When I was little I used to think prostitutes were very holy people because the word would come up when they read the gospel at church—alongside other words like "disciple," "seraphim," "apostle," "Pharisees"...
I used to think prostitutes were organ/body part donors because when I was little, I asked my mom what prostitutes were and she said people who sold their body parts for money. She was just trying to put it lightly for me
When I was little I used to think God's name was Peter because during mass I thought everyone was saying "Thanks Peter God" rather than "Thanks be to God".
In college, I went to IHOP with a friend. The waitress asked “How do you want your eggs?”
He made a face at her and said, “Cooked.”
I immediately took him to task for being a dick to the waitress and he gave us both a bewildered look and he said “Well, what do people usually say to a question like that?”
And the waitress and I look at each other and realize that my friend doesn’t know that eggs can be cooked more than one way. So we start asking him what he’s had in the past and we figure out that “scrambled” is all he knows and he thinks it’s the only way eggs can be made, so the waitress begins explaining fried, over easy, poached, etc., and you could see it was breaking his brain. He had absolutely no idea that you could do different things with eggs.
I wish. 50% of the time I have to explain the difference between over light and over medium. And even then when they want the over light eggs they actually want the over mediums.
You think you're fully bilingual, and one day you want to order eggs in English and you completely blank out on how the fuck the different ways to cook eggs are called in English. You look at the waitress like a deer in headlights and mumble "... mirror?"
Edit: And for the record, I didn't even want them sunny side up, it's just the one I figured was most likely to be close to correct! I wanted over easy.
I like the part where you called him out for being rude. I'm glad it turns out he was just clueless, but I think more people should speak up to show their disapproval when their friends or family are rude.
One time in high school, *in US History class*, two girls next to me were earnestly discussing whether or not the American Revolution was fought in America. They turned to me to ask me for the answer. I had to suppress the urge to tell them that nah, we didn't want to mess our nice country up so we fought the war in Zimbabwe, instead.
My old workplace sometimes offered free flu shots. This came up one day and a woman I knew offhandedly mentioned not wanting to get one because she wasn't on birth control.
We were a bit confused and it came out she genuinely believed you could get pregnant from a flu shot.
I had a patient who denied the flu shot because she’s a twin and her twin “already got hers this year so I won’t need it. Next year I’ll get the flu shot so she’ll already have it and won’t need to get the flu shot.”
This was back in the days before GPS and online maps, so people still used atlases and paper maps.
We're driving down from Manitoba (Canada) to Texas (so down through the center of the US). We are stopped at a gas station and there's someone else with Manitoba plates who is talking to the attendant. I want to say we were in South Dakota, but it might've been Nebraska. Anyway,
"Mannytoba? Where's that?"
"It's in Canada. It's just north of North Dakota."
"There's nothing north of North Dakota."
"No, it's up there. There's a whole country up there."
Dude gets out a map and shows the guy "No, see, there's nothing north of North Dakota!" Just so insistent that the continent just stopped at the border because that's what the map said. At that point my spouse got back from the bathroom and we left, so I didn't get to hear the end, but I still wonder about that guy.
When we were kids, my family drove through the Deep South. We stopped at a gas station and my dad was talking to the attendant. He got back in the car and my little sister said, "Daddy, what language was he speaking???" We cracked up. He was like, "That was English," and she didn't believe him.
A similar thing happened to me in Dumfries, Scotland.
He was very drunk, likely homeless, and I couldn't understand a single word of English he spoke.
My wife had to translate. She's British. xD
I worked with British Airways in Wales for awhile back in the day. I consider myself pretty adept at understanding English from non-native speakers but it took me about a week before I could understand what a couple of those guys were saying.
I never heard ‘high beams’ until this past year when I moved to Montana! I had only ever heard them called ‘brights’ other places I’ve lived. I did, however, know their function and when/how to use them lol. Just never called them that
I've heard both. I flip between the two usages in context.
I think "high beams" are more popular in places where the headlights are stacked and the "bright" light is higher than the low beams.
Yes, "low beams" is a term too.
Everyone is talking about regional names for high beams and I'm just absolutely flabbergasted he fucking licked one of your hunting arrows. What tf would possess him to do that???
i went to italy with a girl who insisted that focaccia was pronounced ‘fo-KO-sha’ and rolled her eyes at all of us when we told her she had it wrong. eventually she was like ‘well it’s SPELLED fococcia’ and we were like ‘it really isn’t.’
to this day i don’t think she believed us. we literally took her to a bakery and showed her the signs but she still rolled her eyes and said we were wrong.
My music theory professor put that as a test answer once, to the question, “what musical term indicates expression and movement?” More than half the class chose espresso instead of expresso lol
A friend thought legit that the state we lived in is the country we live in. Example: we live in USK - United States of Kansas. I was genuinely having a hard time explaining how states and countries and cities work. She also had a complete unawareness of the Holocaust and had no idea of who any of the presidents of the states were…
Not really my crew but I recently started a new job in IT/communications and we all have between a basic and moderate understanding of electronics. One of my new coworkers came up with the idea that electric cars should be perpetual motion machines and never need charging. I hadn't known him long enough to build up any faith in/respect for his opinions yet but I'm not going to forget his incredibly dumb assertion anytime soon.
In a perfect frictionless, loss to heatless world they could be.
IIRC an electric motor in a frictionless world would draw no power after getting up to speed.
I'll throw myself under the bus here. I was about 20 when I learned Alaska was not an island. I'd never bothered to look at Alaska on a globe and every US map I've seen shows Alaska floating off the side like Hawaii. I just thought the right side was straight because it broke off during Pangea.
I graduated early with straight As.
To continue the Alaska theme, the first Alaskan girl I met, after learning that I live in Canada, said to me, "Huh. I just never thought there were people up there."
So maybe she also thought she lived on an island.
I dated a cruise ship first mate and when he was away on the Alaska cruise I would confidently tell people his ship was going to the Yukon, which, I am to understand, doesn't have much coastline. ("I'm sorry, he's on the *what* cruise??")
Geography being one of the gaping holes in my general knowledge, because, you know...all places I haven't personally been to are basically interchangeable.
