These People Were “Today Years Old” When They Learned These Surprising Facts

This article was originally published on parentinfluence.com

Have you ever wondered why eggplants are called eggplants, or why they tell you to break a leg when you’re interviewing for an important job? We take those things for granted and never stop to think about the origin of such phrases, but it turns out there was a lot of thought put into them. There’s a recent trend on Twitter where people share the most random things they’ve found out when they were “today years old” – that is, too late – and some of these revelations are guaranteed to surprise you.

Cashews or Mushrooms?

You probably never gave a lot of thought (or any thought) to how cashew nuts grow, because why would you? We all enjoy eating them, but why would we ever spend time wondering where they came from? Thanks to Twitter user Colleen Ballinger, we’ll never look at cashews the same way again.

It turns out cashew nuts grow on cashew trees, complete with leaves, flowers and even fruits. What looks like an over-sized gremlin hat is the cashew fruit, and the nuts that we eat are its seeds. Now that you know cashews in growth resemble little gremlins, you can go on with your day.

Ready, Set, Match

In the age of technology, Tinder is perhaps the most popular dating app out there. Even if you’ve never used it, you must have heard about the dating app and the success stories that came out of it. You probably never gave any thought to the unusual name, and neither did we, until we stumbled upon this eye-opening tweet.

Tinder is the wood you use to start a fire, and it’s also the app you use to create sparks with a potential lover. The logo of a flame continues this fire motif – you create matches, therefore there’s a flame. We think the creative team of Tinder deserve a shout out, don’t you?

Hold Your Horses

We’re all familiar with the common idiom “hold your horses.” We might say that to a friend who’s upset about something, and we might hear that from a stranger when we’re losing our temper in public. We’ve never stopped to think about the meaning of this phrase, but luckily for us, Twitter user “John Snow” did.

According to his interpretation, when you tell your friend to “hold their horses,” you’re telling them to be stable, since a stable is the place where people literally hold their horses. “Hold your horses” is a fancier way of telling someone to calm down, but we never realized the literal meaning behind it. Aren’t puns fun?

Holy Crab

The Nickelodeon favorite of every kid who grew up in the nineties is full of hidden messages we’re just now starting to realize. We’ve already discovered the houses in Bikini Bottom are car mufflers, and thanks to Twitter user Aspen Sipes, we’ve uncovered another clever joke: The Krusty Krab – the place where Spongebob flips burgers for a living – is a crab trap.

For those of you who need to catch up on your Spongebob, what makes this joke clever is that the burgers restaurant is run by a friendly crab named Mr. Krabs. Suddenly, everything on the show makes sense, and we’re starting to realize that nothing on the show is coincidental.