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I'm still puzzled that the phrase "I was today years old when ..." makes sense to people. Let's see what we have:
- <today> is a placeholder for the person's age;
- the grammar is wrong unless we view "today" as some sort of placeholder, making the expression funny;
- this is to hide the embarrassment of just having learned something important that they wish they had learned earlier;
- there's nothing wrong in learning something late, making it hard for me to read to whole sentence other than literally: either you think it's cool to mock the lack of knowledge and want to pass for someone who knows a lot already, or you're humble about what you know and you're ignoring grammar completely which is weird for someone who reads.
@mjambon
They're just playing around with the grammar and expressing surprise at the new thing, not embarrassment.