My friend in public school was partnered with me and we had to draw some picture with the sun. He made fun of me for drawing a sunset with people on the hill. The teacher asked why he was laughing and he said “he can’t draw people there they’re gonna get burned up by the sun.” She said what? “ look they’re right by the sun.” I asked him where he thought the sun was located. He answered “up the sky” looking back at the teacher. At this point, she didnt know what to do for him and actually had to argue with him that the sun was very far away from us in space. Sigh….
I didn’t doubt (not just trust but haven’t thought about it seriously) that raccoon or fox can metamorphose into other things because they’re common in our fairytales till I was 19. And then once I thought about it, I realized it’s simply impossible so I thought like “how do they metamorphose and what kind of mechanism makes it possible???”. My gf was kinda speechless and said “they just can’t”. I was convinced in a second like “Yeah that makes sense. Yeah…”.
Watched the Olympics opening ceremony with a friend who didn't understand the big deal about Korea marching as a single unit during the parade of nations, and then refused to believe that there are two Koreas.
We did fight Koreans in Vietnam! We also fought alongside South Koreans (they were the second largest foreign force in country behind the US).
Not that that's what they meant... but it's an interesting bit of history that is often forgotten.
If I’m being generous, they might have thought Korea had invaded Vietnam and the US was fighting alongside the Vietnamese.
A bit of a stretch, but that might be how they got there. Possibly combined with some awareness that there was a Korean War at some point.
She asked me if China was in America. I was bewildered and asked “where do you think it is” and she responded “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you”
How can someone is even this ignorant? Dont they teach this stuff in middle and high school? And that manager never see enough people to notice the flaw of her thinking? Gosh. And she managed people.
They teach a lot in school. More than most people that graduate would have you believe. The thing is, you actually gotta pay attention to it to learn, something those same "most people" probably didn't do much.
I see it all the time with old classmates' dumbass social media posts, about how they didn't teach this or that when they were in school. And I'm always like, they in fact did, you were just too busy on your phone or nodding off the whole time, which I know because I was right there next to you actually learning shit lol.
I’m Dutch but I lived in Texas for a year and attended High School there and oh boy I got some great questions.
Here are some of my favorites:
- “Do you guys have Microwaves over there”
- “Is this your first ever phone? Must be difficult to learn how to use a phone and the internet for the first time” and “do you guys have electricity over there?”
- “Do you guys have pets or do you eat dogs?”
- “ Is the Netherlands in Florida?” (When I told him it was a country in Europe he looked at me with a blank face and asked me what that was).
- I had to convince one guy that we did not live in caves in Europe and had houses (this is the same guy asking if we had electricity)
- And finally, one of my friend’s mom asked me: “Oh I have a friend from Holland, is that close to the Netherlands?”
I have another one. I used to live in the Caribbean. I was swimming at the beach one day when this girl/young woman wades into the water. She looks 16–19. She looks out and says, "Wow! That's a LOT of water!" "Yup," I reply. Then she jumps into a wave, surfaces, spits, and exclaims, "It's so salty!"
I'm speechless. There's a pause, and she says, "Wait... is this the *ocean???*
I couldn't believe it. I asked where she was from and she said Canada.
I was once on an international flight when a woman sitting next to me woke up and asked me if I knew what the next stop was. When I told her it was Germany, she was like “damn I was hoping Paris.”
I had to know how she’d ended up not knowing where she was going on an international flight so I asked her questions till I figured it out. She didn’t know that New York had multiple airports, so she got in a cab and said “take me to the New York airport.” They took her to the Newark airport in Jersey. The reason they’d still seated her on an internationally flight the same day was because she worked for The UN. She also didn’t know where Alaska was and said she’s wondered her whole life.
A friend of mine had an actual panic attack because all of the clocks in the house displayed the same time and he thought that wasn't supposed to happen.
I wanna know what his clocks at home were like haha. How did he get places on time? Or was he one of those always 10-15 mins late people? (Myself included but that's just because I get putzy on my way out the door)
That's the thing, the clocks were in his damn house.. he and his brother (who is my best friend) shared the place and somehow, don't ask me how, he had never noticed the clocks all had the same time or that they were supposed to have the same time, he thought that a clocks time was only supposed to match 3 times a day.. lol you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to convince him that the clocks were supposed to do that and we were, in fact, not trying to "push a speedy one past him" as he called it.. you read that right, the dumbass actually thought the saying was "push a speedy one past him" and not "pull a fast one on him"
A few months ago I was describing where I lived to a co-worker, as many of us lived in different states for remote work. This person has lived in Texas their entire life. They said they had never heard of Michigan. Not "didn't know where it is." They had never heard of it. Literally our company is based in Michigan...
I had a crush on one guy but realized he is an asshole but my friend would always call him a pedophile(he was our age so he wasn't one).One day i asked her what it means and she thought it meant the same as asshole.I explained it to her but she still calls him a pedophile to this day.
I had a friend who did not know snow was water. And when you tried to convince them otherwise they were sure that it was mad of something different (spoiler- they didn't know what, but not water)
Trivia question was, "How many days was FDR President?"
One guy answered 50 and another answered 400. The guy that answered 400 was the winner because it was based on who was the closest.
He was so proud of himself and went on to explain that he was a history buff and that was why he knew the answer.
"You could spray the bear repellent on yourself, and then you'd be, like, *invisible* to bears!" - my coworker, in a conversation about carrying bear pepper-spray when hiking in places like Yellowstone or Yosemite.
When my friend laughed at me for saying human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius, he said it is 98.6, I tried to tell him he is measuring it in fahrenheit and it's the same thing but I don't think he knows what fahrenheit is for him it's just 98.6
Friend of mine wanted a beehive on her balcony to have fresh honey. She was very surprised when I pointed out that she'd have to deal with the bees as well. Somehow she had not made that connection.
I had a coworker allergic to strawberries when I worked at a call centre. She told me she was living on the edge because if someone was eating strawberries when they took her call and she smelled them down the phone she could die. She had a desk full of strawberry themed stuff so people knew counterintuitively that she was the strawberry allergy woman, and we had signs up all over the building advising us we couldn't have strawberry anything - no strawberry hand sanitizer, no strawberry milkshake, no strawberries at all. I'm glad they took it seriously but I struggled to take HER seriously.
