today years old
- idiom
- Slang
:
hoy años
- I was today years old when I found out that bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't.
Examples
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And I was today years old when I learned that when put into water, limes, they sink, the lemons they float.
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She realized she was today years old when she learned that honey never spoils.
-
He was today years old when he discovered that a group of flamingos is called a 'flamboyance.'
Synonyms
1
8.9
To suddenly understand something you did not notice before
Surface Forms
Morphology
Although the words 'today', 'years', and 'old' individually evoke time and age, the peculiar construction (replacing a numeral in 'X years old' with 'today') is a recent humorous internet pattern whose ironic meaning — 'I only just learned this' — depends on cultural/meme knowledge and nonstandard grammar. A B1 learner who knows the constituent words but has not seen the meme will not reliably infer this intended sense, so the expression is idiomatic and unpredictable from its parts.
Etymology
Today years old is a joking way to say you only just found out something: people replace the number in 'years old' with 'today', creating the image that you are as old as the day you learned it. So it means 'I just learned this' or 'I was surprised'.