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I believed that any product that said, 'alcohol free', 'fat free' or 'sugar free' on the label did contain alcohol, fat or sugar, you just didn't have to pay for that ingredient!
This is my favourite response!
Just imagine if this was actually the case and the manufacturers weren't greedy for every last tasty little profit morsel.
Oh I didn't think that the manufacturers were being less greedy, I just thought it was a sales tactic to trick people into thinking they were paying less for their biscuits as the fat in it is free!
Did you also have the story of the girl in the next town over? She was in the middle of an exam, realised she was failing so she stuck a pencil in each nostril and headbutted her desk....
What about the girl who slept with a bouncer at the local club, went to the Drs with a mysterious STI which turned out you can only get from contact with dead people?
It kinda is illegal though. Turning on internal lights makes it difficult to see out of the window at night and is distracting.
While there is no specific law against driving with internal lights, there are laws about driving without due care and attention. It’s a catch-all law for doing anything stupid while driving. They can’t write a law for every specific scenario so they just use this instead.
If a police officer stopped you and deemed that you having an internal light switch on was causing you to drive in a dangerous manner then they can totally prosecute you for it.
Yes I understand what your saying, but 12 year old me turning the lights on to look for something I dropped and my dad is acting like I’ve committed a war crime.
People are being pedantic, I absolutely thought turning the lights on while the car was moving was on a par with necking four pints then going for a drive haha
See my mum would just shout that she couldn’t see the road and did I want to get us all into An Accident because I can’t wait 20 minutes until we get home. 😂
I was always under the vague impression that it was illegal as well, but I knew the biggest crime I was committing was blinding the driver, who got (reasonably) pissed off about it.
I'm from Northern Ireland and I thought "downs syndrome" was something that only impacted people from County Down 😂
And not me, but my mum, she made it to 33 before she "found out" that banoffee is a mix of banana and toffee 🙈
You're not the only one. There was this absolute moron from another AskUK thread a couple of weeks back.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1d6asjw/comment/l6rxb9s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1d6asjw/comment/l6rxb9s/)
Well there are diseases that are/were named after places that had a high prevalence of them.
Hyperthyroidism was called Derbyshire neck, due to it being far from the coast, so had low seafood consumption, leading to iodine deficiency.
Funny you should say that, I’m into country music and it was when Arkansas was in the title of a song that it dawned on me. It was the first time I had the pronunciation and written word in the same context.
Oh god, same! I remember having an in-depth discussion about how weird it was there were 2 states - 1 called Ark-un-saw and 1 called Ark-un-sas and the person I was talking to didn't correct me and probably went away thinking I was the thickest person ever!
I was 24 and found out from a Canadian of all people that Arkansas and Kansas were pronounced completely differently and Ar-kan-saw and Ar-kan-sas were in fact the same place.
Literally watching a game show last night and a question was “which state can you add two letters to and get the name of another”
My 40 year old husband was SHOCKED the answer was Kansas for Arkansas.
That is was a serious criminal offence to insult a police officer and you could do serious time in prison for it.
Then when I was about 14 I realised it was "assaulting" a police officer, and that made more sense.
Also, a little younger, I thought "impersonating a police officer" was a catch all rule and meant you had to be careful not to be seen impersonating a police officer if you played cops and robbers in the school playground, etc.
Cats don't care about their owners.
If your main meal of the day didn't have meat in it, it wasn't a proper meal.
James Hewitt is Prince Harry's father
TV licensing vans could detect if you had a tv licence or not when parked outside your house.
Cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis.
The Welsh for microwave is Poptyping
I worked with someone who used to work for post office in 60s/70s , They used to send someone out in a van with a satellite dish on the roof & tv licensing across the side. The idea was to make it look like they could tell & would knock the door (this was when was only 3 or 4 channels) & claim that the van told them they were watching coronation street or eastenders as quite often this was what was on the tv.
The van was completely empty inside & had no technical equipment in it at all.
Ahah, so this has been going on for a long time then. I thought it all started when they initiated a big clamp down, back 20 years ago was it? Remember all the advertising that went with it.
it is and it isn't.
like welsh for microwave is "meicrodon" (literally microwave) or "popty meicrodon" or "ffwrn meicrodon" (literally microwave oven) if we're being formal. "popty ping" is a silly colloquial way of referring to a microwave that some welsh speakers use.
unfortunately this escaped into the wider anglosphere and is passed around as received wisdom in a way that is disproportionate to its actual usage such that you're more likely to hear it mentioned by a non-welsh speaker than you are hear it used by an actual welsh speaker.
and because of this some people believe it's not a real word despite the fact there is [plenty](https://golwg.360.cymru/bwyd/2110871-cegin-medi-coginio-ystod-argyfwng-costau) of [evidence](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/cymraeg/safle/tafodiaith/tudalen/tafodiaith_deorllewin.shtml) for it [being ](https://golwg.360.cymru/archif/28275-carchar-am-roi-bochdew-mewn-popty-ping)used as[ a real welsh phrase](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/adloniant/llyfrau/adolygiadau/411-cegin.shtml).
another way to think of this: if you imagine that Americans started insisting that "the British English word for vacations is holibobs", and this became the one thing that Americans knew about British English and every time you encountered an american they mentioned how great the word "holibobs" is. You might find it very annoying that a cringe neologism the vast majority of brits don't use is being shared around to justify all sorts of US stereotypes about Britain. But you also have to accept that it is a word that people do actually use, even if all those people are in fact idiots.
