What is something you thought you knew your whole life and only just recently found out you were wrong the whole time?

It's, uh, boll. Boll weevil. So you learned two things!

While we're on animals, every time I hear the word mongoose I picture some kind of platypus-like creature. Like, a half goose, half weasel or something. And that's not what it is at all.

Like, a half goose, half weasel
Wow, I thought the same and looking at their pictures they are not at all what I imagined!

I thought rabbits and hares were the same species but just gendered like cow and bull

I’ll be damned.
They're different species?!
- Yep. Like how a lion is related to a tiger but they aren’t the same.
- One is cute and fluffy, one has seen into the void and hates reality.
Love this one and the comments. I can tell them apart at a glance.

God said, "Where you want these extra 2 inches? Top or bottom?"

EDIT: That last was on the wrong comment. I'm rolling with it.

I thought everyone had an internal monologue, now I'm seeing that's not the case, I'm still processing it.

Speaking of brains, my girlfriend claims that when she imagines something in her head, she sees a detailed image in front of her, as real as real life. Meanwhile thoughts in my head are just concepts and words. I mean I can imagine what something looks like, but it's an abstract of the basic concept of the thing, not a detailed image in my mind. It takes a strong psychedelic for me to be able to picture something in my head with detail, but according to her apparently I'm the weird one.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
  
  My partner has Aphantasia. Brains are strange! She cannot visualize in her mind which makes it very challenging to do certain tasks and many things she does are based on muscle memory. Also interestingly when a song gets stuck in her head it is like she is making all of the sounds with her inner voice. For me, I can hear the song like there is a recording playing in my head.
- You can’t picture anything in your mind’s eye? It’s not seeing for real but imagining you are looking at something. Like a memory. When you say abstract of the thing you just think of the words associated with it or along those lines?
I can't tell if I do or not.
- If you can't tell, then you don't have one.
You mean like imagining a voice speak out your thoughts? Thoughts are so much faster than speech, I feel like having to speak out all your thoughts would slow things down significantly.

The best tip I learned about reading faster is to stop narrating the words in your head, which puts a hard limit on your reading speed.
- Bro I can't read if I don't read it in my head lmao
- I like the reading tip! I think not many people are aware of it.
  
  My thoughts use meaning, instead a specific words.
  
  The whole interpreting my thoughts as natural language often takes longer than coming up with the tought itself.
  
  This results in:
  
  I often use the intersection of the languages I, and the people I speak with know.
  
  When it's a topic I'm knowledgeable about, I often talk too fast and people find it hard to follow me.
  
  I draw many associations and comprehending the larger picture is easy. Yet I often miss the point in the smaller picture.
- Wait, people narrate the words in their head? That must be insanely slow

His name's boll weevil, check him out.

I think my favorite weevil is the acorn weevil

So.. which one is the lesser of two weevils?

The way we use our brain. I thought that everybody's brain was used similarly to hire I use mine. But I'm fact everybody did it differently.

For instance, some people use more of their visual cortex to do maths, and assign colors to different numbers. For some maths takes place more in the language part, or timekeeping part.

Richard Feynman did some experimenting with this: https://youtu.be/lr8sVailoLw ( from 2.08)

But it makes sense, in school nobody tells you how to use your brain, they just give assignments and look at the outcome, also you don't really control how your brain works, you can train it to do some things more efficient, but you can't learn to do maths in your visual cortex.

I recently saw a video of a girl being able to spell words backwards really fast and the way it was described is that she just saw the text of the word in her mind and just read the letters backwards. That is so fascinating to me because that is just so so far from how my brain works, I don't see shit.
- That sounds like aphantasia.
  
  Until maybe 10 years ago, I thought that was some exceptionally rare condition, and that I'd be instantly able to tell who had that by how they acted because that person would be so weird or different than everyone else.
  
  Turns out lots of people have it, including my mother.
  
  It was so weird to me, because I have an inner monologue and it's pretty much always going. And I can "hear" it inside my mind. I can visualize anything I can think about, even watch "movies" with a "soundtrack" in my own mind. It's so omnipresent in my life, and that's just not how everyone's brain can work.
  
