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".
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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.
Same for me! Everyone told me I was smart, so I never studied in college. Turns out you can still be smart and also fail out of college. Luckily got my act together, but I hold some resentment for my teachers and parents for not teaching m that you can have a knack for things but without follow through it's worthless
Bonus points I discovered after a bachelor's degree and most of a master's:
If you pay attention in class you'll understand most of the material, and the rest you can ask the professors directly. Truly astounding.
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.
I was you once
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.
Thank you for this.
I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used..
In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!
This feels like a gross exaggeration of the problems with English. there's a lot of patterns to English, despite a lot of weirdness and a lot of exceptions. But if you hear a new word, it will normally be easy to find in the dictionary on the first try. All that being said, yeah English is probably a mess compared to most languages, which is why it has spelling bees
spelling bees are a thing in English speaking countries
I think they're just an American thing
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.
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
Just spit it all out three or four times, wipe your mouth off and go about your day. You won't even notice.
No dentist has ever said this to me.
A dentist said it to me years ago.
But I suspect that using a Sonicare makes a bigger difference for tooth health than not rinsing.
The guy who runs Reddit is an utter douchebag.
Common sense is not common.
Common sense is a fundamentally broken concept.
It's not that "few people have common sense" (the fact that this phrase gets tossed around should be clue #1 for you), but that there cannot be such a thing as sense that is common. Every region, every community, every social circle, and every individual have vastly different personal experiences and ways of doing things in life. Some people may have similar experiences to eachother, but thats no guarantee.
Typically you see the word "common sense" only used as an insult and a way to tear someone else down. You rarely if ever see it used as a complement or an objective fact. "That person has a lot of common sense" sounds wrong the first time you hear it right?
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.
Well this is a TIL moment. You saved me at ~28 years.
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.
Freetaxusa.com Isn't expensive. It's dumb it still costs money for state but the company that lobbies the government to make our tax code complicated costs a lot more.
You can also do your taxes manually if you know you have a simple return. Or use the expensive software and check it against your manual.
It all sucks though. It should be dead simple as the government already knows 99% of everyone's tax info.
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.
prima donna != pre-Madonna
Holy shit. I found this out less than 6 months ago. I always heard "pre-Madonna" thinking it had something to do with Madonna. I thought I was the only one. For context it took me like 30 years of hearing it before I saw it in writing.
People know less than they think they do, which is why everyone calling everyone else morons is probably correct.
'Moron' was (and technically may still be) a clinical term meaning someone of intelligence so low they're unable to function without supervision. Every time they invent a new non-emotionally-loaded term for low intelligence, we ruin it by using it as an insult.
It's a beautiful thing.
most are in the past year kind of recent:
... that there's a group of people who pronounce "gif" with a "soft g" sound like "jif"
... that Taylor Swift is that popular, she is seen as a political threat for her influence
... also armor bags for kids and shooter drills like it is some kind of natural disaster
It fucking broke me when I learned that kids today instead of learning "Stop, Drop and Roll" learn "Run, Hide, Fight." Fucking kindergartners are being taught, if you see a shooter, Run. If you can't get away, Hide. If you can't hide, try to be a hero because you are going to die anyway.
lol Taylor Swift dating a player and just attending the Super Bowl (not doing anything) might genuinely bring in multiple million extra viewers.
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.
always dispose of the excess grease in an empty container and trash it instead of putting it down a drain.
This will likely vary greatly by country, but here in the UK some supermarkets have a section in their recycling centre where used grease and cooking oil can be deposited to be recycled into fuel of some sort.
That bit about the toilet paper isn't true unless you have roots growing through your sewer line. A bit of copper sulfate down the drain will take care of that, though.
A friend of mine: liters are not the same as kilograms. She's 30...
Tbf 1L of water is 1kg, so that's probably where the confusion is.