People say: I only found out about this well-known fact very late

Now I often use my hair color as an excuse, but I have actually experienced quite a few blonde moments in my life. Anyway, I am incredibly gullible, so I immediately blurt out: ‘Really?’ when people tell something that is obviously not true, without first thinking critically myself. But also in terms of basic knowledge, I sometimes fell short. For example, I thought until an extremely late age that it was genuinely illegal to turn on the light in the car and that my parents always said it had to be turned off as soon as possible for that reason, and I only learned long after my twenties that a pickle is actually just a cucumber.

But luckily I'm not alone in this, because here comes Reddit again. This time with the question: ‘What basic, children’s-age-level fact did you online find out embarrassingly later in life?’ And the answers are, as you probably expect, hilarious. And cute. And sometimes relatable. Oops.

‘My grandpa only had half a pinky on his left hand and he always said that was because he dipped it in the leftover syrup from pancakes on his plate. That he had done it so often that his pinky had become blunt. That sounded very logical to me because I saw him do it often. I was so embarrassed that I only found out in university that it made no sense.’

‘My dad once put a bunch of marshmallows in bushes during a camping trip, so it looked like they were growing out of them. My sister was already in high school when she found out they didn't come from there.’

‘I genuinely believed that hair grew from the tips and not from the roots. When I was 13, I asked my friend who had dyed her hair what she would do when the ends turned back to their natural color. My stupidity still haunts me to this day.’

‘As a child, I thought the Black Market was a real place, a kind of bazaar where all criminals regularly gathered.’

‘Never put dish soap in the dishwasher. I found that out when I was 26. It was a fun task to clean up that mistake.’

‘My mom told me that if you swallowed gum, it would stick to your ribs. I was in my second year of study when I realized during an anatomy class that this was completely untrue.’

‘It took embarrassingly long for me to realize that if a movie got a review in Rolling Stone, it wasn't someone from The Rolling Stones who wrote it.’

‘My mom used to tell me that the car wouldn't start if the belts weren't fastened. I found out at 22 that it was nonsense.’

‘My roommate was 21 when he found out that cows have fur. He thought it was just their skin.’

‘I thought the former leader of North Korea was named Kim Jong the Second. For some reason, I never heard his name out loud.’

‘I am now 29... And I just found out that the first letter in the Disney logo is a D. I always wondered why it was such a weird G when it was called Disney.’

‘I thought that when you ate something, all the food went to your feet and that when it became so much that it reached your waist, you only then pooped it out. No idea why I thought that, but I believed it much longer than I should have.’

‘That Apollo 13 really happened and wasn't just a movie with Tom Hanks in the lead role.’

‘A pony is not a young horse. I am now 47 and learned that less than ten years ago.’

wieke