  And of course, people who don't have that in their mind are no less intelligent or anything. Maybe it's easier for them to focus than it is for me! Lol
  
  But when I first heard about it, I wondered things like, "How can they read?" or "How can they know what something looks like from a description, or how can they understand how something would be moved in a 3D space without actually moving it?" Lol
- Fuck me, I just tried that and it's so much easier. She's on to something.

"Cake" in "let them eat cake" is "brioche". I had thought that cake meant cheap chemically leavened bread-ish, but it actually was an out of touch elite being genuinely confused about bread shortages, not someone callously suggesting the peasants eat shittier food.

Also it probably wasn't Marie Antoinette.

For almost my entire life, I'd been using the word "Apparently" to mean "Allegedly" or "I'd heard/read, but haven't verified".

It actually means "Evidently" or "As can be plainly observed". So pretty much the opposite connotation.

I've been trying to get myself out of that habit, but even judging from my comment history, it's apparently pretty hard.

(I did it right that time!)

I think the problem was that I'd thought it was being used ironically.

I am not sure you were as wrong as you think - see definitions 2 and 3 here

Usage of words shifts and sometimes expands over time.

More references here or here

I would personally definitely interpret "apparently" and "plainly" differently - "apparently" to me is "the evidence so far does seem to point this way, but I am not necessarily convinced, or have strong feelings either way" vs "plainly" is "the evidence is clear, I am convinced, and so should you be" - although obviously context would matter as well and could alter this interpretation.

Edit: even your example usage "I've been trying to get myself out of that habit, but even judging from my comment history, it's apparently pretty hard" - to me the usage of "apparently" here indicates similar tension and/or contradiction, in this case between belief/intent (I am trying to stop the habit) and evidence (but my comment history shows otherwise) - it wouldn't work quite as well with "plainly"

It would work with "evidently" but carry more of a connotation of confirmation and shift the emphasis (I am trying to, but it's hard as confirmed by evidence) rather than contradiction (I would like to think I am doing it, but evidence shows otherwise) - of course you might have meant it either way (or even neither) - I am just saying how it reads to me.
- I can understand why it might bother some people, since it's kind of like "literally", where the "new" definition is the opposite of the "traditional" definition, and we already have perfectly good words to fill in for the new definition.
  
  I also dislike how "apparent" means "clear" or "obvious", but I'd been using "apparentLY" to mean "allegedly".
  
  But thank you for the affirmation that I was using it in "one" proper way!
I've always understood it as "This is apparent to people who are familiar with the issue, but since I am not, I have to take their word for it. If I looked into the issue, I'm reasonably certain I would come to the same conclusion."

Apparently that's not how other people parse it, though.
- This is the way.
This reminds me of "concur". For so long I have thought it meant "disagree", but apparently it's actually the opposite? It still feels like it should be the former

Value-types in C# can apparently contain reference-type members. I had always thought that they could only contain other value-types. I've been using C# since before its official release. It still hurts my head trying to wrap my brain around it.

It's library - not libary

Boston is further north than NYC.

Commercials are saying お試しみしてください and not お楽しみしてください.

Please try it or please enjoy it?
- That's a direct translation; better English equivalents would be "give it a try" vs. "look forward to it". They are pronounced similarly (tameshimi/tanoshimi) and either makes sense in context (usually heard at the end of an ad), so "Please look forward to/get excited about X" and "please give X a try" both would make sense.

I thought jealousy and envy were synonymous.

i learnt a while back that they're not the same, but i can't even remember the difference
- Envy is wanting something someone else has. Jealousy is fearing someone will take away something you have. Or I’m about to learn that what I’ve recently learnt is not true and then this would be my answer for this post.
- Jealousy is Smeagle with the ring.
  
  Envy is Smeagle when someone else has the ring.

That "Southern" isn't normally pronounced in the way that I pronounce it (which is "SOWth-urn", with a lot of emphasis on the "O" sound, instead of "suff-ern")

It's not suffern.... Suh thern