As we move through life’s journey, we’re constantly learning new things. Of course, some stuff is typically learned during childhood, while other knowledge is gained later.
Sometimes, though, these facts that seemingly should be learned in childhood don’t actually sink in until later.
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A recent r/AskReddit thread asked, “What basic, children’s-age-level fact did you only find out embarrassingly later in life?” and the answers were hilarious.
Snow doesn’t stay white.
“I always pictured snow as eternally white and ethereal, like in all the cartoons I’d watched as a kid. Then I watched what happened as the snow stayed around. And I got to see black ice and the nasty gray/brown snow blocks on the side of the road.”
That isn’t how you ruin a cake.
“I was baking a cake in my dorm for my 19th birthday. My friends were running around and being loud so I yelled at them to stop because I didn’t want them to ruin the cake. They looked at me like I had two heads so I had to explain that my siblings and I were always taught that making loud noises or running around a kitchen when something was baking would make it fall.”
Spinach isn’t lettuce.
“My mother used to feed me ‘dark green lettuce’ as salads, I loved it even when I was a kid.
“I think I was 17 and I had a friend over for dinner, asked my mom for seconds of dark green lettuce.
“Friend looks at me like I’m a [expletive] idiot, ‘Uh, you mean spinach?'”
Pancakes won’t destroy your pinkie.
“My great-grandfather had half a pinkie on his left hand and always said it was because he liked to use it to sop up leftover pancake syrup and had worn it down to a nub. This made sense to me because I’d seen him do that plenty of times.”
Robins exist year-round.
“I thought robins (the birds) came out of hibernation at Christmas time because that’s when you see them on cards and stuff in the UK. I did not realise for an verrrry long time that you in fact see them all the time, like normal birds.”
What are pickles, exactly?
“One day I had a lightbulb moment. ‘Pickling is a process! You can pickle anything. SO WHAT ARE PICKLES?!?’ I was gonna blow so many minds with this question. Turns out, it’s cucumbers. And everyone on the planet knew that, except me.”
Good smorning to you.
“Not me, but in college my buddy asked me how to spell ‘smorning’ because his phone didn’t recognize it as a word. He then goes on to say ‘you know, like ‘the smorning.’ I ask, ‘do you mean this morning ??'”
It’s where the bad guys hang out.
“As a kid I used to think the Black Market was an actual place like a bazaar where all the criminals would regularly meet up”
That isn’t how hair works.
“I truly believed that for the longest time that hair grew from the ends of the strands, not from the scalp. When I was 13 I asked my friend who had dyed her hair what she was going to do when the ends grew her natural colour. Didn’t hear the end of it. My stupidity still pains me to this day.”
Does this look like a treble clef to you?
“I didn’t realize the handicap sign was a person in a wheelchair for a long time. I had always thought it was just a neat little symbol, kind of like a treble clef.”
Companies usually know when they were founded.
“I thought until the age of about 21 that when companies had “Est” next to their name, it was estimated that companies were started around that time.”
Here’s why you turn your head.
“I was in my mid 30s before I realized that the ‘turn your head’ part of ‘turn your head and cough’ was so that you didn’t cough on the damned doctor. I always thought it must’ve flexed some particular muscle or something, I don’t know. “
Here’s how you discover an allergy.
“I was 23 when I learned I was allergic to apples.
Someone was complaining about their throat closing up after smoking, and I responded with ‘oh yeah like when you eat an apple?’ You can imagine how the conversation went from there.”
One Roman coke please.
“In my mid-20s I moved up the food chain from server to bartender. Someone order a Roman coke. I didn’t know what was in a Roman coke so I told him so but that I would figure it out. I figured out that what I had been understanding as a Roman coke my whole life was, in fact, a rum and coke.”
That’s how you ruin a dishwasher.
“Don’t add dish soap to the dishwasher. Found that one out at 26. I swear it’s only because I grew up washing dishes by hand. Had a fun time cleaning that mistake.”
That wouldn’t be a fair way to do a lottery.