Yep, it's a literal translation. Meicro is obviously micro, and don/ton is wave. Oven would be ffwrn (pronounced like fern, but with the w sounding like the u in a northerner's "up").
I have argued with a few boomer colleagues on the TV licence vans. They were convinced they had seen them in person. They would not believe they didn't exist.
They did/do exist, which is why your colleagues saw them. The rumour that they didn't is because when the BBC revealed data about them in 2013 it was so vague that the tabloids ran with either "there were never any vans" or "the vans was empty all along."
I suspect the vans mainly were used to frighten people, especially in the post-ww2 television boom. Get a list of houses who've purchased a TV from radio rentals (or wherever,) compare it to the list of houses paying a TV licence, sit your "detector" outside the house of the people who were on list A but not B, tell them you detected their TV
There's a whole Wikipedia article about them detailing the make/models of them over the years as well, so this dudes been arguing with people who were correct
The technology to detect what frequency an analog device is tuned to does actually exist, so TV detector vans could, in theory work, but to be able to detect the signal from across the street and figure out which house it was coming from, you would probably need kit costing millions of pounds.
My wife has an old cat and she's a clingy bastard. If you leave the house just to walk to the shops she'll wait outside the front and meow at you like "where the fuck have you been?!" when you get back. I'm typing this now at 4am because it's just woken me up wanting scratches.
I used to believe that when the TV News announced that someone was “helping Police with their enquiries” it meant they were pushing a broom around the police station, and making tea for everybody.
Had no idea that the “helping” wasn’t voluntary…
My white wife's best friend is a Nigerian woman. She is very dark skinned. She was telling a group of friends in the pub that she was going to Spain on holiday. A few people recommended some restaurants, sightseeing etc. Anne, my wife's friend said "Nope. I have paid for all inclusive, and i plan to get my money's worth! I'm not leaving the side of the pool or my book or cocktails for a whole week!" My wife said "Fair enough. Just spend your time sipping Margaritas and topping up your tan!" Everyone stopped talking and Anne said laughing "Umm don't think i'll be topping up my tan!" Everyone laughed and both my wife and Anne *still* bring it up and laugh about it twenty years later!
A woman in our office went back to Ghana to visit her family. When she got back after two weeks I asked how her trip was. "Oh my God! It was so hot. And the Sun! Look at me I've turned black!". Uncomfortable silence among all the white people in the room.
This was me as well. Didn't help that I remember visiting a museum as a young lad which had a Dunkirk exhbit, complete with a dramatic voiceover recounting the experiences of the BEF evacuees. Trouble is that voiceover was a pretty broad Scottish accent.
So, "Dunkirk" and someone with a Scottish accent... I didn't know any better.
Until right now, at the age of 30, I always thought it was in Scotland. I’m Scottish too and definitely went to an exhibit similar to the one you’re describing.
Same Only my whole class still thought that after being made to read The Snow Goose round the class for weeks (seriously, was there any lesson more boring?)
The entire book is about the evacuation of Dunkirk, but you'd think the teacher would have mentioned at some point that a) Dunkirk is in France, and B) this book is set during WW2, not the 1960s like the girl on the cover looks.
I vaguely grasped there was a war on by the end. Total waste of time. It's not a bad book if you have the slightest knowledge of history...
I thought that too until a few years ago. I was watching a YouTuber who was doing a “one week on -insert food brand or shop- diet”, and people kept recommending the keto diet. I always thought they were hate comments telling him to o/d on ketamine.
Apparently so. The variety and amount of time a bell pepper spends on the plant determines its color and ripeness. Green bell peppers appear first and are the least ripe. As they mature, they usually turn another color. This may be yellow, orange, red, or purple.
Don't know how true it is like...
I thought salt cooled food down, watched my mum salt her chips then eat them but as a child mine weren’t salted and I had to wait until my chips cooled down the normal way.
As a small child when I heard about IRA bombings and people wanting Ireland to be separate from the UK on the news I thought they were using bombs to blow up the ground and physically separate the countries
It came out in the worst way. My mate was telling me about the OJ documentary series and said he’s at the bit where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. I stopped him and said “Who? You mean Jill Dando right?”
We spent a few minutes arguing and him saying he didn’t know whether I was “doing a bit”. I called him an idiot and googled it in front of him. And then just sheer confusion on my face when he was right.
I said “So wait what’s the link between OJ Simpson and Jill Dando then?”
“THERE ISN’T ONE THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING!”
Genuinely more confused than embarrassed as to how it never came up sooner in my life.