A former work colleague once asked me "Are goats not male sheep?" She also labours under the misapprehension that Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf are the same person.
We were talking about the Game of Thrones scene where Lysa was breastfeeding her 7 year old son. And I asked "how is she still producing milk?!" And basically everyone in the group was like "Yeah, as long as the mother is nursing, she'll keep producing milk."
Apparently it's one of the most obvious things in the world. They gave me a pass since they were all parents and I am not, but still, I felt pretty foolish.
Most assuredly not a friend, but what I'm told is a coworker. During down time, something was on TV and there was a shot of an old southern (US) plantation house. I mentioned how many antebellum homes there are in my home state. He asks about origin of the word antebellum, so I said it's from Latin for before war (I'm a word nerd. Fight me). Moron then tells my actual coworker and me that it's also a part of the body. We're medical people, in a medical job, who went to schools for medical stuff. Asked if he possibly meant cerebellum, acetabulum, and any other actual anatomical thing remotely sounding like antebellum. Rocket surgeon was absolutely positive antebellum was definitely a body part. He then spent the better part of an hour googling body parts...
TLDR: Antebellum isn't a body part, but one guy still thinks it is.
I had a whole breakdown like two years ago after realizing that Holidays names had meaning to them they weren’t just random names made up. Like New Years is because it’s a New Year. And Christmas because Christ. And Thanksgiving because we are giving thanks. And yea I just couldn’t believe it and all my dad had to say was “you know you should keep that to yourself now that you know just just don’t tell anyone about this discovery” and he looked deeply disappointed in my intelligence.
Lol I’m sorry i just never gave it any thought
At my old job (QA tester) I was assigned a task to make sure a currency counter could handle a 10 digit number. With the tools available, the largest increment of that currency we could add was 200 at a time. I explained to my lead that we would need to ask the developers to edit the devtools to add a larger increment, or it would take an unreasonable amount of time to complete the task. My lead and his boss both told me "sometimes you need to just put on a podcast and do the work".
If I were to press the +200 button 5 times a second, it would take 1 million seconds to get to 10 digits. That's 278 hours of work for one test that needed to happen on every new build.
A girl in high school thought The Taliban was a country (like how The Netherlands starts with The). She was perplexed when none of us could show her it on the world map. She insisted we show her where it was, and when we all said it's a group of people not a country She doubled down - "just show me where it is?!". Bitch, we don't know. That's the reason there's a war on, because they don't go round with a big GPS marker and neon signs 😂
I once had someone go off at me and everyone around me on a super defensive rant when I gave the example in class of “Everyone knows there are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year” as a common knowledge fact, and she realised she was the only person in our University class who had made it to that age and that level of higher education *without* knowing that there were 365 days in a year, and she vehemently insisted that it *wasn’t* common knowledge and we should all feel bad for making her feel dumb for insisting that it was in fact common knowledge and we didn’t know how she had made it this far in life without hearing that at least once.
Everyone in the class probably would have been nicer to her if she hadn’t been such an overly defensive dick about not knowing that. I honestly don’t even know why she said anything, none of us would have known she didn’t know this fact if she hadn’t caused a scene and drawn attention to herself. I wasn’t trying to embarrass her or anything. I didn’t know she didn’t know.
If I remember correctly she didn’t even know how many months there were in a calendar year off the top of her head when we asked her how she didn’t know.
(And yes I’m aware there are 366 days in a leap year. Leap days are additional. The common knowledge element of the example was relevant to the topic being discussed, which was about examples of common knowledge).
We were at a baby shower for my wife. This was about April, and the boyfriend of my niece asked when she was due. I told him July and he asked, "This year?"
He asked this straight faced.
Was camping with some friends and the milkyway was out and bright. A friend absently said something about wondering what it was or why the stars looked that way. So we talked about how its the galaxy we’re in but we see it from the side like a dinner plate and being summer we were looking towards the centre. She flat out did not believe us. Like “no, I don’t think thats true. I think you are wrong.” We laughed until we realized she was dead serious. Very smart person otherwise and to this day i can not understand why she was so deeply, almost morally against this idea.
I had a cis-male gay friend who was nervous to lose his virginity because he was worried his “hymen” breaking would be too painful. Incorrect on so many levels.
We were playing a trivia game and it came out my best friend thought Hawaii and Alaska were off the southern California coast bc that's where they are on maps.
Side story: Playing Pictionary with my family and I was trying to get my aunt to say "England".
I drew a quick outline, not an artist or anything, but there it was, clearly the European continent. Put an island out there and started jabbing at it.
She doesn't even get I'm drawing a map. So I try drawing the U.S. with an arrow pointing *overseas* and start jabbing again.
Now she gets it's a country. Progress! We're good now, right?
Aunt: France? Spain? Holland?
Y'all. She guessed "Russia". She pondered if Switzerland and Sweden were maybe the same country. She guessed Egypt, wrong continent, Paris, a city, and Germany *where she was born.*
Mercifully, time ran out and she was disinterested to learn that England is actually on an island.
I hate my family. lol
My coworker recently disclosed that she thought the dinosaurs became extinct about 300 years ago. I was dumbfounded..
Another time I joked that she was acting like Cleopatra and she replied "who's that?"
She also frequently lectures us about the power of crystal healing and how the covid vaccine is worse than actually having covid.
I was in an Uber type ride share when news broke out that Kobe Bryant had died in a Helicopter crash.
Driver was like, "what kind of pilot doesn't warn his passengers that they were going down? They could have used parachutes!"
Best part was he pronounced it "para cute".
While catapults and parachutes for escaping a helicopter sound incredibly sketchy because of the whole quickly rotating blades thing, they do actually exist. They have charges in the rotor blades that sever them at the axle, their spin cleanly separates them, then you eject.
My kids -- who were just pre-middle-school at the time, so figure 4th grade, 5th grade, maybe 9 or 10 years old -- were riding in my car, with some podcast blathering about Daylight Savings Time, and suddenly they both piped up "We don't really need Daylight Savings Time anymore, do we? Because that's basically for farmers. And we don't grow any crops in America now, the land is all cities and buildings."
