To the OP: yes, you are being overly judgmental. Lots of people - well, actually everybody, including the most intelligent and best educated - have all sorts of little gaps in their knowledge, and everybody’s gaps are different. The fact that she didn’t know this one thing that you happen to know means nothing, and she (even if she actually is quite stupid) probably knows lots of things that she considers common knowledge and that you don’t know.
And here, maybe, is an example. The association between lesbians and the island of Lesbos has absolutely nothing to do with any warriors. Lesbians are named after Lesbos because the great ancient poet Sappho was a native of the island, and her poems were mostly love lyrics addressed to other women. (The current inhabitants of Lesbos, incidentally, are less than happy with what the word has come to mean, although it does great things for their tourist trade.)
For the generation of 45 and up, being “cultured” meant knowing about Greek and Roman legends and history. There was a shared cultural lexicon that made references and in-jokes possible.
But that shared lexicon was a much, much smaller database then today. The Classical lexicon is small enough to fit into one small book. Add the bible, maybe a book of collected famous poems and tadaa: that was all you need to get most cultured references.
Today, the shared lexicon is about a gazillion books, all the music on spotify, and entire lines, nay whole dialogues from movies and series.
Not strange, then, that she might have other interests.
Then again, maybe she isn’t that intellectually curious. Intellectual curiosity is just one of the 16 basic human drives.
Amazonian warriors are more obscure a concept than the Amazon river and rainforest themselves.
There’s a UK game show called Pointless, which is an inverse Family Feud where the best answers are the most obscure ones, that the least number of people surveyed knew the answer. It is very interesting to see what most people know, compared with what I anticipate them knowing. For example, British people know a lot about their own country, of course, but also of local European countries, and a little bit about Africa and India (because of the number of immigrants from those areas, perhaps). But they know very little about America, even though I’d expect their knowledge to be somewhat at the same level as mine (which I pick up mostly from pop culture). They know some movies and TV shows (which ones it’s impossible for me to anticipate), but it turns out very little else.
Anyway, my point is that you really can’t predict what people should or shouldn’t know. Everybody’s experiences, interests, exposure, and accessibility to different kinds of information is infinitely variable.
At the end of every year, many different kind of lists are made (best of, retrospectives, etc), and now is no exception. It’s amazing to me how many things are included in those lists that I had not heard any mention of at the time they were happening.
I remember the early 1990’s when the indignant question “what do a bunch of dead white males have to teach me?” was spouted.
It was the reaction against a system where the world was ruled by people who sat and read classics at Ivy League or Oxbrigde schools until their butts turned to stone, then went to rule over a layer of technocrats who actually knew how iron smelters, shipping schedules, debits & credits, etc. function. That couldn’t last, of course, but some of us dreamers still prefer the Philhellenes to the Philistines.
It’s a big world. There are lots of things one needs to know. There are billions of people out there with life experiences different from your own. The lack of knowledge about pieces of trivia indicates nothing about the person who doesn’t know it, but the reaction shows a lot about the people who react.
I expect adults in general to know what Amazon means in this context. But I also expect every single adult will have some variety of gaps in their knowledge, so the person in the OP has displayed a data point and not a trend. We don’t know if this is one of her rare gaps, or typical of her.
Speaking of rare gaps, it’s news to me that Playboy might have had anything to do with popularization of the term “Amazon”. I fiddled around for a while trying to do web searches on Playboy and Amazon while excluding amazon.com, but it appears that for practical purposes “Amazon” has been co-opted to be shorthand for amazon.com. Which is a funny problem, all by itself. It’s like the plight of a genealogist looking for information on a marriage between the Web and Page families.
I’ve certainly heard of a Amazon warrior, but I never learned about it in school. I just had to look it up on Wikipedia to find out the exact who, what, and where.
Greek and Roman mythology never was my thing. I know the main players of the pantheon, but can’t remember the stories to save my life. But I’m not a stupid person. It’s just that it’s impossible to know everything, and I’d rather spend my time learning about actual Amazon warriors than the make-believe stuff.
However, I do agree with you that there are some knowledge gaps that are rather…informative. I met a woman once who didn’t know that Harriet Tubman was black. Now, I can shrug this off since I know not everyone had Black History Month growing up. But if she doesn’t know Harriet Tubman was black, then there’s probably a heap more black people stuff she doesn’t know. I like talking about “black people stuff”. So we probably aren’t gonna have a lot of things in common.
Lots of people have holes in their knowledge, it doesn’t mean they are uneducated. That you are surprised is okay though. and that you didn’t automatically look down on her, and are concerned ab out being judgemental speaks well of you.
Now, if she’d majored in the Greek classics…
I had a thread here once about a college musical theater major who’d never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan. Now, to me, that’s a BIG hole in their education
Along a similar line, I was wearing this t-shirt in a store and a woman, probably in her 40s at most, stared at it and asked me about it, but she absolutely didn’t get it. As a point of reference, I’m less than a month away from turning 60. Now, I don’t expect everyone to remember all the details of high school chemistry, but I’d have thought the layout of the blocks on the periodic table was a fairly standard, recognized thing. Heck, my daughter taught 5th grade science and her kids worked with the periodic table. I didn’t think my shirt was that obscure.
Over and over, I’ve made snarky comments that I thought were based on common knowledge, but I guess not. On the other hand, you could make an inside joke about a Khardashian that would go right over my head, so I guess it’s all very individual.
I had Christmas dinner at a neighbor’s and a 38-old guy said he’d gone to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and really liked it. I asked if he thought James Thurber would approve or was he spinning in his grave? He said, “Who’s that?”
Yeah, I’d be joining him on that. I remember reading it in school, but names never stay in my brain for very long. I know I probably look like an idiot because of it.
I don’t see how can you expect people to get that joke at first sight. I have heard the “element of surprise” gag before, but I still had to stare at the link for a while before I realised that that is what it was.
Until Olbermann started reading his stuff on his show, I didn’t know who Thurber was.
My own anecdote: talking to brother-in-law at Christmas. Told him I had never heard of the Roots before they joined Fallon. Attributed it to being white. (I’m a 35 y/o Yank btw)
Well, there ya go: I definitely didn’t sleep through the past 40 years…but I don’t remember ever learning about Qaddafi’s Amazonian Bodyguard! I Googled and found references (and images – whoa!)
The world is simply too big, and there is too much to know.