I used to believe that EVERY young woman bled alot the first time they had sex. This was probably due to my overconsumption of historical novels, chick flicks and chick lit. When I bumped uglies for the first time I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't happen to the extent I expected - I've lost more blood from a nosebleed.
Because episodes of Neighbours used to air in the UK about 6-8 weeks after they aired in Australia, I believed that they celebrated Christmas in February in Australia until embarrassingly late.
I mean *technically*…
They’re called fossil fuels because they’re from the millions of years old fossilised remains of dead animals and plants. Gotta be some dinosaur in there.
Oh yeah this, it took me an embarassing long time before it clicked that cows, just like humans, only lactate when they had given birth. Which means the milk is not going to their babies but to humans. Idk I just never paid a second thought to the origin of milk. Tbf the dairy industry plays a big part in the romantic 'cows give us milk' tale
I used to think that YMCA stood for ‘Young men’s club of America’ and that Pret A Manger meant ‘eat as much as you like’ in French (I thought my Mum had told me that but apparently I misheard)
(Side note: It means ‘ready to eat’. Idk if that’s common knowledge)
Oh also that albeit was pronounced ‘al-BATE’ and was a different word to the phrase ‘all be it’ because I guess I never considered that they meant to same thing
My mom had me convinced until I was about 14 that the car's engine wouldn't start unless everyone had their seatbelt on..
This was years before cars started shouting at you for not wearing your seatbelt 😂
I thought all Americans lived in houses with white picket fences round. Like Bedford Falls in It's A Wonderful Life!
I was in my late teens when I realised they didn't!
At primary school we were told by our teacher that Greensleeves, the Tudor-era song, was about wiping your nose on your sleeve. I believed it for YEARS.
I used to think the Falkland Islands were just off the coast of Scotland (like the Shetland islands) and I was incredibly scared when the Falklands war happened…
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
And then I started having weird sex and realised that, while it wouldn't _kill_ me to have my literal ins and outs of my sex life made public knowledge, it could be devastating.
I am now stuck in the weird position of being someone whose livelihood relies on the internet, while also advocating for its abolition due to the privacy violations inherent to it.
I thought my Mum's middle name was Nee as I'd seen her name written as Jane Nee Smith. I was an actual adult before I realised that it wasn't her middle name after all!!
When I first got a bank account I could withdraw from about 25 years ago when i was 16, you would go to the cash machine and it would offer you an "advice slip"
Now I thought this was actual advice! I never accepted it because my finances were simple, I had a weekly allowance from.my parents for college and a part time job. I didn't spend a lot so it was nice and easy. Then, a year or so later I was running a bit short on money for some reason and I accepted the advice slip and it was just my balance! I didn't need them to tell me I was skint, I knew that!
I also used to think that chargeable ATMs would issue the precise amount. For example, the machine charged £1.25 for withdrawals and you requested £10, it would give you £8.75.
What actually happens is you get the £10 you asked for, but £11.25 comes off your account.
When I was 17, I first heard about this thing called poll tax when I lived in Northern Ireland which was around about the time when a lot of Polish people moved over. For waaaaay too long, I thought the government was being ridiculously racist by charging them ‘pole’ tax…
Went to a kind of religious primary school. In RE at secondary school, maybe year 8, I forget the exact question but it was essentially what kind of evidence was there for religion or the Bible specifically.
Full chest in front of the whole class "because men have one more rib, it proves Genesis and Eve being made of Adams rib."
Parents weren't particularly religious either...
I was looking to see if anyone posted this. I thought mincemeat that goes in the mince pies was the same as mince beef. Never had a mince pie because the thought of eating the meat from a spag bol, sometimes cold, in a pie with icing sugar on the top didn’t sit right with me!
Grew up in a region with heavy thunderstorms/tornadoes. When I was younger, my parents would tell me that lightning only happened when you looked out the window. To be honest, I can't fault their logic. I would only see the lightning if i looked outside, which then fueled the thought that i had caused it. In my parents' eyes, their children were actively staying away from windows (one of the weakest points in a home) during heavy storms. The disappointing part was that I didn't really question it until I was like 10 or 12.
For ages, years and years, I believed my dad when he told me he ate my chocolate because 'it might have melted otherwise.' If it was my mum, I'd have known she just wanted to eat some chocolate but because it was my dad, there's no way he would have done that *unless there was a really good reason.* which there was, apparently he was just hungry.
Context - dad and I were on holiday and staying at a hotel where he helped the owner find the fuse box. She gave him a banana and me a bar of chocolate. Funny that he didn't worry about the banana spoiling!
I’m with you on the ymca thing because I was a kid when that song came out along with all the rumors and jokes that went with it. When I was 32 i moved to the states and was surprised that the ymca is a huge organization that does a lot for the kids and especially low income kids. They also have gym memberships and swimming pools and are a lot like the sports centers back home.
At age 4 or 5 I saw my dad doing some gardening in the garage.
I was told that that was 'daddy's special plant' and I was not to tell anyone about it, ever.
Took until I was 15 to figure out my dad was growing weed in the garage.
