First time I see that notation. In Spain it was with an x that could never be confused with the x used to represent variables (they don’t even get the same name: the operator is a “cross”, the algebraic symbol an “x”), and in the US I always encountered the * notation.
I know my times tables just fine, what I’d never seen was parenthesis used to surround a single number.
I was in St. Petersburg, Russia and a bunch of people just arrived from a cruise ship. A woman, who I assumed to be American, but could have been Canadian, pointed at a Rusian Orthodox church with typical onion domes and asked me “what kind of church is that?”
I told her it was an orthodox church and she seemed confused, so I said “you know, a Russian Orthodox church.” And it just floored her, she didn’t know that there was such a thing as the Russian Orthodox Church, or that the Russians had a Christian tradition. She had heard of the Greek Orthodox church, though.
What really floors me is that she took a cruise ship to Russia, you’d think she’s at least read a short history of the country that she was coming to visit.
My wife and I had a similar experience wanting to buy some dowels. Stopped a clerk, asked him where they were and he had no idea what we were talking about, even when we described them. We managed to find them ourselves about 15 minutes later. I wanted to take a 3/4 inch dowel and find the guy so I could yell “THIS (whack) IS (whack) WHAT (whack) A (whack) DOWEL (whack) IS (whack)!”
Maybe the dog has a temper because he has hip displeasure.
I was looking for canning supplies and hadn’t quite figured out where the stores keep them. I went to WalMart, which is where I go when I can’t find stuff anywhere else, as if the item will magically appear at WalMart, because well, WalMart is magic, isn’t it?
Anyway, I’m in the craft section and wandering around and I can’t find jars or lids or rings or pectin or those jar grabber thingys. I turn to an employee – I actually found one – and asked where are the canning supplies. I got a blank stare. Then the kid directed me to canned goods in the grocery section. : face palm :
I had to find a little old lady employee who would know what canning is and she hooked me right up. I should point out I’m not shocked that a young man would not know what canning supplies are or look like. My grandmother was the only person I knew who knew how to can and she’d been dead for several years at that point. (Which is why I looked for a little old lady.)
My first real job was as a cashier at Kmart. One day a little old lady asked me, ‘Do you have any “NO-thins”?’ I asked her to repeat herself, and she asked again. 'Do we have nothing? 
’ She said, ‘No! NO-thins!’ I had to ask her to write it down: ‘Notions’. That didn’t help. Me: Ar? ‘Erm… Do we have any ideas?’ I had to call the lead-person over, who was female. She directed the woman to the proper aisle, and informed me that ‘notions’ are ‘sewing things’. The old woman’s lisp aside, I had no notion that ‘notions’ were sewing things. As a 19-year-old male, sewing things were ‘sewing things’ or ‘needles and thread’ or ‘buttons’.
I can’t say that I’ve ever heard ‘notions’ used in that context since; but now I’ll know what it is if I do.
Older women might also have trouble if they ask where the toilet water is kept. 
Did anyone reply “Yep. About a third as many as in our little country”?
Or as one of my Grandmas called it, terlet water…
Maybe this is a bit specific, but I’m working with a team of 4 other local college seniors on a capstone project that calls for many, many revisions of our main document, for which we use Microsoft Word.
Not a single other team member knew:
[ul]
[li]how to use the citations tool (OK, it’s somewhat new, I can understand that…but it’s so incredibly useful)[/li][li]how to track changes (they would ask, “so what are all these lines for and will they be on the final document?”)[/li][li]how to add and delete comments (they thought only the professor could do such a thing)[/li][/ul]
It’s just perplexing to me that we are in the final year of college and they’ve somehow never encountered these before. We’re all around the same age, except for one much older lady. I’m no great Word magician…these are just necessary tools for college projects, I would think.
My boss has a BS in Journalism.
She is quite convinced that “it” is a preposition.
A few years ago, when there were still a good number of video rental stores around, I spent an afternoon going from store to store trying to find one that had a copy of Psycho. In one of the last stores I went to, I asked the clerk if she could look in the computer to see if they had “Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock”. She looked at me blankly for about five seconds before asking if it was a new release.
I admit being very surprised at this.
