Five surprising common misconceptions

There are some things that everybody knows — call it common sense. Whether you heard them from your teacher, parent, friend, or one of those public Facebook posts, they’re the facts and figures we take for granted that make up our knowledge of the world around us. Turns out, a lot of the information we’ve gotten over the years may not be all that reliable.

Actually, many of our most taken for granted beliefs may be either partially untrue or total fabrications. Though there are too many to name, here are five of the most persistent myths and legends which still get passed around as indisputable facts.

Marie Antoinette said “let them eat cake”

French queen consort Marie Antoinette’s famous quip is often credited as one of the best-known examples of rich people being, well, total dicks. Supposedly uttered at a time when the people of her nation were revolting due to a famine so devastating they could not even afford bread, the statement was used as a symbol of the selfishness and foolhardiness of the French nobility for years to come.

However, there’s no evidence Marie Antoinette actually said this at all. The statement first appeared in the autobiography of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published when Marie Antoinette was only nine years old. In the work, Rousseau attributes the phrase to an unnamed princess, which was subsequently misattributed to Marie Antoinette.

There are many theories about how this phrase was attributed to her — most seem to believe it was the work of anti-royalists wanting to tarnish Marie Antoinette’s reputation at a time of extreme discontent with the French monarchy. In any case, Antoinette was known as one of the only members of the monarchy to actually care about the poor, making the statement pretty out of character.

Bulls are enraged by the colour red

This one is surprising. After all, we’ve all seen the absolute ferocity with which a bull rushes at a red cape waved by a matador, completely ignoring the matador himself — well, most of the time, anyway. Due to the popularization of bullfighting, the red of a matador’s cape has been seen as an aggressor to bulls for a very long time. However, not only is red itself not an aggressor for bulls, they can’t even see it.

Cattle, like most mammals, are dichromats, making them colour-blind. The actual reason bulls charge at red capes isn’t the red; it’s that the cape is in motion, which the bulls perceive as threatening. Why they chose to make the cape red instead of any other colour has a more morbid explanation: though modern bullfighting is not lethal to the bulls, historically, the red of the cape was chosen to mask the blood of the bull as it was injured and eventually died throughout the course of the bullfight. 

The Great Wall of China is visible from the moon 

Standing 8,850 km long and nine metres wide, the Great Wall of China is one of the most iconic structures ever built. The idea that this marvel is visible from the moon seems plausible, and has become ingrained in our cultural subconscious. However, this myth has been pretty thoroughly debunked.

The truth of the matter is, as Earth is 384,400 miles away from the moon, seeing the Great Wall of China from that distance would be equivalent to seeing a strand of hair from 20 miles away. Good luck with that. According to NASA, “No man-made object is visible at this scale.” Astronauts agree, and note that the Great Wall also blends in well with the surrounding landscape, making it even tougher to see from a distance.

Deoxygenated blood is blue

Turns out your 3rd grade teacher lied to you; blue veins don’t equal blue blood. In fact, blood is always red, regardless of oxygen content. The red blood cells in your blood contain hemoglobin, an iron-containing protein that aids in oxygen transport which our eyes see as red. Instead of blue, deoxygenated blood is a deeper red than the blood we’re used to seeing, closer to maroon.

This myth is a product of our veins appearing blue to us, which is due to a number of reasons, among them the way light scatters through your skin and the complexity of human colour perception — which you can read about at length in many a scientific paper. Suffice it to say that your blood ain’t blue.

Twinkies never expire

If you’ve ever seen Zombieland, you might hold out hope that in case there’s some kind of zombie apocalypse or nuclear war, as long as we can get to the Hostess warehouse and find the Twinkies, we’ll never go hungry. Why? Because Twinkies don’t expire, of course!

The idea of Twinkies as infinitely fresh arose from the seemingly perpetual sponginess and high volume of these little cakes in grocery stores. Eventually, rumours arose that Twinkies were purely artificial, made up entirely of chemicals which allowed them to stay fresh for years, or even decades, at a time.

Unfortunately, if you happen to open up a time capsule from 1995 and find a still-wrapped Twinkie inside, it would be a good idea to just throw it away. Officially, Twinkies have a shelf life of 25 days, and while this is longer than most cakes, it is nowhere near the multi-year expiration dates attributed to them. We can dream, though.