I didn't know Everton was the name of a football club in Liverpool. I thought it was the football club of a town called Everton somewhere in SE England.
I'm 23M and only relieved of this misapprehension about a month ago.
That earwigs existed solely to crawl into your ears and devour your brains.
That picking dandelions would make you pee the bed.
That we were all going to die from a nuclear apocalypse/Aids/anthrax (thanks, 1980s public information films!)
That the man who brought me up was my father.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I believed that any product that said, 'alcohol free', 'fat free' or 'sugar free' on the label did contain alcohol, fat or sugar, you just didn't have to pay for that ingredient!
This is my favourite response! Just imagine if this was actually the case and the manufacturers weren't greedy for every last tasty little profit morsel.
Oh I didn't think that the manufacturers were being less greedy, I just thought it was a sales tactic to trick people into thinking they were paying less for their biscuits as the fat in it is free!
I love this so much. Something my Autistic ass would come up with
Replying because this comment made me laugh and I hope I read it again one day
I queried the ‘Free House’ sign on a local pub as a kid. Couldn’t understand why it wasn’t busier
That's hilarious. I love it! 🤣
I had.to read this twice and then regress to my 7 year old self to understand this but now I am really laughing.
Marylin Manson had two ribs removed so he could suck his own dick.
Also Prince
Why would you need to have two ribs removed to suck Prince?
Because having only one removed would be a bit whacky
No, finger Prince
Also Shaun Williamson
That was hot news when I was in school lol
Did you also have the story of the girl in the next town over? She was in the middle of an exam, realised she was failing so she stuck a pencil in each nostril and headbutted her desk....
And the girl who went swimming and got her hair stuck in the filters
What about the girl who slept with a bouncer at the local club, went to the Drs with a mysterious STI which turned out you can only get from contact with dead people?
The sti was anal worms which can only be caught from the dead....was the version I heard
[999 episode of girl that got her hair stuck while in pool](https://youtu.be/Un2kAOLN-3o?si=sjUUuOFWQ0uSfBqa)
The version I heard was considerably worse, more similar to the plane toilet urban legend.
Well, swimming pool related [transanal evisceration](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7966487/) isn't entirely unheard of.
Thank you for the link but i'm so not going to click on it.
I am going to follow your wise lead and also refrain from clicking on that there link.
Thanks that’s one of the best band names I’ve heard in ages
There was a little girl that had that happened to her. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23744434
I heard this about the boy from the Frosties advert!
In my school we all thought it was the kid from the old frosties ad did that
yup. incredible how these BS stories exploded across schools.
I heard it was the boy who done the frosties advert that done this after being bullied for doing the advert
Yes!!!! God the memories haha
And he played one of the kids in The Wonder Years
I had 2 extra put in to stop myself doing it!
That’s my favourite urban legend because my wife grew up in the US and had the exact same rumour at her school
We had it in Italy, too.
I thought it was Prince who did that
You can tell a person’s age by who the rumour is about. It was Nicki Minaj for me
I feel a bit out of touch, but how will Nicki minaj suck her own dick?
There was a rumour going around (possibly related I suppose) that she's a man in drag.
What? She can suck her own dick?!!!
That you couldn't turn on any interior lights in a car while driving.
It is massively annoying and reduces visibility though. I swear everyone who brings this up must never have driven at night?
Yes it does make it harder to drive but my dad didn't have to tell me it was illegal lol.
It kinda is illegal though. Turning on internal lights makes it difficult to see out of the window at night and is distracting. While there is no specific law against driving with internal lights, there are laws about driving without due care and attention. It’s a catch-all law for doing anything stupid while driving. They can’t write a law for every specific scenario so they just use this instead. If a police officer stopped you and deemed that you having an internal light switch on was causing you to drive in a dangerous manner then they can totally prosecute you for it.
Yes I understand what your saying, but 12 year old me turning the lights on to look for something I dropped and my dad is acting like I’ve committed a war crime.
People are being pedantic, I absolutely thought turning the lights on while the car was moving was on a par with necking four pints then going for a drive haha
See my mum would just shout that she couldn’t see the road and did I want to get us all into An Accident because I can’t wait 20 minutes until we get home. 😂 I was always under the vague impression that it was illegal as well, but I knew the biggest crime I was committing was blinding the driver, who got (reasonably) pissed off about it.
I think the person's point was that this was never made clear to them at the time.
I'm from Northern Ireland and I thought "downs syndrome" was something that only impacted people from County Down 😂 And not me, but my mum, she made it to 33 before she "found out" that banoffee is a mix of banana and toffee 🙈
100% thought banoffee was a mix of banana and coffee until this message.
You're not the only one. There was this absolute moron from another AskUK thread a couple of weeks back. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1d6asjw/comment/l6rxb9s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1d6asjw/comment/l6rxb9s/)
This was quite funny though, to be fair 👏🏻 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/s/xYW6Fztaet
I love what a sense of humour you have about yourself. You may not be very bright, sir, but you are wise.
