You Weren't Born Yesterday, But These 27 Obvious But Often Unknown Facts Might Make You Feel Like You Were
by Angelica Martinez · BuzzFeedArgue with the wall, but it is my personal belief that learning fun facts is a hobby. Nothing quite tickles my fancy like scrolling on TikTok or clicking my way through a Wikipedia rabbit hole and learning some completely random piece of information I would've literally never learned in any other circumstance. And, of course, fact-checking that it's true because some of y'all are LIARS 👀.
Nonetheless, I think my favorite fun facts are those that make you sit there for a second after you learn them, like...my life is a lie...how did I not KNOW that?? Luckily for us, redditor u/iluvlightyagami03 posed a question just like that in r/AskReddit. They asked, "What is a little-known but obvious fact that will make all of us feel stupid?" So, my fellow nerds, here are 26 "obvious" facts people shared that just might make you wonder if you know anything at all, actually:
Note: All submissions have been fact-checked, and links to sources are included in each if you care to deep dive into any of the following topics.
1. "Rabbits don't have paw pads like cats or dogs. They've got nothing but fluffy feet. If you see a cartoon rabbit with paw pads, it's all lies."
2. "Words that are spelled the same but pronounced with emphasis on different syllables are actually indicative of the part of speech they are. Stress on the first syllable is a noun. Stress on the last syllable is a verb. Examples: CON-tract and con-TRACT. The former is a noun (sign this contract), whereas the latter is a verb (the muscles contract). Same with record, address, impact, object, and a few others."
3. "Percentages are reversible. 8% of 25 is the same as 25% of 8, and one of them is much easier to do in your head."
4. "Uppercase letters are called that because they could be found in the upper drawer of a printing press, lowercase could be found in the lower case of the printing press."
Before the printing press, they were called majuscule and minuscule, respectively.
5. "The word 'set' holds the record for having the most definitions of any single word."
According to Guinness World Records, there are 430 different definitions for the word 'set' in the 1989 Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, the entry is 60k words.
6. "The component parts of the word helicopter are not 'heli' and 'copter.' It’s 'helico,' meaning 'spiral-shaped' like the word 'helix,' and 'pter' meaning 'wing' as in 'pterodactyl.'"
7. "There's a thing called the Royal Order of Adjectives. This rule dictates the specific order in which adjectives should be arranged in a sentence, and native speakers follow it instinctively without being taught."
The order is: quantity, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin/material, and qualifier. For example: A lovely small old square brown French leather handbag. It sounds wrong if you deviate from this order, but many people aren’t consciously aware of it! When you say something like 'A lovely small old square French leather brown handbag,' other naive speakers will wonder what French leather is. "
8. "Rollercoasters are built to shake! I’ve seen so many people decide not to get on because of the swaying, but it’s important! If the support beams and tracks didn’t shake, they’d simply snap with all the force from the coaster cars roaring over them."
9. "Also, roller coasters — at least the traditional kind — don’t have any engines. Typically, there’s a slope at the start where a chain in the track pulls the cars up to the top. After that, it’s all gravity and momentum. Takes some careful design to ensure that the cars don’t run out of (metaphorical) steam before the end."
10. "The term 'bug' in computing has been around for a long time. The term was not commonly used until an actual bug landed on an electrical switch, causing the computer to malfunction. The term bug grew in popularity afterward and landed us where we are today. Also, when we find a bug in software, we apply a 'patch.' This comes from old cardex/punch card systems. If a punch card was punched in the wrong spot, you could fix it by applying a patch to the hole."
The use of the term 'bug' to refer to an error or glitch can be traced all the way back to Thomas Edison in the early 1800s. As OP said above, it gained popularity in computer science after 1947, when a team at Harvard discovered that the reason their computer (Mark II) was having consistent errors was because an actual bug — a moth — had gotten inside the hardware and was messing with its functionality.
11. "The story of Humpty Dumpty doesn’t explicitly state that he is an egg."
The assumption that Humpty Dumpty is an egg can actually be traced back to Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice sees a large egg with human-ish features and declares that it is Humpty Dumpty.
It is, in fact, believed by some — and allegedly has been confirmed by some military historians — that Humpty Dumpty was the name of a Royalist cannon in the English Civil War that sustained damage in battle and was unable to be repaired.
12. "You think your skeleton is inside you, but you’re a brain, so you’re inside your skeleton."
13. "The Undertaker’s manager was named Paul Bearer, which is a play on pallbearer."
14. "Trees get the vast majority of their mass from the air. All that wood? That was once carbon dioxide and sunlight."
15. "1 billion is much larger than you think. 1 million seconds is ~11 days. 1 billion seconds is over 31 years."
16. Humans have stripes. We just can't usually see them. They're called Blaschko's lines, and according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology, they're patterns on "the skin that represent the developmental growth pattern during epidermal cell migration."
Suggested by: Probablynotspiders
17. "German chocolate cake was made by an American named Samuel German. Not an actual German."
18. "The thing between hard and soft is firm. The thing between hardware and software is called...firmware."
19. "Plumbing comes from the root Latin word of 'plumbum', which means lead, and is the reason it's Pb on the Periodic table. The Romans made water pipes out of lead."
20. "Your skin doesn't have receptors to let you know if it's wet or not. This is why those sensory deprivation tanks have you floating in it. When the water is warm enough, your skin stops sensing the 'wetness' and you just feel like you're floating in the air."
—ZorroMeansFox and Nutzori
21. "Your pee is filtered out of your BLOOD by your kidneys. There's no direct route for that glass of water from swallow to kidneys to pee (like food/feces has it's own set of pipes, from in to out). Water goes into your blood circulation (absorbed through the gut) and at some point, it gets lifted by your kidneys (along with other waste products) via your blood."
"It probably sounds breathtakingly obvious to many of you, but I teach A&P as part of my job, and many people don't initially realize that. They assume that there's some separate tube that takes fluids direct to the kidneys because they've just never really thought about it."
22. "Poison dart frogs obtain their toxin by eating poisonous bugs, like fire ants. When you feed them crickets and such, they are perfectly safe to handle."
23. "The fax machine was invented in the 1800s, well before the telephone."
It's not the fax machine we know today, but the "original" fax machine (aka the electric printing telegraph) was invented in 1843 by Alexander Baine. In contrast, the telephone was invented decades later in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Big century for Alexanders, it seems!
24. "Flamingos get their pink color from the seafood they eat. Change the food, and they'd be a different color."
According to the National Zoo, flamingos get their pink color from the carotenoids in their food — particularly, from microscopic algae and brine shrimp.
25. "The tune of the ‘Alphabet Song’ is actually the ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ tune."
26. "The human body glows in the dark. No, seriously. It emits visible light at all times, but our eyes are too weak to see it. So yeah, you’re glowing right now, but no one can appreciate it."
27. And lastly, "We all know the dinosaurs died out a long time ago (~65 million years ago). But what's even longer: they roamed the Earth for 165 million years. The Stegosaurus went extinct 66 million years before the T-Rex even existed."
Do you know any facts like these that seem obvious after you learn them, but that most people don't know? If so, tell us in the comments below or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for clarity, length, and fact checking.