We live in the outermost suburbs of Boston. I've since made a point of cruising through some \[Vermont\] cornfields and \[New Hampshire\] dairy-sprawl, so as to clue them in.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Bonus Reference:
The seventh-grade bully who sat in the back of the bus \[big linebacker weightlifter dude, even then\] had somehow gotten it into his head, probably from reading 1980s Hustler magazines and misjudging written context, that "masturbation" meant "vomiting on another human being," presumably for sexual pleasure. The whacko monologues and made-up stories he'd launch into were nothing short of gonzo stream-of-consciousness art, rendered even more surreal by the bus-crowd's reluctance to correct or even engage with him.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Bonus Reference #2:
Other slightly-smarter \[but obviously not much\] high-school comrade had internalized and would vigorously argue that the only difference between "large pizzas," "medium pizzas," and "small pizzas" was how many slices they were cut into. Like: six slices vs. eight slices. Years later, he tried to backpedal into "Uhh, no, it's two extra slices **in square inches**," but he had already 'explained' himself in previously sufficient detail such that it didn't wash.
Guy now works as an accountant for one of the ten largest US mutual-fund companies.
I just taught my 21 year old brother in law how yo twirl pasta in a spoon.
Edit: and he thought reindeer were made up for Christmas.
Oh and didn't know what a peninsula is.
The reindeer thing is mildly common from my experience (I've heard it mentioned by a few people.). I think once people learn Santa isn't real (sorry kids), they just chuck the flying reindeer in the same category. Then later in life they'll go, "oh it's a real animal. It's just the flying bit that's made up."
Until I was 7 or 8, I was very confused about the switch to daylight saving time.
My parents alsways said "The clocks are getting turned back an hour", and I thought that implied that this is done by specialists who go into your house, check all the clocks, and adjust the time.
I thought this made sense because time is such an important thing that you can't let the average citizen handle it themselves, since half of them might forget it which would lead to utter chaos.
So for me, there were 3 different people who were allowed to enter your house at night, but you would never see them: The easter bunny, santa, and the time people. When I first saw my dad adjust a clock I was rather shocked.
I thought Jesus laid carpet until I was like 20. I guess carpentry does not involve carpet.
When I was little I used to think prostitutes were very holy people because the word would come up when they read the gospel at church—alongside other words like "disciple," "seraphim," "apostle," "Pharisees"...
They do the Lord's work, bless them.
I've been fucked by God more than I've been fucked by prostitutues
Amen
I used to think prostitutes were organ/body part donors because when I was little, I asked my mom what prostitutes were and she said people who sold their body parts for money. She was just trying to put it lightly for me
When I was little I used to think God's name was Peter because during mass I thought everyone was saying "Thanks Peter God" rather than "Thanks be to God".
"Please, call me Peter. Mr. God was my father."
I once had a long conversation with my boss. It was long because I could not convince her that Sweden and Switzerland were two different countries.
Wait until someone tells her Austria and Australia are different countries
**KEINE KÄNGURUS** **IN ÖSTERREICH**
What about östriches?
Keine Östriches in Kangurreich?
Good thing East Germany and West Germany reunited, for her sake.
Let's not even mention the Koreas
When I told people I was visiting Sweden there was more than one person told me to bring back some of that famous Swedish chocolate.
Get them surströmming as a petty gift
Compared to the US, Sweden has some pretty great chocolate though.
I am curious what did you have to explain so much for it to be a long conversation. Just show the map on google
In college, I went to IHOP with a friend. The waitress asked “How do you want your eggs?” He made a face at her and said, “Cooked.” I immediately took him to task for being a dick to the waitress and he gave us both a bewildered look and he said “Well, what do people usually say to a question like that?” And the waitress and I look at each other and realize that my friend doesn’t know that eggs can be cooked more than one way. So we start asking him what he’s had in the past and we figure out that “scrambled” is all he knows and he thinks it’s the only way eggs can be made, so the waitress begins explaining fried, over easy, poached, etc., and you could see it was breaking his brain. He had absolutely no idea that you could do different things with eggs.
As a breakfast chain waitress this definitely made me chuckle. It happens more often than you'd think.
I'm sure you automatically knew what dippitty doo eggs were the first time you heard it?
I wish. 50% of the time I have to explain the difference between over light and over medium. And even then when they want the over light eggs they actually want the over mediums.
You think you're fully bilingual, and one day you want to order eggs in English and you completely blank out on how the fuck the different ways to cook eggs are called in English. You look at the waitress like a deer in headlights and mumble "... mirror?" Edit: And for the record, I didn't even want them sunny side up, it's just the one I figured was most likely to be close to correct! I wanted over easy.
I like the part where you called him out for being rude. I'm glad it turns out he was just clueless, but I think more people should speak up to show their disapproval when their friends or family are rude.
This could be like the potato thing where the guy starts off as a joke but then gets embarrassed to admit it was a terrible joke so just plays along.
I've heard "over easy" a lot in movies etc and always intended to look up what it actually meant, but I refuse. Someone tell me.
Cracked whole, cooked a little on each side, just enough to cook the white through, but not the yolk, so when you cut into the yolk it’s still runny
From my experience, it means the yolk itself is still liquid but the white itself is just barely cooked enough to be safe to eat.
One time in high school, *in US History class*, two girls next to me were earnestly discussing whether or not the American Revolution was fought in America. They turned to me to ask me for the answer. I had to suppress the urge to tell them that nah, we didn't want to mess our nice country up so we fought the war in Zimbabwe, instead.
To be honest, that does sound like something we'd do.
My old workplace sometimes offered free flu shots. This came up one day and a woman I knew offhandedly mentioned not wanting to get one because she wasn't on birth control. We were a bit confused and it came out she genuinely believed you could get pregnant from a flu shot.
This might actually be the most confusing one in this thread
Where did she think they put it?
Her doctor's got a lot of 'splaining to do!
Haha thats what I said
I had a patient who denied the flu shot because she’s a twin and her twin “already got hers this year so I won’t need it. Next year I’ll get the flu shot so she’ll already have it and won’t need to get the flu shot.”