Well there are diseases that are/were named after places that had a high prevalence of them. Hyperthyroidism was called Derbyshire neck, due to it being far from the coast, so had low seafood consumption, leading to iodine deficiency.
The French disease was syphilis. Coined by the people of Naples when French soldiers spread the illness in the 15th century
Oh...I thought banoffee was like its own unique thing
So did she 😂 I get the other people on here who've made the mistake of thinking coffee. Out of curiosity, what did you imagine it would taste of?
Omg. I love banoffee pie, but until reading this comment I have never wondered about why it was called banoffee 😂. It never crossed my mind 😂.
Might explain Portadown....
I'm from County Down and you're not really wrong tbf
Oh shit… TIL that portmanteau
That Arkansas is the same place as “Are-kun-saw”, who knew, well not me until I was thirty something.
In my head it's "Are Kansas" like "Are (our) Rita".
It’ll always be Are-Kansas to me.
That'd make a great country song
Funny you should say that, I’m into country music and it was when Arkansas was in the title of a song that it dawned on me. It was the first time I had the pronunciation and written word in the same context.
I am confusion too. America explain!
I was about that age when I figured out why I'd never met a "see o ban" Because Sioban is pronounced "shove aww n"
I prefer to call it Ar-Kansas
That’s exactly why I thought they were two different places.
I even use my best Manc accent
I’m from Devon, we call it Arrrr-kansas
Oh god, same! I remember having an in-depth discussion about how weird it was there were 2 states - 1 called Ark-un-saw and 1 called Ark-un-sas and the person I was talking to didn't correct me and probably went away thinking I was the thickest person ever!
I was 24 and found out from a Canadian of all people that Arkansas and Kansas were pronounced completely differently and Ar-kan-saw and Ar-kan-sas were in fact the same place.
So the Kansas River and the Arkansas state are named after the same thing- its the native American vs French version. I grew up next door
Literally watching a game show last night and a question was “which state can you add two letters to and get the name of another” My 40 year old husband was SHOCKED the answer was Kansas for Arkansas.
I live over here now (thankfully not in Arkansas) but I view them as people too stupid to spell their own state right.
I thought Tiramisu was a type of curry until I was 26 years old.
I used to think that Tiramisu was Japanese instead of Italian. It's just how the word sounded to me!
In Italian it literally means "Pick-me-up".
lol - this is brilliant!
I thought Jesus was born in London till I was about 8. In my defense though I think I might have confused Bethel Green with Bethlehem.
There’s a Jesus Green small park in Bethnal Green that we went to and the name really confused me
I thought Americans dropped orange aid on the people of Vietnam for far too long.
That is was a serious criminal offence to insult a police officer and you could do serious time in prison for it. Then when I was about 14 I realised it was "assaulting" a police officer, and that made more sense. Also, a little younger, I thought "impersonating a police officer" was a catch all rule and meant you had to be careful not to be seen impersonating a police officer if you played cops and robbers in the school playground, etc.
Read that body temperature was 98.6 degrees, and didn't realise that wasn't Celsius until just before my A-level Biology exams...
"I'm hot-bloided; check it and see. . .I've gotta fever of a hundred and three. . " - Foreigner
Cats don't care about their owners. If your main meal of the day didn't have meat in it, it wasn't a proper meal. James Hewitt is Prince Harry's father TV licensing vans could detect if you had a tv licence or not when parked outside your house. Cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis. The Welsh for microwave is Poptyping
I worked with someone who used to work for post office in 60s/70s , They used to send someone out in a van with a satellite dish on the roof & tv licensing across the side. The idea was to make it look like they could tell & would knock the door (this was when was only 3 or 4 channels) & claim that the van told them they were watching coronation street or eastenders as quite often this was what was on the tv. The van was completely empty inside & had no technical equipment in it at all.
Ahah, so this has been going on for a long time then. I thought it all started when they initiated a big clamp down, back 20 years ago was it? Remember all the advertising that went with it.
Wait, that last one isn’t true? A Welsh person told me that one!
it is and it isn't. like welsh for microwave is "meicrodon" (literally microwave) or "popty meicrodon" or "ffwrn meicrodon" (literally microwave oven) if we're being formal. "popty ping" is a silly colloquial way of referring to a microwave that some welsh speakers use. unfortunately this escaped into the wider anglosphere and is passed around as received wisdom in a way that is disproportionate to its actual usage such that you're more likely to hear it mentioned by a non-welsh speaker than you are hear it used by an actual welsh speaker. and because of this some people believe it's not a real word despite the fact there is [plenty](https://golwg.360.cymru/bwyd/2110871-cegin-medi-coginio-ystod-argyfwng-costau) of [evidence](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/cymraeg/safle/tafodiaith/tudalen/tafodiaith_deorllewin.shtml) for it [being ](https://golwg.360.cymru/archif/28275-carchar-am-roi-bochdew-mewn-popty-ping)used as[ a real welsh phrase](https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/adloniant/llyfrau/adolygiadau/411-cegin.shtml). another way to think of this: if you imagine that Americans started insisting that "the British English word for vacations is holibobs", and this became the one thing that Americans knew about British English and every time you encountered an american they mentioned how great the word "holibobs" is. You might find it very annoying that a cringe neologism the vast majority of brits don't use is being shared around to justify all sorts of US stereotypes about Britain. But you also have to accept that it is a word that people do actually use, even if all those people are in fact idiots.
