What did you discover relatively late on in life that everyone else had known for years?

Great thread SirChenjin and having read the entire thing, I've learned things tonight that many of you knew, and I still didn't know.

Not saying what they were though.

I was in my 20s before I discovered that the metal clips used to close men's shirt cuffs are cuff links. I had always thought they were called cufflings. How daft is that?
And to my utter shame the whole family then adopted the word.

That Penelope was not pronounced Pena-lope (as in skip-a -rope)!
Oh the laughs had at my expense! The bosses wife was called Penny....

I had a half brother; what a shock that was.

I didn’t know that about the chicken joke ?

My friend and her husband belonged to a French twinning group. They had a pair of twins and I honestly believed it was to enable families who had twins to meet up and socialise. ?

Good thread SirChenjin

That Roy Orbison wasn’t blind

Wait...what??!

I was in my 50s when I discovered on another forum that people actually performed willingly some of the sex acts I had read about!Sheltered life.

That Roy Orbison wasn’t blind.

Some of you might appreciate the title of a book I once read: "Blessed Art Thou a Monk Swimming"!

Still wondering how anyone could NOT have realised Freddie Mercury was gay!

A very jolly thread, thank you. x

grandtanteJE65 - I had an English and Scottish education ?

Just found out a few weeks ago that Oxo cubes need to have the little flaps pulled out to squash the cube and then opened. I have always opened them and then squashed them.

The meaning of several rude words, which my 13 year old son had to explain to me in my thirties.

Can't find a petrol icon on my Jazz.

Oh the benefits of a Scottish education! I never liked geography, but I still managed to absorb the principles of gravity, the earth's rotation on its axis and Mercator's principle in the admittedly few moments when I actually bothered to listen to the boring woman who taught us.

But I do remember puzzling over what "Jesus bits of shine" meant ("Jesus bids us shine") in Primary 1 and it took me a very long time to work out that only the speaker in the nursery rhyme "As I was going to St. Ives" was actually heading in that direction.

I was 55 before I understood the ,why did the chicken cross the road ? joke ....to get to the other side .
to get to the OTHER SIDE ! Where the ghosts are ! ?

I didn't learn that the digits in the answers in the 9 times table always add up to 9 until doing an OU degree. Could have done with that in primary school. But I've learnt much more interesting stuff here today

I fairly recently learnt the difference between crocodiles and alligators, something that had never occurred to me before.

For years I thought that the year 1 BC was the oldest ever year it’s only recently that it dawned on me that it was the last year before 1 AD. It’s logical when you think about it.

Ginny42 - "Anyone remember Terry Wogan introducing Kenny Roger's song, 'You picked a fine time to leave me loose heel(Lucille)'?"

followed by - with four hundred children and a crop in the field (rather than four hungry children)

cangran - future son-in-law looked at the table full of wobbly stuff and said ‘This is surreal’.

That just tickled me today. Literally made me LOL !!!

Marmite is great for Vegetarians but not Vegans as it is made from yeast extract, and staunch Vegans will not eat it. As was pointed out to me very loudly by a rather nasty Woman last year when I was catering a party for 120. It had been a Vegan friend who had said it was ok, I would not have minded but NW was neither a Vegan or a Vegetarian.

Actually, people may not have known that for years because it's a relatively new programme!!
And perhaps I am naive

That the Chasers on the quiz programme The Chase are the ones who set the questions, albeit years ago.

One of them let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said he remembered that one from when they had set the questions 2 or 3 years ago.

Now - is that loaded against the contestants or not?

Sorry that should read them.