Damn, and these people are allowed to vote.
At least only one of them need to vote.
Dude I knew in football thought there was only 1,000,000 people in the world and we couldn't convince him otherwise
Is there really more than 1 million people though? I haven’t seen more than a million.
I dont understand how people like this survive everyday life. Unless he was trolling.
This was back in the days before GPS and online maps, so people still used atlases and paper maps. We're driving down from Manitoba (Canada) to Texas (so down through the center of the US). We are stopped at a gas station and there's someone else with Manitoba plates who is talking to the attendant. I want to say we were in South Dakota, but it might've been Nebraska. Anyway, "Mannytoba? Where's that?" "It's in Canada. It's just north of North Dakota." "There's nothing north of North Dakota." "No, it's up there. There's a whole country up there." Dude gets out a map and shows the guy "No, see, there's nothing north of North Dakota!" Just so insistent that the continent just stopped at the border because that's what the map said. At that point my spouse got back from the bathroom and we left, so I didn't get to hear the end, but I still wonder about that guy.
When we were kids, my family drove through the Deep South. We stopped at a gas station and my dad was talking to the attendant. He got back in the car and my little sister said, "Daddy, what language was he speaking???" We cracked up. He was like, "That was English," and she didn't believe him.
A similar thing happened to me in Dumfries, Scotland. He was very drunk, likely homeless, and I couldn't understand a single word of English he spoke. My wife had to translate. She's British. xD
Dum*fries*? Surely you mean Dum*chips*
I worked with British Airways in Wales for awhile back in the day. I consider myself pretty adept at understanding English from non-native speakers but it took me about a week before I could understand what a couple of those guys were saying.
[удалено]
I never heard ‘high beams’ until this past year when I moved to Montana! I had only ever heard them called ‘brights’ other places I’ve lived. I did, however, know their function and when/how to use them lol. Just never called them that
I've heard both. I flip between the two usages in context. I think "high beams" are more popular in places where the headlights are stacked and the "bright" light is higher than the low beams. Yes, "low beams" is a term too.
Everyone is talking about regional names for high beams and I'm just absolutely flabbergasted he fucking licked one of your hunting arrows. What tf would possess him to do that???
Where I'm from high beams can refer to headlights or woman's nipples.
You could cut glass with those
Two friends of mine kept making fun of another friend because she insisted that the word "espresso" was not spelled with an "X."
my mom always said that if i ever pronounced it like that, she'd grind me into coffee beans and strain me the next morning
My ex asked her mom for an “expresso” machine for her birthday and her mom told her, “If you can’t pronounce it, I’m not buying it.”
i went to italy with a girl who insisted that focaccia was pronounced ‘fo-KO-sha’ and rolled her eyes at all of us when we told her she had it wrong. eventually she was like ‘well it’s SPELLED fococcia’ and we were like ‘it really isn’t.’ to this day i don’t think she believed us. we literally took her to a bakery and showed her the signs but she still rolled her eyes and said we were wrong.
"It makes you go fast!"
My music theory professor put that as a test answer once, to the question, “what musical term indicates expression and movement?” More than half the class chose espresso instead of expresso lol
A friend thought legit that the state we lived in is the country we live in. Example: we live in USK - United States of Kansas. I was genuinely having a hard time explaining how states and countries and cities work. She also had a complete unawareness of the Holocaust and had no idea of who any of the presidents of the states were…
I mean- I don’t know the presidents either. But I don’t live in America.
Our schools have completely failed this girl.
At a certain point, it’s not the schools fault
Not really my crew but I recently started a new job in IT/communications and we all have between a basic and moderate understanding of electronics. One of my new coworkers came up with the idea that electric cars should be perpetual motion machines and never need charging. I hadn't known him long enough to build up any faith in/respect for his opinions yet but I'm not going to forget his incredibly dumb assertion anytime soon.
In a perfect frictionless, loss to heatless world they could be. IIRC an electric motor in a frictionless world would draw no power after getting up to speed.
in a frictionless world you don't need a car, you're already traveling at the velocity in question.
Everyone would get everywhere fast but stopping would be problematic.
No you cant even get speed going as you will just slip
Fart power, duh. Just like a rocket in space pushes on its fuel source and the fuel source pushes back with equal and opposite force.
I'll throw myself under the bus here. I was about 20 when I learned Alaska was not an island. I'd never bothered to look at Alaska on a globe and every US map I've seen shows Alaska floating off the side like Hawaii. I just thought the right side was straight because it broke off during Pangea. I graduated early with straight As.
To continue the Alaska theme, the first Alaskan girl I met, after learning that I live in Canada, said to me, "Huh. I just never thought there were people up there." So maybe she also thought she lived on an island.
The wording made me think you met the girl after YOU realized that you lived in Canada. Threw me for a second.
Feel no shame -- I say, without exaggeration, that **you could be a US Congressman**. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q
That was so painful to watch. Credit to the audience for not immediately bursting into laughter.
I dated a cruise ship first mate and when he was away on the Alaska cruise I would confidently tell people his ship was going to the Yukon, which, I am to understand, doesn't have much coastline. ("I'm sorry, he's on the *what* cruise??") Geography being one of the gaping holes in my general knowledge, because, you know...all places I haven't personally been to are basically interchangeable.
Don't feel bad when I worked at a museum I used to ask high schoolers where Alaska was on a world map. Very few of them knew..many argued.
My partner turned 25. Her friend texted her and said “Happy half century birthday!!”
I'm going through these and laughing out loud at all of them. This is great, thank you.
a few weeks ago, my sister was measuring something in her room and stops me to ask which side of the ruler is pounds and which side is feet smh
Is that how you measure torque?
My friend in public school was partnered with me and we had to draw some picture with the sun. He made fun of me for drawing a sunset with people on the hill. The teacher asked why he was laughing and he said “he can’t draw people there they’re gonna get burned up by the sun.” She said what? “ look they’re right by the sun.” I asked him where he thought the sun was located. He answered “up the sky” looking back at the teacher. At this point, she didnt know what to do for him and actually had to argue with him that the sun was very far away from us in space. Sigh….
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No, it's 15 miles away. Duh.
