Jackknifed Juggernaut started a great thread about stuff you can’t believe people don’t know. Sometimes the reverse happens.
Some friends and I were chatting over coffee one day, and someone said they’d just bought a TV with NICAM stereo. I wondered out loud what NICAM actually meant, and one of my friends instantly replied "It stands for ‘near instantaneous companded audio matrixing’ ". This guy wasn’t a nerd or an engineer, he just happened to know. We asked him how he knew, and he didn’t know!
Similar stuff ever happen to anyone else? And how often do you find you know something, but have no idea HOW you know it?
When one guy at my old boarding house used mauve in a sentence, and pronounced it correctly. It’s supposed to rhyme with “cove”, not with, um…“Romanov”.
And I want no one to quote from any dictionary that gives the incorrect pronunciation. You are wrong and the source is wrong.
I went to see the movie “The Lost World, Jurrasic Park 2”. As I walked out of the theater I overheard 2 young kids (like 6 or 7) discussing the movie with phrases like “what a bunch of over-hyped marketing opportunities packed into 2 hours” and “they should have spent some of that special effects budget on better script writing”. When I was 6 or 7 I would have been saying “cool, dinosaurs”.
Happens to me all the time. Hubby has gotten used to using me for a walking dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia and when I really amaze him by knowing something, he asks me how I know. The answer? “I dunno–must have read it somewhere or something…”
Name any year since the Academy Awards were first given out.
My brother can tell you who won the Oscar for every major awards category that year; picture, director, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, cinematography, etc., etc. And he won’t have to think hard about it. Half the time he knows how old the actor/director/cinematographer was when he won it.