That’s nice of you to try to excuse her, but Minnesota is on Lake Superior. Major league tides.
My boss didn’t know Hawaii was a state - thought it was a territory. In his defense, he only recently became a US citizen.
I don’t suppose a symbol menu could be built into the board’s reply editor? So you could just click and add stuff like ‰ ™ ¢ © ® ° ² · ½ etc.?
The ceramic fixture is a “toilet bowl”.
I can see not knowing what ‘notions’ are if you don’t sew. It’s things like needles, thread, small scissors, etc - the small little things you stick in your sewing box. I might be surprised that someone didn’t know what they were, because I’ve been exposed to it, which a lot of these seem to fall under. (I think they’re fair fodder for this thread though). It’s a matter of ignorance not stupidity.
One of my coworkers didn’t know how vaccines work. Note, we work in a medical supply company. (Admittedly it has nothing to do with vaccines, but still).
Granted, I oversimplified. But the phrase, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” is generally taken to mean that the United States Government shan’t prohibit the printing and sales of books or prevent people from reading them.
This was a basic talk about censorship to a group of high school students, not a law-school lecture on the First Amendment.
On the last page, a few posters tried to give her a similar benefit of the doubt, but I assure you that she was still confused after class and asked several of us for clarification. Her point was most certainly that there was nothing even vaguely resembling a chicken roaming this great planet of ours-- then, one day, the Mesopotamians pulled a god and made chickens— then, and only then- were there chickens.
I once knew a girl who said with confidence that all the Beatles died of drug overdoses. She knew all their names, but not that three of them (at the time) were still alive or that the other one had been shot.
The bowl is only part of the fixture; there’s also the tank. Overseas, it’s also the room in which the fixture is located; hence the thread ‘whats the big deal with the word “toilet” in the US?’
I’ve never actually seen “toilet water,” but I know about it thanks to the family story of when my mother was a girl and she got a bottle of toilet water for her birthday, and her kid brother … poured it in the toilet.
Lake Superior’s tides are only a couple inches high. They’re lost in the waves to any casual observer.
Never, in any dialect of French, as the word doesn’t exist in that language- it’s always toilette.
I think it’s rather hilarious that some people (seemingly Americans) have taken a literal translation of the phrase and use it. Though to be fair, I don’t know what else I’d call it in English - I don’t think I’ve ever referred to it without switching to the French term, and would probably just call them all perfumes. For me, calling it “toilet water” was always a silly joke!
'Twas years ago and there was going to be a lunar eclipse in the early winter evening, starting just around quitting time. I commented upon it others in the office. “Ooooh, don’t look at it!” warned a (very) blonde young lady. She didn’t know exactly why but said she just knew it was dangerous. In my best schoolteacher mode, I asked her what caused a lunar eclipse. “Hmmmmm. Isn’t that, like, when the sun gets between the earth and the moon, and casts a shadow?” I swear this is 100% true.
Fuck. The first lunar eclipse I saw there were people taking pictures of it: with the flash on! Which doesn’t make any sense in many ways.
A couple of months ago my MIL called us to let us know that she was planning a vacation to St. Petersburg. I said that I thought Russia would be a fabulous place for a vacation and asked why she decided to go there and she paused for a second before saying, “No, not Russia. Florida.”
It makes me chuckle, too, but the truth is, most of those cameras (depending on when you grew up) have automatic flash modes. Not that some people wouldn’t turn on the flash anyway, but I bet it’s mostly the automatic flash kicking in.
So, without running to wikipedia or a history book, what can you tell us about Alton B. Parker’s presidential campaign? Though you were a kid, Goldwater was part of your time. Share with us your knowledge of Parker, who was from before your time.
Alton B. Parker ran for President
… in a year divisible by 4,
… in an election dominated by the Republican and Democratic parties
… was a white male
… was a US citizen and met the Constitutional requirements for being President
What do I win? 
I’ve been shocked by others’ cluelessness many times in my life, but I’ve come to chalk it up to the fact that growing up, I was told frequently by my father that I was a moron, so I always just assumed if* I* knew something, everyone else must know it too. So one time I was reading *On The Road *by Jack Kerouac and must have mentioned it to my dad. He asked what it was about- “you know, Kerouac, taking road trips, beat poets, etc.” He was looking at me blankly. “You know- Jack Kerouac.” Blank look. “Who’s that? What are ‘beat poets’?” That was the first time I realized I knew things he didn’t know, but it sort of blew me away.
I was surprised to learn my girlfriend- who had already sort of established herself as intellectual and more classically educated than me- had no idea who Harry Connick was. This was around the time when Connick was pretty popular- a few years after the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally…, his acting career was taking off, I think he had been on the cover of Newsweek, and so on. That’s when it started to hit home- maybe I’m the freak, here.
Since then, I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that I’m not as much of a moron as I always thought, and also that I have a (somewhat frustrating) ability to remember arcane trivia. Which actually makes me seem smarter than I think I am.
Well, I guess it’s just me! I must play around with Word more than most people then…what’s the point of having this wonderful software if you don’t use 90% of it?
Never mind that Excel still scares me…
I mostly use it to write documentation for equipment and processes at my job. I also used it to make my resume. I do these on my own so I don’t need the collaboration tools, these are not published so don’t need footnotes and for whatever other reasons, I don’t need a ton of stuff that’s shoved in to that bloated product. It does a great job for what I need it to do and I prefer to waste my free time on a different set of wasteful things.
A kid was in our shop one day looking at the ferrets. She looked over at me knowingly and said, “I know that if a ferret bites you and you bleed, the ferret develops a taste for blood, and they’re just gonna want more and more and more and more.” It gave me an image in my head of a “Little Shop of Horrors” sort of situation playing out with a little girl and her ferret.
The other day someone was admiring the baby macaws I’m hand-raising, and asked where they came from. I told her I own the parents, but I hand-feed the babies after 6 weeks so they’ll be tame pets.
She stared at me for a minute, and said, “But where did you get the parent birds?” I told her I’d purchased them from another breeder in the area who was getting out of the business. “But where did SHE get them?” she asked. I told her I didn’t really know, but I assumed she had purchased them at some point as well. The woman stared at me for a minute, and finally came out with, “But where did the FIRST macaws come from?”