“I only recently found out that ponies are not baby horses, but full-sized ponies.”

“The lyrics to The Beatles song Twist and Shout are: Shake it up baby now (Shake it up baby) But I always thought the lyrics went: We’re shakin’ a baby now (Shakin’ a baby). People were horrified when I started singing it this way.”

“I thought lions and tigers were the same animals all throughout my teenage years — that lions were the boys, and tigers were the girls.”

“My sister believed Mount Rushmore was a naturally occurring rock formation.”

“I was 23 on a trip with my girlfriend in San Francisco. We were both getting ready for the day in the bathroom and I needed my hair gel, so I asked if she could hand me my toilet treat bag. She seemed confused, I again asked, “Can you please hand me my bag of toilet treats!?” She ran out of the bathroom laughing.”

“Once, when I was 20, a friend told me he was sad and that he had blue balls. I didn’t know what blue balls meant yet, so I asked him if there was anything I could do to help.”

“I didn’t know narwhals were real until sophomore year of college.”

“I re-named a goldfish “rainbow” when I was 7 because it kept changing color every few months. I told friends about this fish for years like it was some mystical kaleidoscope fish. It hit me in the face a couple of months ago that the fish wasn’t changing color…my parents were just replacing it when it died without telling me.”

“I thought handbags were called ‘hambags’ until I was 15. It was only when I asked my mom if they were used to carry hams in the olden days that I learned the truth. And she fucking died laughing.”

“Thought Olivia Newton-John, Fig Newtons, and Newton’s Laws were part of some sort of family business.”

“I didn’t realize that Mike Myers plays both Austin Powers and Dr Evil till the third Austin Powers movie came out. And Fat Bastard. And Goldmember.”

“That ‘in-law’ means literally related by law.”

“I was convinced cheese grew on bushes till 12-13 years old.”

“Until I was 17 I thought the term “getting knocked up” just meant having sex. As a guy, this was an awkward thing to constantly wish upon myself.. (“man, I wish Sarah would knock me up… like really good.”)”

“I used to think that when we eat and drink, it just collects in your stomach until it’s completely full — then you throw it all up and start the process anew.”

“The piggy going to market isn’t buying groceries.”

“That the Washington Redskins play for Washington, DC, not the state of Washington.”

“Thought the Sistine Chapel was called the ’16th Chapel’ until I was in my early 20s.”

“I thought if you just blew into a balloon it would rise. I didn’t realize it was the helium that caused the balloon to float until I was 18 and receptioning at a salon and had an extremely embarrassing moment of blowing up the balloons, tying the strings to them, and asking a co-worker why they were just laying on the ground. She almost died laughing.”

“Five years ago, I learned that a chest of drawers wasn’t called a Chester Drawer and named after a person named Chester. I’m 37 years old.”

“I always thought a lemon was ripe and a lime was not a lemon yet.”

“Just talked to a coworker the other day who didn’t know his name was Jason until 3rd grade. His initials were JT and his family called him by that and so he thought that was his name. During roll call in class the teacher was asking for a “Jason” and he just sat there thinking “some sucker is late for class”. Then the name JT was never called and confusion ensued.”

“I thought groundhogs were a mythical creature until I saw one in my backyard when I was 16. I thought I was high at first.”

“I didn’t know pickles were just cucumbers in vinegar until I was 19.”

“I thought the term “prima donna” was “pre-Madonna.” I always wondered what happened before her that would demand a new term.”

“I was at least 11 when I figured out that ‘elbow grease’ isn’t a secretion that comes from your elbows when you clean things vigorously. My mother used to say, ‘Put some elbow grease into it!’ and I’d start scrubbing like my life depended on it…and occasionally tapping my right elbow to see if anything had come out.”

“In my mid-30s I learned coffee cake was not coffee-flavored cake.”

“I have some friends in their 30s who think behaving means being haved. (That’s haved pronounced like shaved). They will ask their own kids “are you being have?” Like ‘have’ means good.”

“It was a long time before I realized that when people say ‘a quarter to’ or ‘a quarter after,’ they mean 15 minutes. I hadn’t heard that phrase when I was learning to tell time, so I assumed that since a quarter was 25 cents, ‘a quarter to’ meant 25 minutes.”

“I thought speed bumps on the road were supposed to slow you down. As in, you would drive over them at a normal speed, and going over them would slow your car down. I had been driving for about five years by the time someone corrected me…”

“I thought “I feel like a dog in heat” meant that you felt uncomfortably warm, like a dog in hot weather would feel.
I was in the back of my friend’s suburban on a road trip through Southern California when her parents asked if we wanted them to turn on the air conditioning. Yes, please. I feel like a dog in heat! That was a pretty awkward ride.”

“I didn’t know that lambs were baby sheep until I was 32. I was horrified.”

“I thought that people only named their kid ‘Justice’ if they wanted them to be a judge when they grow up. Then I thought, ‘No, that’s ridiculous — people just change their first name to ‘Justice’ when they become a judge.”

“On street signs, ‘Parkway’ is abbreviated as ‘Pkwy.’ My dumb ass thought it stood for ‘Pillwocky’ until I was at least 13.”

“I think I didn’t realize until I was 20 that the ‘D’ in the Disney logo was actually a D, and not a backwards G. But do you blame me?”

“I didn’t realize until like last month that John Lennon was assassinated.”

“I was in my 20s before learning you don’t pronounce the ‘L’ in chalk, walk, talk. Bewildered, I asked ‘Am I supposed to say ‘mick’ for ‘milk’?’ My world was turned upside down.”

“My friend thought it was ‘WACOMOLE’ not guacamole until last week. She is 26. Also, I learned how to make coffee when I was 26….ooooops.”

“I didn’t know you were supposed to check eggs for cracks before you bought them.”

“Until I was 16, I had no idea what breastfeeding was or that it was even a thing people do.”

“I didn’t know ‘Beatles’ wasn’t the correct spelling for the insect until about 3 years ago.”

“I never took sex ed, so I thought boobs would like…inflate when a girl was aroused. And then I was talking later in life with some girls and I said that and they were like, ‘WHAAAAT?'”

“I found out what ‘tucking’ really meant a few weeks ago and have never felt more naive. I apparently know nothing about the penis. It can all go back inside the body!!!! Ahhh. Horrifying. Also, slightly more interesting than what I had originally thought.”

“I thought that Alzheimer’s was called ‘old timer’s’ until I was in college and I said to a friend, ‘My boyfriend’s grandmother is suffering from old timers.’ And the record stopped and she was like, ‘What?!’ I guess I hadn’t seen it written down. So embarrassing.”

“It wasn’t until high school that I realized a certain children’s song wasn’t a first-person account of a sailor’s out-of-body experience/existential crisis. It’s ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean…’ not ‘My body lies over the ocean.”

“I didn’t know that garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same thing until really recently.”

“Until the fifth grade, I thought the civil war was fought between North and South America…the continents…not within the United States….it made a lot more sense when I came to this realization.”

“Nobody told me that people have sex for fun until I was like 16. In sex ed they just told you it was for baby making. I thought you did it like once for every time you had a kid and people were upset about ‘trying’ for babies because sex was terrible.”

“I thought Steve Carell and Steven Colbert were the same person for about a year.”

“When I was 13 and in my prime, I woke up from a nap and thought I had pooped myself.
I told my mom and she began praising me because I had finally become a woman. I started sobbing because at first I thought I was a 13-year-old gal who pooped herself but when my mom told me it was my period, it made the situation worse for me because I thought that meant I had a period everyday for the rest of my life. So fragile. So innocent.”