conuly

1. Diamond mines.

I read A Little Princess incessantly as a child. Over and over and over again, cover to cover and start over. And one thing that never made sense to me, even as a kid (well, aside from the "India is unhealthy for children" line which - duh, don't people in India have kids of their own?), was the taunting about diamond mines. First it was "I bet there aren't any really" from the mean girl, what was her name?, and then it was "See, we knew there weren't any, that's why you're not still rich", and then, at the end, it was "Oh, I guess there really are such things as diamond mines after all", and it just didn't make sense, because the only place I knew of to get diamonds was, well, from mines! But they were talking like they'd never heard of such a thing, while meanwhile every cartoon ever made eventually has an episode where Huey, Dewey, and Louie; or Chip and Dale; or Baloo; or whoever wanders into a mine, finds a perfect diamond, and is forced through fate to leave it behind. Common knowledge! Diamonds come from mines!

It wasn't until I was grown that I happened, by chance, to find out that diamond mines weren't discovered in Africa until the mid 1800s! Now it all made sense! (And diamond production had increased tenfold from pre-mine numbers, incidentally.)

2. Passover.

Oh, okay, I understood the whole Passover concept. It's matzoh I didn't get. Well, I got it - unleavened bread, leavening means "fluffiness" (as my child mind put it), but I didn't get how leaving in a hurry could keep your bread from rising and becoming fluffy. Shouldn't it continue to rise on the way? And even if it doesn't, wouldn't it make more sense to prepare bread in the usual fashion (with leavening) and then bake it before it has time to rise, to be more traditional?

Then I grew up, and grew up some more, and found out that commercial yeast is a new thing. Formerly, bread was leavened by letting it sit around until yeast spores happened to colonize it; or by using a started created by using the previous process. And it made sense. Or, at least, it did until I found out that there are apparently a zillion and a half other reasons to avoid leavened foods, few of which happen to have anything to do with the literal "they ran really fast, and the bread didn't rise" part of the story, but have to do with various forms of symbolism. That would have made sense all on its own.