Have you ever thought that concrete and cement are the same thing? Well, they’re not! Concrete is the tough, gray material used in building things like sidewalks and buildings. Cement, on the other hand, is just one of the ingredients used to make concrete. Cement is a dry powder made from minerals like limestone and clay. When people say they’re mixing cement, they usually mean they’re mixing it with water and sand to make concrete. Once mixed, it becomes a paste that hardens over time.
Do you know the difference between knitting and crocheting? It’s all about the tools! If you see a hook at the end of the tool, it’s crocheting. Crocheting uses one hooked needle and holds one loop at a time. Knitting uses two needles and involves passing loops of yarn back and forth. Crocheted items often look like knots, while knitted items appear flatter.
Think you’re eating yams at Thanksgiving? Think again! You’re probably eating sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family, while yams are part of the Dioscorea family. Sweet potatoes can have orange, white, or purple insides, while yams usually have white or yellow flesh and a rough skin. The confusion started when farmers needed a name for the orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, so they called them yams.
Equality and equity might sound similar, but they’re different. Equality means giving everyone the same resources, while equity means giving resources based on need. Imagine three people of different heights trying to see over a fence. If each gets one box to stand on, that’s equality. But if the shortest person gets two boxes and the tallest gets none, that’s equity.
Disinformation is false information spread on purpose to mislead people. Misinformation is false information spread by mistake. Think of disinformation as being dishonest, while misinformation is just an error.
A factoid isn’t a small fun fact. It’s actually a false fact that people believe because it seems true. The word “factoid” was first used by Norman Mailer in 1973. So, when you hear about fun facts, make sure they’re not factoids!
Gelato and ice cream might seem similar, but they’re quite different. Gelato is denser and softer, with less fat than ice cream. Ice cream in the U.S. must have at least 10% milk fat, while gelato usually has 4% to 9%. Gelato is churned slower, making it denser, and it’s stored at warmer temperatures, making it softer.
Macarons and macaroons are both delicious but different. Macarons are sandwich cookies with filling between two airy wafers. Macaroons are clumps of shredded coconut, sometimes dipped in chocolate. Both originated in Italy, but their paths diverged over time.
Frosting and icing are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same. Frosting is thick and fluffy, made with fat like buttercream. It’s great for cakes. Icing is thinner and focuses more on sugar, making it perfect for cookies. Fondant, a type of icing, is thicker but still considered icing because it’s made from sugar and water.
Jam and jelly both contain sugar, fruit, and pectin. Jam is made from crushed fruit, so it has bits of fruit in it. Jelly is made from fruit juice, making it smoother and more transparent. Jelly is cooked to a firmer consistency, similar to Jell-O.
Caskets and coffins are not the same. A casket is rectangular with a hinged lid, while a coffin is six-sided and has a removable lid. Coffins are tapered and use less material, making them cheaper. They’re also the classic choice for vampire stories!
If you’re in England, you’re also in Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom includes all of Great Britain plus Northern Ireland. Be careful not to call someone from Scotland “English”—they might correct you!
In baseball, a “no-hitter” means no hits, but players can still get on base through walks or errors. A “perfect game” means no one gets on base at all. Every perfect game is a no-hitter, but not every no-hitter is a perfect game.
Iced coffee is hot coffee served over ice, while cold brew is made by steeping coffee grounds in cold water for about 12 hours. Cold brew is smoother and less acidic, often with more caffeine. That’s why it’s usually more expensive at coffee shops.
And that’s a wrap on these commonly confused pairs! What confuses you the most? Share your thoughts, and let’s learn together!
Try creating your own small batch of concrete! Gather some cement, sand, and water. Mix them together and observe how the mixture changes over time. Discuss with your classmates how cement is just one part of the concrete mixture and why it’s important in construction.
Bring some yarn and try your hand at both knitting and crocheting. Use a pair of knitting needles and a crochet hook to create simple patterns. Compare the differences in technique and the final products. Which one do you find easier or more fun?
Organize a taste test with cooked sweet potatoes and yams. Note the differences in taste, texture, and appearance. Discuss why these two are often confused and how you can tell them apart in the future.
Participate in a role-playing activity where you simulate different scenarios of equality and equity. Use props like boxes to demonstrate how resources can be distributed equally or equitably. Reflect on how these concepts apply to real-life situations.
Create a quiz with a mix of factoids and fun facts. Work in pairs to determine which statements are true and which are false. Discuss how factoids can spread and why it’s important to verify information before believing it.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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Concrete and cement are not quite synonymous as you might think. Technically, concrete is the gray, gritty building material used in construction, while cement is an ingredient used to make it. Cement itself is a dry powder comprising various minerals, from limestone and clay to seashells and potentially even volcanic ash. When people say they’re mixing cement, they probably mean they’re mixing it with other materials to make concrete. Those materials include water and some kind of aggregate, like sand. Mix them all together, and you get the workable paste that animals often walk on before it sets.