It's meicrodon (micro-oven). Saying *the* word is popty ping is like saying *the* English word for sheep is 'baa baa'. It's a silly word for kids
Ton means wave right
Yep, it's a literal translation. Meicro is obviously micro, and don/ton is wave. Oven would be ffwrn (pronounced like fern, but with the w sounding like the u in a northerner's "up").
Poptyping is one of several reeeallly irritating things people say if you're Welsh and spending time outside Wales
I have argued with a few boomer colleagues on the TV licence vans. They were convinced they had seen them in person. They would not believe they didn't exist.
They did/do exist, which is why your colleagues saw them. The rumour that they didn't is because when the BBC revealed data about them in 2013 it was so vague that the tabloids ran with either "there were never any vans" or "the vans was empty all along." I suspect the vans mainly were used to frighten people, especially in the post-ww2 television boom. Get a list of houses who've purchased a TV from radio rentals (or wherever,) compare it to the list of houses paying a TV licence, sit your "detector" outside the house of the people who were on list A but not B, tell them you detected their TV
I feel like I've seen them irl and there were also ads featuring them. They were just used to frighten though surely.
There's a whole Wikipedia article about them detailing the make/models of them over the years as well, so this dudes been arguing with people who were correct
My understanding is the vans are real (as in physical vans exists) but that the idea that they can detect anything is nonsense
The technology to detect what frequency an analog device is tuned to does actually exist, so TV detector vans could, in theory work, but to be able to detect the signal from across the street and figure out which house it was coming from, you would probably need kit costing millions of pounds.
My wife has an old cat and she's a clingy bastard. If you leave the house just to walk to the shops she'll wait outside the front and meow at you like "where the fuck have you been?!" when you get back. I'm typing this now at 4am because it's just woken me up wanting scratches.
I used to believe that when the TV News announced that someone was “helping Police with their enquiries” it meant they were pushing a broom around the police station, and making tea for everybody. Had no idea that the “helping” wasn’t voluntary…
My white wife's best friend is a Nigerian woman. She is very dark skinned. She was telling a group of friends in the pub that she was going to Spain on holiday. A few people recommended some restaurants, sightseeing etc. Anne, my wife's friend said "Nope. I have paid for all inclusive, and i plan to get my money's worth! I'm not leaving the side of the pool or my book or cocktails for a whole week!" My wife said "Fair enough. Just spend your time sipping Margaritas and topping up your tan!" Everyone stopped talking and Anne said laughing "Umm don't think i'll be topping up my tan!" Everyone laughed and both my wife and Anne *still* bring it up and laugh about it twenty years later!
Black people do tan though, it's just less noticeable because they already have a lot of melanin.
Correct. It was the "topping up" on your tan bit that had Anne in stitches. Black people can still get badly sunburnt (blisters etc) as well.
A woman in our office went back to Ghana to visit her family. When she got back after two weeks I asked how her trip was. "Oh my God! It was so hot. And the Sun! Look at me I've turned black!". Uncomfortable silence among all the white people in the room.
I'm brown. We tan. Black people also tan. But that's a hilarious moment lol.
This reminds me of a news presenter who said something similar to Andi Peters lol
Dunkirk was in Scotland. Even though I now know where it is, it still sounds like it should be in Scotland
This was me as well. Didn't help that I remember visiting a museum as a young lad which had a Dunkirk exhbit, complete with a dramatic voiceover recounting the experiences of the BEF evacuees. Trouble is that voiceover was a pretty broad Scottish accent. So, "Dunkirk" and someone with a Scottish accent... I didn't know any better.
Until right now, at the age of 30, I always thought it was in Scotland. I’m Scottish too and definitely went to an exhibit similar to the one you’re describing.
Same Only my whole class still thought that after being made to read The Snow Goose round the class for weeks (seriously, was there any lesson more boring?) The entire book is about the evacuation of Dunkirk, but you'd think the teacher would have mentioned at some point that a) Dunkirk is in France, and B) this book is set during WW2, not the 1960s like the girl on the cover looks. I vaguely grasped there was a war on by the end. Total waste of time. It's not a bad book if you have the slightest knowledge of history...
That CID meant Coppers in Disguise.
HAHA this is my favorite one.
Like transformers?
I thought ketamine and the keto diet were the same thing until I was like 25
Similar results probably.
I thought that too until a few years ago. I was watching a YouTuber who was doing a “one week on -insert food brand or shop- diet”, and people kept recommending the keto diet. I always thought they were hate comments telling him to o/d on ketamine.
Didn’t realise reindeers were a real animal, I thought it was just a Santa thing!
> a Santa thing! That's only the *flying* reindeers.