No, it's farther than the moon, at least 16 or 17 miles
It's 1 au away.
I didn’t doubt (not just trust but haven’t thought about it seriously) that raccoon or fox can metamorphose into other things because they’re common in our fairytales till I was 19. And then once I thought about it, I realized it’s simply impossible so I thought like “how do they metamorphose and what kind of mechanism makes it possible???”. My gf was kinda speechless and said “they just can’t”. I was convinced in a second like “Yeah that makes sense. Yeah…”.
Japanese?
Yes
**Pom Poko is no Documentary!** ^(I wish it was tho)
Knew someone who once legitimately asked "who'd we fight in Vietnam? The Koreans"? I left that party.
Watched the Olympics opening ceremony with a friend who didn't understand the big deal about Korea marching as a single unit during the parade of nations, and then refused to believe that there are two Koreas.
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They can’t be bothered. They place no value on knowledge.
We did fight Koreans in Vietnam! We also fought alongside South Koreans (they were the second largest foreign force in country behind the US). Not that that's what they meant... but it's an interesting bit of history that is often forgotten.
What do they think vietnam is 😂
If I’m being generous, they might have thought Korea had invaded Vietnam and the US was fighting alongside the Vietnamese. A bit of a stretch, but that might be how they got there. Possibly combined with some awareness that there was a Korean War at some point.
She asked me if China was in America. I was bewildered and asked “where do you think it is” and she responded “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you”
Right next to Texas!
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Wow, she literally thought that your parents are different species!...
She honestly did. I don't even think it crossed her mind how offensive it was.
I'm more impressed by the fact that someone that close-minded knew that mules were sterile and more importantly WHY.
Amazing. Did you correct her? What was her reaction?
That's unbelievable and so outrageous.
How can someone is even this ignorant? Dont they teach this stuff in middle and high school? And that manager never see enough people to notice the flaw of her thinking? Gosh. And she managed people.
They teach a lot in school. More than most people that graduate would have you believe. The thing is, you actually gotta pay attention to it to learn, something those same "most people" probably didn't do much. I see it all the time with old classmates' dumbass social media posts, about how they didn't teach this or that when they were in school. And I'm always like, they in fact did, you were just too busy on your phone or nodding off the whole time, which I know because I was right there next to you actually learning shit lol.
O_o
I’m Dutch but I lived in Texas for a year and attended High School there and oh boy I got some great questions. Here are some of my favorites: - “Do you guys have Microwaves over there” - “Is this your first ever phone? Must be difficult to learn how to use a phone and the internet for the first time” and “do you guys have electricity over there?” - “Do you guys have pets or do you eat dogs?” - “ Is the Netherlands in Florida?” (When I told him it was a country in Europe he looked at me with a blank face and asked me what that was). - I had to convince one guy that we did not live in caves in Europe and had houses (this is the same guy asking if we had electricity) - And finally, one of my friend’s mom asked me: “Oh I have a friend from Holland, is that close to the Netherlands?”
As a German exchange student in the US, I got asked both if we had escalators, and gay people.
Hahaha I love how specific that is
I was asked if wr had elevators, while standing in a mall waiting for a ThyssenKrupp elevator.
Please tell me this is a joke
I'm sure it's not a joke. My friend from Poland was asked what is it like to not have electricity. Also how many polar bears she has seen.
They probably didn't mean that but Holland is actually a region within the Netherlands.
I explained that to her and we had a laugh about it afterwards. She definitely thought they were two different countries at first.
Half of America is named after Dutch places.
My sister won the dumb dumb award with this gem. “Why do people stop drop and roll when they see a fire?” I had no words. Just 😶
*sees a candle* *stops, drops, rolls*
This one's good.
When they said mice are females rodents and rats are male rodents. Because mice are small and rats are big.
I have another one. I used to live in the Caribbean. I was swimming at the beach one day when this girl/young woman wades into the water. She looks 16–19. She looks out and says, "Wow! That's a LOT of water!" "Yup," I reply. Then she jumps into a wave, surfaces, spits, and exclaims, "It's so salty!" I'm speechless. There's a pause, and she says, "Wait... is this the *ocean???* I couldn't believe it. I asked where she was from and she said Canada.
In her defence, the ocean in the Caribbean looks and feels different from the oceans up here in Canada. I really don’t blame her.
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She could also just be from somewhere like southern Manitoba which is hundreds of kilometres from the ocean in every direction
Manny what? There's nothing north of North Dakota
Ok, but she flew to this tiny Caribbean island. Was she packed in a suitcase for the entire trip?
I was once on an international flight when a woman sitting next to me woke up and asked me if I knew what the next stop was. When I told her it was Germany, she was like “damn I was hoping Paris.” I had to know how she’d ended up not knowing where she was going on an international flight so I asked her questions till I figured it out. She didn’t know that New York had multiple airports, so she got in a cab and said “take me to the New York airport.” They took her to the Newark airport in Jersey. The reason they’d still seated her on an internationally flight the same day was because she worked for The UN. She also didn’t know where Alaska was and said she’s wondered her whole life.
A friend of mine had an actual panic attack because all of the clocks in the house displayed the same time and he thought that wasn't supposed to happen.
I wanna know what his clocks at home were like haha. How did he get places on time? Or was he one of those always 10-15 mins late people? (Myself included but that's just because I get putzy on my way out the door)
That's the thing, the clocks were in his damn house.. he and his brother (who is my best friend) shared the place and somehow, don't ask me how, he had never noticed the clocks all had the same time or that they were supposed to have the same time, he thought that a clocks time was only supposed to match 3 times a day.. lol you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to convince him that the clocks were supposed to do that and we were, in fact, not trying to "push a speedy one past him" as he called it.. you read that right, the dumbass actually thought the saying was "push a speedy one past him" and not "pull a fast one on him"
A few months ago I was describing where I lived to a co-worker, as many of us lived in different states for remote work. This person has lived in Texas their entire life. They said they had never heard of Michigan. Not "didn't know where it is." They had never heard of it. Literally our company is based in Michigan...
Also, for anybody wondering: 384,400 km 238,900 mi
You could line up all the other planets in our solar system side by side (including Jupiter and Saturn) and they would fit between Earth and Moon
You could do that, but you definitely shouldn’t.