In all the mathematics I’ve ever encountered at the level of high school algebra or above, the standard way of indicating multiplication has been to write the two factors next to each other, with no operation symbol between, like “3n” or “xy” to mean “3 times n” or “the product of x and y.” If you replace the n with a specific number, like 5 or -2, you have to use parentheses around one or both factors so you can tell that they’re two separate numbers being multiplied, as in “3(5)” or “(3)(-2),” because “35” or “3-2” would mean something different.
In practice, it seems to be far more common to only put parentheses around one of the factors, but there’s nothing wrong with putting them around both.
I just now looked in an Intermediate Algebra textbook I happened to have handy, and this notation is used freely there: I see expressions like “(-3)(-6)” or “-4(10).”
In American contexts, the raised dot is sometimes used to indicate multiplication. The x-looking “cross” is used commonly in basic arithmetic but not algebra, where it could be confused with a letter x. And the asterisk (*) as a multiplication symbol is AFAIK mainly a development of the computer era, used commonly when entering mathematical expressions from a keyboard but hardly ever handwritten.
I don’t think I’ve ever used any of those features. I imagine I’d be able to figure it out, but off the top of my head, I don’t know how to do any of that.
I could fill a book of these from when I was teaching. I had a student who couldn’t find England on a map. (Granted, in the book we were using, England was on the seam between the pages, but still.)
The other day I met a young woman around 20 who had never heard of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Her boyfriend wasn’t surprised. To be fair, I believe she was home-schooled, which might account for some pop-culture screening at young ages.
My American teachers always used the asterisk; the Canadian who couldn’t find his electrons with both hands did too. Eight-pointed ones (well, actually four lines crossing, but you know what I mean). Miami, 1994-7.
We had Chemistry books bought from the US which used asterisks for multiplication. 1992.
We used the raised dot and the inverted v to differentiate two types of multiplication, but not in any other context. Same symbols in Spain and the US.
As an author and bookseller, I have strong feelings on censorship. During Banned Books Week, I go to local schools and talk to the kids about it. A couple of years ago, I spoke to four high school classes, each of which had about 15-20 students. In this area (Montana, U.S.A.), high school means grades 9-12, so I’m dealing with kids who have taken at least some American history and government classes.
I explained to the kids that there is a procedure a parent could follow to have a book removed from the school library or curriculum. A book could be banned from the public library in town. It could even be banned statewide. But that book could not be banned nation-wide (yeah, yeah, I know there are exceptions like national security, but I talked about that later). Then I asked them:
What document guarantees us the right to say what we wish and read what we wish?
In two out of the four classes, not one single student could come up with an answer. I would have happily accepted the first amendment, the Bill of Rights, or the Constitution as answers. In the other two classes, there was a pause and some discussion before someone came up with it. That’s mind-blowing to me.
Many of the things mentioned in this thread (including what I just said) are very culture-specific. Like the Eeyore thing.
I am 53 years old, raised in the U.S., but I’ve been to the UK quite a few times. I have never heard the sound a donkey makes described as “eeyore,” and until this thread I had no idea where that donkey’s name came from.
This never fails to blow me away. When I travel to another country, I don’t take a history and language class, but I at least spend a little time looking at a map, reading the Wikipedia page, and learning how to say please, thank you, excuse me, and so forth in their language. That’s just common courtesy.
onomatopoeic words don’t seem to “translate” well between cultures and languages. Like Stewie Griffin with the European See’n’Say:
European See 'n Say: The pig goes “WANK!”
*[Stewie pulls the cord again] *
European See 'n Say: The cow goes “SHAZOO!”
Stewie Griffin: It most certainly does not!
[pulls the cord again]
European See 'n Say: The rooster goes “KIKERIKI!”
Stewie Griffin: Where? Where does the rooster say that?
[pulls the cord again]
European See 'n Say: The monkey goes “MACAQUE!”
Stewie Griffin: Oh, no, no, no! It does not!
[pulls the cord again]
European See 'n Say: The elephant goes “THWOMP!”
Stewie Griffin: Oh, yeah, kinda.
That’s interesting. I don’t ever recall seeing the asterisk for multiplication in high school or college (1989-1998). I only have one math-related book at hand, one on probability published in 2000, and it uses the dot notation for multiplication, too.
Same here. I’ve used Word for like fifteen years and I’ve never had occasion to use those features. I’ve only ever seen the collaboration features a small handful of times.