Someone Online Asked “What Took You An Embarrassing Amount Of Time To Figure Out?”, And 30 People Delivered

I was 50ish when I realized that the little piggy that goes to market wasn't going f**kin' shopping.

When I was younger I thought 'feat' was a very popular rapper. ie Eminem feat 50 cent etc.. I was like damn this feat guy appears in a lot of songs..

When I was like 5 my dad would constantly make the following joke:

He'd put his hand on my head and squeeze lightly a couple times while saying "I'm a brainsucker. What am I doing?" After a quick pause he'd follow up with the punch line "Starving!", but he always stretched out the pronunciation for the word so it sounded to me like "Star...ving"

For years I thought it was a lame joke where the punchline somehow referred to the fact that brainsuckers were aliens and came from the stars or something like that.

I was sitting in class one day and I must have been 10-12 years old before I realized "He's calling me dumb! The joke is that I dont have a brain so the brainsucker is starving!"

I was at least smart enough to never tell him this, because I'd never live it down if he knew it took me five years to figure out the joke.

How ring binders work. I thought you had to take out all the pages to add a new page to the back of the binder, which annoyed me in school because it could take a while having to realign all the pages to fit the holes in the binder. I was about 22 when I worked in a bookstore and my coworker saw me take all the pages out, after which she showed me how it actually works. I will never forget the look of disbelief on her face.

That those ridiculous over-the-top dresses exhibited at fashion shows are not intended to ever be worn in real life; they are like concept cars of the fashion world, intended to showcase the designer's creativity and vision.

Before my cataract surgery I thought Hellboy wore aviator goggles. Post surgery I saw they were remnants of his horns.

That the state Montana is literally the word ‘mountains’ in Spanish. Didn’t realize until I was physically in Montana, staring up at some mountains, and thought ‘wow! Mountains are so pretty! Montañas… Montanas… montana, oh.’

I didn't realize until my late teens/early 20s that "chemical castration" means taking pills which render you infertile, not necessarily dipping someone's balls in a vat of acid. Yea this one is pretty embarrassing.

When I was growing up the family would often do road trips to Vancouver, at least once a year. Just outside Williams Lake I would always observe a construction site where some sort of log house is being built. It was always half finished.

After like a decade I was maybe 18 and finally made the comment about them "still building that place". Apparently they build custom log homes on site and disassemble and ship them out.

In 'Lady and the Tramp' the humans are called Jim dear and darling. I was in my 30s before I realized that wasn't their actual names, it was what lady heard them calling each other.

That my childhood hamster did not, in fact, run away.

My French press. I owned one 9 months before I realized the coffee grounds go UNDER the plunger and not ON TOP of it. I was always so annoyed having to clean the top of the plunger after lowering the coffee into the water.

My girlfriend stared at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever met trying to formulate how to politely fix this.

That breakfast actually means breaking the fast.

That chickens always lay eggs without needing to mate with a rooster.

How to use a staple remover.

Until I was was in my 40s, I’d just use the staple remover to “bite” the long side of a staple and kind of tear it back through the paper.

Then someone showed me how to properly use a staple remover by “biting” the crimped side of the staple to bend the crimp and kind of straighten out the staple again. Once kind of straightened, “bite” the long side of the staple and the staple will back out the same holes it went in without further tearing the paper.

That the ‘Teletubbies’ literally had tele-tubby’s, as in their stomachs were TVs. Figured this out at university.

K-9 stands for canine.. took me 29 years.

When I was younger I had no idea that New York and Newark were two different places. I kept thinking people saying Newark were trying to say New York, but had a speech impediment or accent, or just didn't know how to pronounce it.

I realised a few years ago that cows don’t just naturally produce milk, they have to be pregnant/have a calf to produce it. Which is embarrassingly late to figure out.

When you do something wrong but with enthusiasm, and someone says, “A for effort,” I didn’t understand that it meant an “A” as in school report card grades. It never made sense because in my head, “E” is for Effort, like “C” is for Cookie. I finally had someone explain it to me sometime after I turned 30.