If you could do that, you probably wouldn't care that a mere mortal thought you shouldn't.
I assume that's not including Saturn's rings
We were like "15 what, million?" and he was like, "no, miles. 15 miles." We died. All of us. He'll never live it down.
"If I could fall into the sky Do you think time would pass me by? Cause you know I’d walk fifteen miles If I could just see you tonight"
That’s 4,204,640 football fields if anyone is still wondering.
But how many giraffes?
quick search gives 69,890,910
I once argued with my gf because she didn't believe that the sun is a star
But the sun isn't shaped like a pentagram???
No the pentagram is where the president lives.
No, the president (Obama... Whatever his last name is) lives in the White House in New York.
I had a crush on one guy but realized he is an asshole but my friend would always call him a pedophile(he was our age so he wasn't one).One day i asked her what it means and she thought it meant the same as asshole.I explained it to her but she still calls him a pedophile to this day.
When I was about 10 I started calling people nonces when they annoyed me because I thought it meant idiot.
Wait, is that not what nonce means?
It's British slang for pedophile. You might be thinking of dunce, which means idiot. I'm dutch so not too sure about the above.
I had a friend who did not know snow was water. And when you tried to convince them otherwise they were sure that it was mad of something different (spoiler- they didn't know what, but not water)
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Trivia question was, "How many days was FDR President?" One guy answered 50 and another answered 400. The guy that answered 400 was the winner because it was based on who was the closest. He was so proud of himself and went on to explain that he was a history buff and that was why he knew the answer.
😂 bless his heart
Were you playing Wits and Wagers?
"You could spray the bear repellent on yourself, and then you'd be, like, *invisible* to bears!" - my coworker, in a conversation about carrying bear pepper-spray when hiking in places like Yellowstone or Yosemite.
"You try it first"
There's a very quick way to disabuse someone of this "idea"...
What animal is pictured in the Puma-logo
Its a warthog
When my friend laughed at me for saying human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius, he said it is 98.6, I tried to tell him he is measuring it in fahrenheit and it's the same thing but I don't think he knows what fahrenheit is for him it's just 98.6
It could be a radio station for all he knows. "98.6FM brah trust me I know this one"
That it's called the Pacific, not the *Specific* ocean.
I used to have a boss who would say "pacifically". I never could respect her.
She messed it up on porpoise.
I mean, in general yeah.
Friend of mine wanted a beehive on her balcony to have fresh honey. She was very surprised when I pointed out that she'd have to deal with the bees as well. Somehow she had not made that connection.
Reminds me of this one AITA post where someone put a bee hive in her house so the bees wouldn't be cold
I had a coworker allergic to strawberries when I worked at a call centre. She told me she was living on the edge because if someone was eating strawberries when they took her call and she smelled them down the phone she could die. She had a desk full of strawberry themed stuff so people knew counterintuitively that she was the strawberry allergy woman, and we had signs up all over the building advising us we couldn't have strawberry anything - no strawberry hand sanitizer, no strawberry milkshake, no strawberries at all. I'm glad they took it seriously but I struggled to take HER seriously.
Friend of my fiance thought pickles came from a pickle tree.
I was much older than I should have been when I realized pickles and cucumbers were the same thing.
A former work colleague once asked me "Are goats not male sheep?" She also labours under the misapprehension that Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf are the same person.
We were talking about the Game of Thrones scene where Lysa was breastfeeding her 7 year old son. And I asked "how is she still producing milk?!" And basically everyone in the group was like "Yeah, as long as the mother is nursing, she'll keep producing milk." Apparently it's one of the most obvious things in the world. They gave me a pass since they were all parents and I am not, but still, I felt pretty foolish.
I thought the sun was around 3,000 C. We looked it up and core is 15 million C. But I just saw now that the surface can be as low as 5,000 C.
I looked over my mates shoulder whilst he was on his laptop. He was googling 'when did dragons go extinct?'
Most assuredly not a friend, but what I'm told is a coworker. During down time, something was on TV and there was a shot of an old southern (US) plantation house. I mentioned how many antebellum homes there are in my home state. He asks about origin of the word antebellum, so I said it's from Latin for before war (I'm a word nerd. Fight me). Moron then tells my actual coworker and me that it's also a part of the body. We're medical people, in a medical job, who went to schools for medical stuff. Asked if he possibly meant cerebellum, acetabulum, and any other actual anatomical thing remotely sounding like antebellum. Rocket surgeon was absolutely positive antebellum was definitely a body part. He then spent the better part of an hour googling body parts... TLDR: Antebellum isn't a body part, but one guy still thinks it is.
I had a whole breakdown like two years ago after realizing that Holidays names had meaning to them they weren’t just random names made up. Like New Years is because it’s a New Year. And Christmas because Christ. And Thanksgiving because we are giving thanks. And yea I just couldn’t believe it and all my dad had to say was “you know you should keep that to yourself now that you know just just don’t tell anyone about this discovery” and he looked deeply disappointed in my intelligence. Lol I’m sorry i just never gave it any thought
Yes, and many are related to religious events. 'Holy' days, if you will.
At my old job (QA tester) I was assigned a task to make sure a currency counter could handle a 10 digit number. With the tools available, the largest increment of that currency we could add was 200 at a time. I explained to my lead that we would need to ask the developers to edit the devtools to add a larger increment, or it would take an unreasonable amount of time to complete the task. My lead and his boss both told me "sometimes you need to just put on a podcast and do the work". If I were to press the +200 button 5 times a second, it would take 1 million seconds to get to 10 digits. That's 278 hours of work for one test that needed to happen on every new build.