“When they do the nightly lottery drawings on TV, they always add a reminder at the end: ‘Benefits Older Pennsylvanians Every Day!’ So, naturally, I just assumed that a lot of elderly people won the lottery. When I was a teen I made a joke to my dad about him turning 50 and having a better shot at winning the lottery, and he looked at me like I was nuts.”
Interesting safety feature.
“My mom used to tell me the car doesn’t start if the seatbelts aren’t buckled … didn’t know that wasn’t a real feature until I was 22”
Space heaters don’t come from space.
“Space heaters are so named because they heat a room (a space), not because they look like futuristic devices from outer space.”
– u/okay19
Moms are great, but they can only do so much.
“When I was 4 or 5 my mother brought me home a balloon one day. Plain blue balloon with helium. I accidentally let it go and it flew away. Being little, I was devastated. Later that night she comes back from somewhere and tells me she was at the gas station and miraculously, my balloon just came floating by. Being a kid I was thrilled and totally believed it.
“So fast forward 20+ years. I’m on a date and we stop to get gas and we see a balloon floating by the gas station. Probably hadn’t thought of that story again in all that time. So I start telling my date the story about how I had a balloon fly away and then my mother found the very same balloon at a gas station and then as I’m saying it out loud I realize (too late to not look like an idiot) that of course it wasn’t the same freaking balloon. I’ve never seen someone laugh so hard.”
It’s a miracle some of us survived.
“For years I had been removing toast from the toaster by sticking a butter knife in and picking it out. It wasn’t until I was 20 that my girlfriend freaked out when I started doing it that I learned metal in toaster = bad. Guess I’d been pretty lucky…”
They really should have covered this in “Old Macdonald Had A Farm.”
“A pony is not a baby horse.
“I’m 47, and learned that less than a decade ago.”
There’s a lot going on back there.
“That little thing that dangles at the back of your throat isn’t your tonsils.”
For the record, that’s your uvula, so people who have had their tonsils out still have that dangly bit, generally speaking.
Where do marshmallows come from?
“Not me, but my father once stole into the woods during a family camping trip and put marshmallows on a bush, so it looked like they grew on it.
“My sister made it to post secondary horticulture before she wised up.”
It’s right in the name.
“Not me, but a friend of mine didn’t learn that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr weren’t the same person until college.”
Just imagine they didn’t, though.
“My 31 year-old girlfriend thought islands don’t touch the bottom of the ocean.”
That sure would ramp up the difficulty for map-makers, or anyone trying to find, say, Hawaii.
Mick approves.
“It took me an embarrassingly long time before I realized that when a movie had a blurb from Rolling Stone…it wasn’t The Rolling Stones reviewing it.”
That’s not how it works.
“My mother told me that if you swallowed gum it would stick to your ribs. I was in my second year of college in an Anatomy class when it hit me that this isn’t true.”
How many names do they need, though?
“That woodchucks and groundhogs are the same animal. I was somewhere in my 30s. My state called them woodchucks, so I never made the connection when I was younger.”
Beethoven didn’t actually record much.
“A few years ago I was searching for different classical pieces in Spotify, getting frustrated that every version Spotify had of works by composers like Beethoven and Bach were “covers” performed by modern orchestras.
“My idiot brain was looking for original recordings from the 18th Century until it finally realized how dumb that was.”
The greatest (hair cut) of all time.
“Ok so I grew up on a small farm. We had cows, chickens, pig, rabbits and goats and more. On occasion we had to shear the goats, the goats would hold very still when being sheared. Like statue still. I saw this on pretty regular occasion.
“When my parents would take me to get a hair cut they would tell the barber to give me a billy goat cut. Of course to me this meant hold really still, so I did. Had the same barber for a loooong time. Eventually he passed when I was in high school. Leaving me to find a new barber. Imagine my and the new barbers surprise when he said “how do you want it cut” and I said I just want a normal billy goat cut….
“This is one of those things that makes me cringe at night.”