Hi, I’m Aaron McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss. As someone who often receives emails meant for a different Aaron McCarthy, I know that life is full of pairs of commonly confused things. In this episode of the List Show, we’re going to learn how to tell a bunch of them apart. Is that jam or jelly? Great Britain or the United Kingdom? Disinformation or misinformation? Let’s find out!
The fastest way to tell the difference between knitting and crocheting is to look at the tool used. If there’s a hook at the end, it’s crocheting; no hook means it’s knitting. To crochet, you only need one hooked needle, which holds just one active loop at any given time. Knitting typically uses two needles, stacking loops of yarn and passing them back and forth.
As for what a crocheted garment looks like versus a knitted one, crochet stitches often resemble knots, while knit stitches look flatter and less bulky. Sorry to comfort everyone who thinks they’re eating yams on Thanksgiving—you’re probably eating sweet potatoes, which, by the way, aren’t even potatoes. They belong to the morning glory family, while other potatoes are members of the nightshade family.
Sweet potatoes can have white or purple insides, but the version Americans know best has bright orange flesh and brown or reddish skin. Yams, on the other hand, usually have white or yellow flesh and a thicker, bark-like skin. They belong to the Dioscorea family, also known as the yam family.
So how did the mix-up happen? When early 20th-century farmers started growing sweet potatoes with orange flesh, they needed to distinguish them from the white-fleshed ones already in the market, so they called the orange ones yams.
Just because something is equal doesn’t mean it’s equitable. Equality involves distributing resources evenly, regardless of need, while equity factors in need. One popular illustration of this distinction shows three people of varying heights trying to see over a fence. Each is given one box to stand on—very equal—but the shortest person still can’t see, while the tallest can see without any boxes. To achieve equity, the shortest person should get two boxes, and the tallest should get none.
Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to mislead people, while misinformation is false information spread without intent. Often, the spreaders simply didn’t realize it wasn’t true. Think of it this way: disinformation is dishonest, while misinformation is a mistake.
Speaking of false information, a factoid isn’t a cute little fun fact, though enough people use it in that sense that it’s sort of accepted as correct. Technically, a factoid is a fake fact that people widely believe because it seems like it could be true. Here’s an actual fun fact: Norman Mailer is the first person to have used the word “factoid” in writing; it appeared in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. So, when you’re talking about Mental Floss, please say that we are a hub for fun facts, not factoids. Thank you!
Another fun fact: the word “gelato” is Italian for ice cream, but anyone who has sampled both desserts knows that gelato is denser, softer, and richer. It’s sometimes even described as elastic. The difference is partly due to the natural fat in milk, also known as milk fat or butterfat. In the U.S., the FDA mandates that anything labeled ice cream must contain at least 10% milk fat, while a lot of ice cream has much more than that—somewhere between 14% and 25%. Gelato’s milk fat content, on the other hand, is usually somewhere in the 4% to 9% range. With less fat, gelato flavors taste richer, and while ice cream’s ingredient list sometimes includes egg yolks, gelato typically doesn’t. Gelato is often churned at slower speeds, which contributes to its high density compared to ice cream’s fluffier consistency. Plus, it’s stored at warmer temperatures, which explains why it’s softer than ice cream.
Or maybe you’re more of a cookie person, in which case you probably appreciate a good macaron or macaroon. Modern macarons are sandwich cookies made of two round, airy wafers with filling between them. Macaroons, on the other hand, are lightly browned, crackly clumps of shredded coconut, sometimes dipped in chocolate. It’s possible that the two cookies had similar beginnings; both are thought to have originated in Italy. Some say Catherine de’ Medici brought the macaron from Italy to France in the 1500s. English speakers eventually anglicized the word “macaron” as “macaroon,” which may be how we got “balloon” and “cartoon.” In the late 19th century, shredded coconut began to be used in desserts, which further increased the discrepancy between the two treats. 20th-century French chefs widened that gap when they started adding filling between two macarons and still called it a macaron.
Sorry if this somehow made everything even more confusing! Let’s linger in the dessert aisle for one more moment to talk about frosting and icing. Linguistically, the terms are more or less interchangeable, but most bakers would beg to differ. Frosting is typically thicker and fluffier, thanks to its most important ingredient: fat, often in the form of buttercream or cream cheese. Frosting is thick enough to keep its shape, making it best suited for cupcakes and cakes. Icing is runnier and less fluffy because it focuses less on fat and more on sugar, making it great for decorating cookies with a thin layer that hardens as it dries. That said, not all icing is runny; fondant is generally thicker than frosting, but because its base is sugar and water, it’s still considered icing.