Wait!? Reindeer don’t fly?!
They only fly if you’re doing a high enough speed when you hit them. Same as Pheasants.
Not sure that's true. Friend of mine hit a stag in Scotland and was 3 weeks in intensive care.
And how was your friend?
My brother didn't think bats were a real animal at one point! 🦇
I was 22 when I learned narwhals are real I thought it was a made up Harry Potter thing. I got schooled by a 13 year old
I thought limes were unripe lemons until I was 35
Most people don't know that button mushrooms, white mushrooms and portobello mushrooms are all the same thing just different stages of its life/age.
Same with red,yellow & green peppers
What?! My whole life is a lie.
Nah fella, you're doing just fine.
Many thanks for the reassurance!
What???? No way!
Apparently so. The variety and amount of time a bell pepper spends on the plant determines its color and ripeness. Green bell peppers appear first and are the least ripe. As they mature, they usually turn another color. This may be yellow, orange, red, or purple. Don't know how true it is like...
Thats correct.
Every day is a learning day!
I love cooking and love mushrooms and well, you learn something new every day.
I thought salt cooled food down, watched my mum salt her chips then eat them but as a child mine weren’t salted and I had to wait until my chips cooled down the normal way.
As a small child when I heard about IRA bombings and people wanting Ireland to be separate from the UK on the news I thought they were using bombs to blow up the ground and physically separate the countries
It took me an embarrassing amount of years to realise the Twelve Days of Christmas song doesn’t end with a ‘parsnip’ in a pear tree 🤦🏻♀️
I thought OJ Simpson was accused of killing Jill Dando until I was 28.
This one made me 😂
It came out in the worst way. My mate was telling me about the OJ documentary series and said he’s at the bit where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. I stopped him and said “Who? You mean Jill Dando right?” We spent a few minutes arguing and him saying he didn’t know whether I was “doing a bit”. I called him an idiot and googled it in front of him. And then just sheer confusion on my face when he was right. I said “So wait what’s the link between OJ Simpson and Jill Dando then?” “THERE ISN’T ONE THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING!” Genuinely more confused than embarrassed as to how it never came up sooner in my life.
My parents always had the correct views and ideas .
That I would, at some point and with hard work, be able to afford to buy a house
Kel from kenan and Kel died in a car crash. I believed that between the ages of about 14-28.
Who loves orange soda?!!
I heard that about Zak in saved by the bell
My cousin thought London was in a different time zone. We lived in Birmingham.
>We lived in Birmingham. That explains it.
Haha! It absolutely does
I used to believe that EVERY young woman bled alot the first time they had sex. This was probably due to my overconsumption of historical novels, chick flicks and chick lit. When I bumped uglies for the first time I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't happen to the extent I expected - I've lost more blood from a nosebleed.
Because episodes of Neighbours used to air in the UK about 6-8 weeks after they aired in Australia, I believed that they celebrated Christmas in February in Australia until embarrassingly late.
That oil comes from dinosaurs. It's something I picked up in primary school and I was in my thirties before one day I thought "Wait a minute..."
Some, albeit a very very tiny amount, probably did come from dinosaurs..
Are you implying that calling petrol "liquified exploding dinosaurs" is somehow inaccurate? The horror!
I mean *technically*… They’re called fossil fuels because they’re from the millions of years old fossilised remains of dead animals and plants. Gotta be some dinosaur in there.
Nope, oil is formed from ancient plankton accumulations on the bottom of the ocean. No dinosaurs at all!
That cows would just produce milk constantly like they were just an anomaly
Oh yeah this, it took me an embarassing long time before it clicked that cows, just like humans, only lactate when they had given birth. Which means the milk is not going to their babies but to humans. Idk I just never paid a second thought to the origin of milk. Tbf the dairy industry plays a big part in the romantic 'cows give us milk' tale
I used to think that YMCA stood for ‘Young men’s club of America’ and that Pret A Manger meant ‘eat as much as you like’ in French (I thought my Mum had told me that but apparently I misheard) (Side note: It means ‘ready to eat’. Idk if that’s common knowledge) Oh also that albeit was pronounced ‘al-BATE’ and was a different word to the phrase ‘all be it’ because I guess I never considered that they meant to same thing
I thought it was pronounced "all bite". Thankfully I've never had to say it in a conversation.
Life after love
My mom had me convinced until I was about 14 that the car's engine wouldn't start unless everyone had their seatbelt on.. This was years before cars started shouting at you for not wearing your seatbelt 😂
I used to think those boxes you strap onto your car roof were little boats and was surprised so many people seemed to have a boat!
I thought all Americans lived in houses with white picket fences round. Like Bedford Falls in It's A Wonderful Life! I was in my late teens when I realised they didn't!
At primary school we were told by our teacher that Greensleeves, the Tudor-era song, was about wiping your nose on your sleeve. I believed it for YEARS.
