That you aren’t supposed to rinse immediately after brushing your teeth. It’s better to wait 15 minutes to let the fluoride strengthen your enamel.
Been brushing the wrong way for 30 years, apparently.
Yeah. I had to give a “how to” class and I picked brushing your teeth as a simple topic. I got to the end after brushing your teeth. I said rinse your mouth out and your done. The instructor said “the presentation was okay, but you aren’t supposed to rinse your teeth out right away.”
I had no idea as amid to late 20 something at the time. What else do you do wrong?
I spent 30+ years thinking that a pony was a baby horse rather than a smaller type of horse. You know how cats have kittens and dogs have puppies? Well I thought horses had ponies.
Even all the times that Lisa Simpson wanted a pony, I just thought it was similar to how a kid might want a puppy.
To be fair:
The word pony derives from the old French poulenet, meaning foal, a young, immature horse.
Quoth wikipedia.
That annoying character in The Land Before Time is not named Sarah.
Her name is Cera. As in CERATOPS.
That annoying character
How dare you
English spelling is just fantastic. If you hear a new word, there’s pretty much 0 chance that you can look it up in a dictionary on the first try. Just imagine how “epitome” sounds to someone who isn’t already familiar with it. You’re going to have to go though every vowel before you actually find it.
Also, if you’ve never heard a special word being pronounced, but you’ve read it many times, you are pretty much guaranteed to make a fool of yourself when you finally get to use that word in a social situation. No wonder why spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries.
I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.
As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.
A pancake is a cake you make in a pan.
It broke my mind when I learned that one
…and when you take a detour, you are getting off your original tour. (Tour de France, tour of the countryside, etc)
Hence, why you de-tour.
Did everyone work this out at first glance? The etymology of ‘detour’ took me way too long.
Along these lines, I recently learned:
Painstakingly is pains + takingly (as in “took great pains”), not pain + stakingly.
Helicopter is helico + pter (“spiral wing”), not heli + copter.
In linguistics, this phenomenon is called rebracketing.
Wait until you hear about butterflies and dragonflies.
Butterflies, flies that you make with butter.
Just like the way a snowman is a man made of snow.
Not quite recently, but after skating through high school and most of college I learned that if you read through your notes before a test you remember more things. I also learned that this is referred to as “studying”.
I am convinced that being “smart” in high school and college stunted my career. I didn’t do any work in high school, and had like 2 classes that I’d consider difficult in college. I never learned the value of hard work.
I hear you. Finally ending up in a class that properly challenged me was like roller skating into wet cement.
All through high school/college I just always wrote my notes once during class, then almost never referred to them again. For me, just the act of writing out the notes was usually good enough to help me retain the information, for the tests at least. I’ve forgotten most of it, but it was there when I needed it.
You aren’t the only one. I was taking an upgrade class at work and another student saw me taking notes. The instructor told her that a lot of his pupils do something similar.
I’ve seen several articles that claim that taking notes with pen and paper helps people retain information better than taking notes on a keyboard.
I just saw a paper on that. I think the basic idea is that the reason you remember better from handwritten notes versus typing is that each letterform has a unique shape that you have to write down. So your fingers/hands are following along by some sort of choreographed muscle memory when you’re writing stuff down, it’s like a sort of dance that our hands do, tracing out all these letter forms, there’s more uniqueness and complexity to it that somehow stays with us better. Compare that to typing where you’re literally just doing the same action over and over again, you’re just pushing buttons down. You might be able to focus more on what the professor is saying, but you’re more just passively taking it in and your mind isn’t as engaged in your note-taking.
I was you once
That when cooking anything with leftover grease you should always dispose of the excess grease in an empty container and trash it instead of putting it down a drain.
Also that it’s best for your pipes to put your used toilet paper in a trash can instead of flushing it.
*Unless your landlord raises your rent 20%
prima donna != pre-Madonna
Wanna see something cool?
≠
In my day we just had <> and it was good enough for us.
I knew about this on some level before, but the recent posts have given me a better understanding on how in some countries people need expensive third party software to pay their taxes.
Yeah, fortunately I live in America where filing taxes is free and takes like five minutes out of the year
But why do they make everyone file a tax return? In the UK it’s only necessary if you’re self-employed or very wealthy. Is it because they like auditing poor people so they have an excuse not to audit the rich?
DK,DC. The effort needed to file a tax return is negligible. It’s literally as easy as getting a piece of paper in the mail, going to a website, and copying like four numbers and then getting a few hundred dollars in the mail. The only scenarios where this takes more than 5 minutes is if you’re either self-employed or have a lot of wealth in assets you want to claim.
Yeah, fuck everyone else who has multiple jobs, is partially or fully self employed, has taxable assets and isn’t allowed to use the free software.
Anyone can file directly to the IRS, point blank, it just might take more than five minutes. I filed for four years when I was self-employed just fine. I filed for multiple jobs this year for free.
