Hell, I’ve used it for about twenty years and scored a perfect 100% on my temp agency’s Word proficiency exam (though this was in 2003-4, so maybe it wasn’t that widely used at the time), and I’ve never used it nor even seen it (to the best of my recollection.)
[The Scene]
A college, 100-level history class. Think: the kind of class that covers protozoa in the original primordial ooze to Reconstruction; the type of class history professors hate to teach and that students hate to take.
40-50 students of all majors, sitting in rows and paying various levels of attention. Professor is lecturing about Mesopotamia and how they domesticated animals.
Student [blonde, 20 something, looking INCREDIBLY confused, raises hand and is called on by Professor]: “So, like, Mesopotamians invented chickens?”
The class falls silent; Professor stares in stunned silence at the girl. She continues.
Student [now growing somewhat confidant in her position, taking an almost haughty and exhasperated tone, unable to believe no one understands her relatively simplistic question]: “Ok. Like. There were no chickens, right? Then the Mesopotamians made chickens. And now we have chickens.”
The absolute best part about that story? She was studying to be a teacher.
MS-Word, like many other “mature” pieces of software, is designed to be everything to everybody. I used it for 20 years before I had any need for the collaborative functions, but I’ve been using the indexing and footnoting features since they were first introduced. I know people who learned “word art” in lesson #1, yet I never use it.
If someone uses Word daily and doesn’t know what key takes them to the next word or to the end of the line, I’m surprised. If they don’t know how to do citations, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
We were throwing a baby shower for a co-worker who was pregnant with twins. As I was paying for twin-themed decorations at the local party supply store, the cashier asked me if they were identical.
“They are a boy and a girl.” “Yea, but are they identical?”
I was speechless.
About 2 years ago, my boyfriend’s (then)roommate told me that he loved dodos because they were so funny. 
I told him that dodos are extinct. He said, adamantly and loudly, that he had just seen a special on them on Discovery channel, and that the way they landed in the water was hilarious. :eek:
I told him again, they are extinct… and were flightless. He never would believe me. The only thing I can figure is that given the connotations of the two words, he had confused dodos with loons.
nm
That’s about all I got from that story, too - if it says, “Cedar plank,” why would you have to ask the waitress what kind of wood it was?
It’s cedar! 
Maybe you guys are forgetting the 51st and 52nd states, Canada and Mexico. 
Heh - I’m picturing that now. 
I guess she was stupid, but other people have referred to breeding domestic animals slowly from wild animals as ‘inventing’ them, to emphasize that these people created what they wanted from the tools they had. Domesticating an animal into a new species is inventing, but we don’t call it that because it’s an animal.
Yeah, I’m with the student on that one. She was trying to put it her own words. Not a bad goal, even if it sounds kinda stupid.
No, no, she later explained her position further after class, because she was still confused. She literally thought the Mesopotamians pulled a god or something and made chickens from nothing. She literally (not figuratively) meant: there were no chickens, Mesopotamians made chickens, and then there were chickens.
This wasn’t Bob Jones University, I am assuming?
Probably puffins.
Flamingos maybe?
Did he / she really say “yea” (the old-fashioned word that rhymes with hay), or is that a typo for “yeah”? Because I would have been tempted to respond, “verily? Nay, forsooth” and escaped in a cloud of confusion.
My first thought whenever I hear of that is that it sounds awfully unhygenic serving food on a piece of wood. If you’d asked me, I probably would have thought it was a trick question and answered, “plastic imitation cedar”.
I was well into adulthood, at least my thirties or maybe even forties, when I found out that the Jews’ perception of Jesus was different than Christians’, that they didn’t consider him the son of God and all that. In my defence, I’ve never been into religion and it’s never been a topic of discussion among my friends, but I do consider myself fairly well read and aware of things generally and felt a bit foolish for it.
I remember once I was at a bar with my friend. A transvestite started talking to my friend. It was a short exchange. (less than five minutes I’d say.) After she/he turned around and walked away my friends turns and says to me: “Man! What was up with the adams apple on that girl?”
I wish I could say he was wooshing me. He was not.
I vote grebes.
I had a homeschooled coworker who believed that there were only 2 countries in the world that had any nuclear weapons–the US and Russia.
They each had a single missile, capable of doomsday.
When I showed him some info on wikipedia regarding the nuclear club of other countries, and how many nukes and types of nukes there are, he refused to believe it.
Fun fact: Unless the material is actually sterilized, wood is more hygienic than plastic. Some of the chemical components of wood are not particularly beneficial to micro-organisms. That’s in fact the reason for the tree to make them.
I disapprove. A 3/4 inch dowel is NOT going to get through that level of ignorance. You’re going to need at least a full inch. And preferably you’re going to need an old fashioned nun to administer the lesson, one of the old girls who have beaten idiots every day for YEARS. You gotta train for that sorta thing.
This is one of those rare times where the stupid person is actually right (unbeknownst to them). Male-female monozygotic twins are possible, although extremely rare.