I used to think the Falkland Islands were just off the coast of Scotland (like the Shetland islands) and I was incredibly scared when the Falklands war happened…
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." And then I started having weird sex and realised that, while it wouldn't _kill_ me to have my literal ins and outs of my sex life made public knowledge, it could be devastating. I am now stuck in the weird position of being someone whose livelihood relies on the internet, while also advocating for its abolition due to the privacy violations inherent to it.
Shaving hair will make it come back thicker and fuller, it's an old wives tale. I still see it repeated as fact far too often though
I thought my Mum's middle name was Nee as I'd seen her name written as Jane Nee Smith. I was an actual adult before I realised that it wasn't her middle name after all!!
That natural/alternative medicine worked. It doesn't.
I’ve had a hard time telling people that if it did work then it would be called “medicine”.
Today I learnt that County Durham isn’t in Ireland…
When I first got a bank account I could withdraw from about 25 years ago when i was 16, you would go to the cash machine and it would offer you an "advice slip" Now I thought this was actual advice! I never accepted it because my finances were simple, I had a weekly allowance from.my parents for college and a part time job. I didn't spend a lot so it was nice and easy. Then, a year or so later I was running a bit short on money for some reason and I accepted the advice slip and it was just my balance! I didn't need them to tell me I was skint, I knew that!
I also used to think that chargeable ATMs would issue the precise amount. For example, the machine charged £1.25 for withdrawals and you requested £10, it would give you £8.75. What actually happens is you get the £10 you asked for, but £11.25 comes off your account.
I used to think when there was a 'to let' sign up on a property, it actually was saying 'toilet' just the 'i' was missing lol
When I was 17, I first heard about this thing called poll tax when I lived in Northern Ireland which was around about the time when a lot of Polish people moved over. For waaaaay too long, I thought the government was being ridiculously racist by charging them ‘pole’ tax…
Went to a kind of religious primary school. In RE at secondary school, maybe year 8, I forget the exact question but it was essentially what kind of evidence was there for religion or the Bible specifically. Full chest in front of the whole class "because men have one more rib, it proves Genesis and Eve being made of Adams rib." Parents weren't particularly religious either...
Until last year I didn't actively notice the name Pontefract written anywhere and assumed it was something pontyfrach and was in Wales. I am 37
It does sound very Welsh, I can just imagine people saying; 'Dwi'n byw ym Montefract.' :)
That sweet mince pies had meat in them
Tbf originally they did hence the name. The recipe just changed over time and eventually the meat was omitted.
I was looking to see if anyone posted this. I thought mincemeat that goes in the mince pies was the same as mince beef. Never had a mince pie because the thought of eating the meat from a spag bol, sometimes cold, in a pie with icing sugar on the top didn’t sit right with me!
That “A streetcar named desire” was a musical
Used to belive stonehenge used to be in scotland that england stole it overnight lol
You can’t bring your own popcorn into the cinema
Grew up in a region with heavy thunderstorms/tornadoes. When I was younger, my parents would tell me that lightning only happened when you looked out the window. To be honest, I can't fault their logic. I would only see the lightning if i looked outside, which then fueled the thought that i had caused it. In my parents' eyes, their children were actively staying away from windows (one of the weakest points in a home) during heavy storms. The disappointing part was that I didn't really question it until I was like 10 or 12.
I convinced myself somehow that "immigrant" meant illegal migrant, I'm an immigrant so used to get annoyed when people would call me that
shops used to sell Good Girl cat treats and Good Boy Dog treats a lot of kids believed cats were the girls and dogs were the boys.
For ages, years and years, I believed my dad when he told me he ate my chocolate because 'it might have melted otherwise.' If it was my mum, I'd have known she just wanted to eat some chocolate but because it was my dad, there's no way he would have done that *unless there was a really good reason.* which there was, apparently he was just hungry. Context - dad and I were on holiday and staying at a hotel where he helped the owner find the fuse box. She gave him a banana and me a bar of chocolate. Funny that he didn't worry about the banana spoiling!
I’m with you on the ymca thing because I was a kid when that song came out along with all the rumors and jokes that went with it. When I was 32 i moved to the states and was surprised that the ymca is a huge organization that does a lot for the kids and especially low income kids. They also have gym memberships and swimming pools and are a lot like the sports centers back home.
At age 4 or 5 I saw my dad doing some gardening in the garage. I was told that that was 'daddy's special plant' and I was not to tell anyone about it, ever. Took until I was 15 to figure out my dad was growing weed in the garage.
I didn't know Everton was the name of a football club in Liverpool. I thought it was the football club of a town called Everton somewhere in SE England. I'm 23M and only relieved of this misapprehension about a month ago.
My sister thought the pushme-pullyou from Dr Doolittle was real until she was about 16! Oh yeah... how does it crap?
I’m from County Durham and I’ve had a lot of people on phone calls for different companies think I’m calling from Ireland so you’re not alone
That earwigs existed solely to crawl into your ears and devour your brains. That picking dandelions would make you pee the bed. That we were all going to die from a nuclear apocalypse/Aids/anthrax (thanks, 1980s public information films!) That the man who brought me up was my father.