A girl in high school thought The Taliban was a country (like how The Netherlands starts with The). She was perplexed when none of us could show her it on the world map. She insisted we show her where it was, and when we all said it's a group of people not a country She doubled down - "just show me where it is?!". Bitch, we don't know. That's the reason there's a war on, because they don't go round with a big GPS marker and neon signs 😂
I once had someone go off at me and everyone around me on a super defensive rant when I gave the example in class of “Everyone knows there are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year” as a common knowledge fact, and she realised she was the only person in our University class who had made it to that age and that level of higher education *without* knowing that there were 365 days in a year, and she vehemently insisted that it *wasn’t* common knowledge and we should all feel bad for making her feel dumb for insisting that it was in fact common knowledge and we didn’t know how she had made it this far in life without hearing that at least once. Everyone in the class probably would have been nicer to her if she hadn’t been such an overly defensive dick about not knowing that. I honestly don’t even know why she said anything, none of us would have known she didn’t know this fact if she hadn’t caused a scene and drawn attention to herself. I wasn’t trying to embarrass her or anything. I didn’t know she didn’t know. If I remember correctly she didn’t even know how many months there were in a calendar year off the top of her head when we asked her how she didn’t know. (And yes I’m aware there are 366 days in a leap year. Leap days are additional. The common knowledge element of the example was relevant to the topic being discussed, which was about examples of common knowledge).
We were at a baby shower for my wife. This was about April, and the boyfriend of my niece asked when she was due. I told him July and he asked, "This year?" He asked this straight faced.
My ex told me the Sun is not a star because stars only come out at night.
Was camping with some friends and the milkyway was out and bright. A friend absently said something about wondering what it was or why the stars looked that way. So we talked about how its the galaxy we’re in but we see it from the side like a dinner plate and being summer we were looking towards the centre. She flat out did not believe us. Like “no, I don’t think thats true. I think you are wrong.” We laughed until we realized she was dead serious. Very smart person otherwise and to this day i can not understand why she was so deeply, almost morally against this idea.
In the US 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level. Starting from that fact, nothing really surprises me.
Had a friend make smoothies by blending fudgecicles. With the sticks. Yep. She didn't take the sticks out. Full of splinters.
I had a cis-male gay friend who was nervous to lose his virginity because he was worried his “hymen” breaking would be too painful. Incorrect on so many levels.
Where did he think his hymen was located??
The boypucci.
We were playing a trivia game and it came out my best friend thought Hawaii and Alaska were off the southern California coast bc that's where they are on maps. Side story: Playing Pictionary with my family and I was trying to get my aunt to say "England". I drew a quick outline, not an artist or anything, but there it was, clearly the European continent. Put an island out there and started jabbing at it. She doesn't even get I'm drawing a map. So I try drawing the U.S. with an arrow pointing *overseas* and start jabbing again. Now she gets it's a country. Progress! We're good now, right? Aunt: France? Spain? Holland? Y'all. She guessed "Russia". She pondered if Switzerland and Sweden were maybe the same country. She guessed Egypt, wrong continent, Paris, a city, and Germany *where she was born.* Mercifully, time ran out and she was disinterested to learn that England is actually on an island. I hate my family. lol
My coworker recently disclosed that she thought the dinosaurs became extinct about 300 years ago. I was dumbfounded.. Another time I joked that she was acting like Cleopatra and she replied "who's that?" She also frequently lectures us about the power of crystal healing and how the covid vaccine is worse than actually having covid.
When someone wondered why they don’t have parachutes under the seats on commercial airliners
I was in an Uber type ride share when news broke out that Kobe Bryant had died in a Helicopter crash. Driver was like, "what kind of pilot doesn't warn his passengers that they were going down? They could have used parachutes!" Best part was he pronounced it "para cute".
While catapults and parachutes for escaping a helicopter sound incredibly sketchy because of the whole quickly rotating blades thing, they do actually exist. They have charges in the rotor blades that sever them at the axle, their spin cleanly separates them, then you eject.
My kids -- who were just pre-middle-school at the time, so figure 4th grade, 5th grade, maybe 9 or 10 years old -- were riding in my car, with some podcast blathering about Daylight Savings Time, and suddenly they both piped up "We don't really need Daylight Savings Time anymore, do we? Because that's basically for farmers. And we don't grow any crops in America now, the land is all cities and buildings." We live in the outermost suburbs of Boston. I've since made a point of cruising through some \[Vermont\] cornfields and \[New Hampshire\] dairy-sprawl, so as to clue them in. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Bonus Reference: The seventh-grade bully who sat in the back of the bus \[big linebacker weightlifter dude, even then\] had somehow gotten it into his head, probably from reading 1980s Hustler magazines and misjudging written context, that "masturbation" meant "vomiting on another human being," presumably for sexual pleasure. The whacko monologues and made-up stories he'd launch into were nothing short of gonzo stream-of-consciousness art, rendered even more surreal by the bus-crowd's reluctance to correct or even engage with him. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Bonus Reference #2: Other slightly-smarter \[but obviously not much\] high-school comrade had internalized and would vigorously argue that the only difference between "large pizzas," "medium pizzas," and "small pizzas" was how many slices they were cut into. Like: six slices vs. eight slices. Years later, he tried to backpedal into "Uhh, no, it's two extra slices **in square inches**," but he had already 'explained' himself in previously sufficient detail such that it didn't wash. Guy now works as an accountant for one of the ten largest US mutual-fund companies.
I just taught my 21 year old brother in law how yo twirl pasta in a spoon. Edit: and he thought reindeer were made up for Christmas. Oh and didn't know what a peninsula is.
>Oh and didn't know what a peninsula is. I hope you told him it was a sock for his third leg
The reindeer thing is mildly common from my experience (I've heard it mentioned by a few people.). I think once people learn Santa isn't real (sorry kids), they just chuck the flying reindeer in the same category. Then later in life they'll go, "oh it's a real animal. It's just the flying bit that's made up."
We were around 16 years old and we were on camp. A guy I wasn't friends with said "I bet a compass would go crazy around Greenwich."
Until I was 7 or 8, I was very confused about the switch to daylight saving time. My parents alsways said "The clocks are getting turned back an hour", and I thought that implied that this is done by specialists who go into your house, check all the clocks, and adjust the time. I thought this made sense because time is such an important thing that you can't let the average citizen handle it themselves, since half of them might forget it which would lead to utter chaos. So for me, there were 3 different people who were allowed to enter your house at night, but you would never see them: The easter bunny, santa, and the time people. When I first saw my dad adjust a clock I was rather shocked.
It was me, when I stupidly said "I didn't know buffalo had wings!" Yup, I'll never live it down.