
Next time you are driving next to big rigs, look at the hub of the second-to-last wheel on the left side and you may just see a hubodometer rocking gently back and forth as it measures the miles.
Movie reel change dots
Every twenty minutes or so in a film you will see a black dot in the upper-right corner. Ten seconds later you will see another. In the days of dual projector setups, this was to let the projectionist know that the reel was ending. Since all six (or seven) reels are spliced together these days, the dots really are only a curiosity.
My three years as a projectionist brought these dots to my attention. I can’t watch a film without spotting them (as well as splices, cue tape, and other such stuff).
How about you? Any cool hidden things that become ubiquitous once pointed out?
AA meetings. They aren’t really advertised but once you go to one, you find out where the other ones are and the encoded jargon to recognize one when you see it. AA meetings are everywhere and they meet morning, noon, and night. They even have them on cruise ships and resorts. There are over 30 meetings within five miles of my house that meet every week and even on all holidays. There are over 3000 meetings in the Greater Boston area every week. Most people have no idea.
My parents have been on 4 or 5 (maybe more) crusies. After one they meantioned something to me that they found kind of odd. Apparently some guy name “Bill W.” had rooms reserved on all these cruises for his friends. They didn’t know how this guy Bill W. got on all these cruises or why he had so many friends. They were seriously baffled by this. Then I explained it’s an AA thing. They knew AA had a big membership but it seriousy suprised them that they would have AA meetings on cruise ships.
In the mid-'80s, an old friend took me to an Italian restaurant in London, Ontario, where we had a new thing called panzerotti. It was a pizza, folded in half and deep-fried or baked. It was the only place you could get one. Nowadays they’re everywhere you go, only now they’re called calzones.
BMW’s all have two nostril shaped air intake things in the front. Similarly, most makers have there own special grill pattern (but BMW is the first I noticed and seems to be the most consistent.)
Mr brother told me about the reel change dots years ago. He prefaced it by saying, “are you sure you want to know? because once I point them out to you, you won’t be able to not notice them.”
In fourth grade my teacher told us the plural of “mongoose” was “mongooses” and not “mongeese”, because they weren’t geese. I had no idea what a mongoose was and had never seen either the animal or the word. I walked out of the classroom and there was a bicycle next to the door decked out with Mongoose brand accesories o.O
This has happened to me a lot, but I can only think of one example right now. I live in an apartment that’s very close to the main Microsoft campus. At Microsoft there are little orange parking permits that hang from your rear view mirror. Once I started paying attention to the parking permits I noticed that during rush hour, 70-80% of the cars on the street I live on have them hanging from their mirrors.
I do this with words. (This is what I get for signing up on M-W.com’s email list)
Everytime I learn a new word. Or hear a new word I don’t know and I look it up; It seems like from that point on, I’ll hear that particular word… oh, say… like a hundred times a day.
Like it wasn’t more than a year ago I learned what the word ambivalent ment. Now I’m hearing this word all the f’n time!
How’d I go 34 years with out noticing this word before.