Now, speaking of sweet spreadable substances, what makes jam not jelly? They both contain sugar, fruit, and a starch called pectin. Pectin is naturally found in fruit, but more can be added to jelly and jam to give it a more gelatinous texture. Jelly is made from fruit juice, while jam is made from pureed or crushed fruit. Because it isn’t strained, jam often has bits of fruit in it, while jelly is more transparent and much smoother. Jelly is also cooked to a firmer consistency, so if it seems like Jell-O, it’s probably jelly—or it’s actually Jell-O.
You might think caskets and coffins are the same thing, but funeral directors don’t. The main difference is shape: a casket is perfectly rectangular, while a coffin is a six-sided box, wider at the top than at the bottom. Another distinction is the lid; a casket’s lid typically swings open on hinges, while coffins often have removable lids. Because coffins are tapered, they require less wood or other material to manufacture, making them cheaper. You’re also more likely to find a vampire sleeping inside one!
This mix-up isn’t the only thing people get wrong about burial services. To learn more, check out our video on misconceptions about funerals.
If you’re in England, you’re also in Great Britain and the United Kingdom, but if you’re in the UK, you’re not necessarily in Great Britain or England. The term Great Britain refers to the island on which three countries are located: England, Wales, and Scotland. The United Kingdom includes all of Great Britain plus Northern Ireland and some other territories. In other words, England is a country located on the island of Great Britain, and Great Britain belongs to the United Kingdom. Part of the confusion is that there’s no adjective to describe the United Kingdom in general, so “British” is sometimes used to that effect. But if you call someone from Scotland “English,” expect to get corrected!
In baseball, a “no-hitter,” as its name suggests, means there are no hits, but batters can still get on base in other ways, like walks or catcher interference. Since it’s hard to score any runs without any hits, many no-hitters are also shutouts, but it’s not technically impossible to score during a no-hitter. In a perfect game, the rarest of the three, a team doesn’t let a single player on base. Since there aren’t any hits, a perfect game is also a no-hitter, and since it’s impossible to score without getting on base, every perfect game is a shutout too. It’s only ever happened two dozen times in MLB history.
There’s a clue to the difference between iced coffee and cold brew: iced coffee is just hot coffee on ice or hot coffee that’s been refrigerated and then served on ice. Either way, the coffee was originally brewed hot. Cold brew, on the other hand, is steeped in cold or room temperature water. It takes about 12 hours for coffee grounds to infuse into the water, and the combination of low temperature and slow brewing time creates a less acidic, much smoother beverage. Since the coffee grounds to water ratio is higher in cold brew than in regular coffee, cold brew also often contains more caffeine. All things considered, you can understand why coffee shops tend to charge more for cold brew than for iced coffee—a small price to pay for feeling like you’re injecting caffeine straight into your brain.
And that’s it for this episode of the List Show! What are the things that frustrate you most when people use them incorrectly? Feel free to vent in our comments; we’ll listen. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time!
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This version removes informal language, clarifies some points, and maintains a professional tone while preserving the original content’s essence.
Concrete – A strong building material made from a mixture of cement, sand, gravel, and water that hardens over time – The new science lab was constructed using concrete to ensure it would be durable and safe for experiments.
Cement – A powdery substance made from limestone and clay that is mixed with water and other materials to form concrete – In our science class, we learned how cement is a crucial ingredient in making concrete for building structures.
Knitting – The process of creating fabric by interlocking loops of yarn using needles – During our physics lesson, the teacher compared the structure of DNA to knitting, highlighting how the strands are woven together.
Crocheting – The craft of creating fabric by interlocking loops of yarn with a hooked needle – Our biology teacher used crocheting as an analogy to explain how proteins fold into complex shapes.
Equality – The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities – In our social studies project, we discussed the importance of equality in scientific research, ensuring everyone has access to the same resources and opportunities.
Equity – The quality of being fair and impartial, often by providing different levels of support based on individual needs – Our science club focused on equity by providing extra resources to students who needed more help understanding complex topics.
Disinformation – False information spread deliberately to deceive people – In our critical thinking class, we learned how to identify disinformation in scientific articles and the importance of verifying sources.
Misinformation – False or inaccurate information spread without the intent to deceive – The teacher explained how misinformation about climate change can spread quickly if people don’t check the facts.
Factoid – A brief or trivial piece of information, often assumed to be true – Our science teacher warned us that not every factoid we read online about space is accurate, and we should always verify with reliable sources.
Jam – A situation where something becomes stuck or blocked, often used metaphorically in problem-solving contexts – During the robotics competition, our team encountered a jam in the programming code, which we had to quickly resolve to keep the robot moving.
