Just thought of another one. My little brother wanted to know what country the French Revolution took place in.
My eighth grade earth science teacher told the class that Alaska is an island. After I called her on it, she tried to justify her idiocy by saying that of course she knows what a peninsula is, but the kids in the class just wouldn’t get it. Now, I’m no expert, but I’ve noticed that some teachers have this thing they like to do called TEACHING :smack:. Later that year, she called my parents to complan that I rolled my eyes a lot during her lessons. . . . :rolleyes:
Earlier this year, my history teacher told us that OK came from Old Kinderhook. OK, I think I can forgive this one :).
A cousin, a college freshman at a reputable unversity at the time, once asked “What’s Congress?” My uncle (her father) and I stared at her like she was a leper before gently explaining what Congress was.
Plinth?
Boudicca??
Well maybe those are considered well known in Britain… but I ain’t never heard of them, and I consider myself quite erudite.
They should definitely get out more. 
A lady once asked me if Canada was a tropical country. She lived in California.
Less than a month after September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my computer talking to my SO when my sister came in the room and asked me to look up some music books she needed for college on a website (she goes to Houston Baptist University, neither a cheap or easy to get into school). My SO messaged me and, for some reason I can’t remember, told me to ask her a question about Osama Bin Laden, and she had no idea who I was talking about when I asked her.
I thought she was just kidding around with me. i begged her for nearly five minutes to tell me she was kidding. She wasn’t.
And this girl does practically nothing but watch television when she’s home. I wish I could say this was a fluke, but she lives her life pretty much in constant ignorance of what’s going on in the world around her.
A woman I worked with once asked me “Are we in North America or South America?”
Same woman asked where Mt. Everest was. I told her I wasn’t sure but I thought Nepal. She replied, “Wait. So it’s not in the U.S.?”
Is their name “Potter”?
A few years ago three friends and I were at Summerfest in Milwaukee. Summerfest is a music festival held smack-dab on the Milwaukee lakefront. Marcia (a Wisconsin native) and I were walking around without the other two friends and she asks, “What lake is that, anyway?”
Later that same day Julie and I have split off from the group. Julie (also a Wisconsin native) asks, “What lake is that over there?”
How can you live for Wisconsin for 30 years, 100 miles from Milwaukee, and not know Milwaukee is on the shore of lake Michigan?
Freshman science teacher: “Now, yo umay notice alot of funny sounding names on the periodic table: that’s because alot of Latin-American scientists worked on the pereodic table and wated to bput a few thing in their native language” :eek: Yes, this was an actual teacher.
-PSM
I’ve thought about tying out for it, but I’d probably lose on a question like “Who is so-and-so dating?” I’ve never watched the show, but someone told me that the easy questions relate to things most people can answer by simply watching teevee and the “hard” questions are the ones I could answer. But never having seen it, I don’t know. **
[/QUOTE]
Well, it depends… Some $1M questions are pretty hard, and NOT about pop culture. Then again, one contestant bombed out on a $1M pop culture question that a lot of people know, but to get it, he had to know the real name of a relatively obscure pope…
Someone called me up for a psychic reading and asked if I was a natural flamboyant.
My aunt convinced my uncle that because they had slept together in the same bed, even though they didn?t have sex, she was pregnant. They married, then divorced.
At The Two Towers trailer, when Gandalf the White appeared someone nearby gasped ?OMG, he?s ALIVE!?
While driving through an unsavory part of town, my father commented on the local bums: ?All these indigenous people should get jobs? I think he was trying for indigent.
My friend?s ex-husband was fond of shouting, in all sincerity, ?Dammit, Jessica! We wouldn?t keep having these arguments if you?d just stop disagreeing with me!?
Something from long ago…
Wait… She actually said that her BOYFRIEND was a member of a SORORITY? Have I been wooshed, or was that part of her, uh, charm?
You have no idea how few people know this.
My sister’s 7th grade Ancient History teacher was teaching about Hannibal crossing the Swiss Alps with all the elephants and such. One of the kids in the class asked why the elephants didn’t die, up in the mountains, while they were crossing. The teacher replied that it was because elephants are cold-blooded.
Canada/US ignorance works both ways. I once had to convince a Canadian friend that, yes, the NYC metro area really does have a substantially larger population than Toronto.
(When I mentioned that most Americans who learn a foreign language learn Spanish, the same Canadian friend said, “That’s weird. Why don’t they learn French instead? After all, Quebec is right on the border with the US.” The thought that there was a much larger, more populous Spanish-speaking country bordering the US just didn’t enter his head.)
When I first went to America the first thing I did when I had settled in was to turn on the radio. It crackled to life on some station or other which was in the middle of a quiz:
DJ : So for the $1000 prize; who fought who in the War of the Roses?
Caller : Umm, England and France?
DJ : Correct! (applause, jingle)
I was so tempted to call in and correct him!
I once used the word Gigalo in front of my older sister, describng somone we both knew andher response was “I didnt know she could juggle” my mom and I hit the floor laughing. It took us forever to explain it to her.
I had no idea that Sunflower Seeds CAME FROM SUNFLOWERS.
Not until we had them growing in our yard I found out.
Gah, I was amazed! A flower that gives us edible seeds! Amazing!
Oh, and my friend once plugged in stereo speakers,
black to black, Good.
red to red, great.
black to red, Wrong.
red to black, Wrong.
Idiot.
I was wondering why my brand new stereo had crappy sound.
A friend was calling my husband a yuppie the other day (couldn’t be further from the truth!), and my husband says, “Oh, yeah. Next thing you know, I’ll be out on the deck in those pants…you know the short ones? What do they call those, Honey?”
“They’re called ‘shorts’, Babe.”
I was playing cards the other day and I was wearing a Salem Massachusetts sweatshirt. Yes it actually said “Salem Massachusetts”, just so there wouldn’t be any mistakes.
The conversation went like this:
“Oh, you’ve been to Salem?”
“yup, I used to live near there”
“Can you get cigarettes cheaper there?”
“No this is Salem Mass, not Winston-Salem North Carolina”
blank stare
“Salem Mass, you know, the witch trials and all that jazz”
blank stare
“Salem Massachusetts? Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“No, but I’m from Canada”
“But you’ve been here since you were six!”
“Yeah well…I’ve never heard of it. Maybe you just know that stuff because you lived near there.”
Arrgggggg!