30 Things People Learned Embarrassingly Late In Life

Until 2018 I thought Elon Musk wasa kind of truck stop bathroom cologne, from the makers of Jovan Musk. I really wish it was true.

My uncle once told me if I got a thousand bee stings I’d die. He meant all at once. For years, I thought he meant cumulatively. And I kept count.

Can I point to something that other ppl were wrong about? I was in a room full of ppl discussing a cruise some of them took to and around Alaska. I asked if they saw any narwhals, and they all - the entire room looked at me dumbfounded, and some started laughing. Every single one of them thought narwhals were mythical creatures. I still can’t believe it. I guess they should be embarrassed bc I don’t think many of them even looked it up and I guess I should be a little embarrassed that ppl actually don’t think they’re real.

I'm from Belgium and I was nearly 30 when I found out what really happened in congo. We just casually brushed over that part in high school history as "it was the fashion at the time to colonise. We left when they were self-sufficient enough to run their own country, and then they effed it up".

Hump day is referring to the middle of the week, like over the hump, and not the day everyone humps. I always found it weird at my office job when someone would say happy hump day, like, dude, I’m pretty sure you can’t say that here. I was 27 when I realized.

Oh, another one. Not me, but a friend of mine. She didn’t realize that (U.S.) military members got paid. She thought “an all volunteer military” meant they worked for free. When we explained it to her, it was hilarious. She goes, “You mother f*****s got PAID!?!?!? What the hell have I been thanking everyone for their service for!?!?!?”

We laughed for weeks.

That the bad moon is on the rise, not the bathroom on the right. I ruined that song for my mom when I told her what I heard lmao.

That a quart is a **quart**er of a gallon. Duh.

I once accidentally shouted 'I love necrophilia!' during my class in 10th grade. I had just read a book about a young teenage necromancer and got the words mixed up. We can cringe together.

Oh my gosh, my time to shine.

So I was in like 5th grade when Pluto was declassified as a planet and demoted to dwarf planet. Heard about it in science class, wrote in an assignment that it was sad, yada yada yada. Well my brother at that time was 4 years older and told me that the reason it was declassified was because it imploded and was now the size of like a basketball.

I spent my whole life believing this. Then when I was like 21, I was lying in bed with my husband and just blurted out "Bro remember when we were kids and Pluto imploded and they declassified it as a planet? That was wild." You know trying to bond over our shared childhood trauma. My husband, shocked, was like "Wat." And I explained the whole thing to him and he was like "That did not happen, you are insane." I learned the truth then and there as a grown married woman. I was horrified. Talked to my brother and he didn't even remember, just that he used to tell me all kinds of made up s**t. It was one of the craziest realizations I've ever had.

A cup is a unit of measurement. I always wondered how you could have one cup of something in a recipe when everyone has different cups.

The little arrow on my dash beside the gas pump icon points to the side of the car with the gas door. Rental cars were a 50/50 shot of getting it right if I forgot to look first before driving, so it was a good thing to learn. At 40 years old. Haha.

That the song 'The Macarena' is actually about a woman who was sleeping around while her husband was a conscript at war. The "one and a two and a three Macarena'!" lyric is actually counting outloud the amount of men she had sex with.

We sang that song and did that dance in gym class in middle school!!

That Rhode Island isn’t an Island. I learned that at 53 years old.

I learned about Medicaid eligibility in my late twenties. I was unemployed due to untreated depression for about a decade. I didn't know there was medicaid and disability benefits for people. If I had known earlier my life could have been drastically different.

I thought the term "birthday suit" meant a suit you're literally supposed to wear on your birthday.

Until I was 19, I thought fly fishing was fishing out of a plane or helicopter. I figured it just flew really low and slow and that they had really long fishing lines.

That cattle is just the species name for cows and bulls. I thought it was a closely related but separate species until like grad school 😭😂.

I've never heard someone say Yosemite out loud, I've been reading it as Yo sem ight lmao.

That fallopian tubes aren't connected to the ovaries. They have finger-like appendages and float around over to where the egg is released to grab the egg. The egg just free floats in your abdomen void waiting to get picked up. Oh and if you only have one tube, it can make it over to the other ovary to get the egg there sometimes.