I know what cedar is, but I think that I might flap if someone asked me this question in the street.
Why? Because when someone stops me and asks something, by default I want to be helpful, I don’t want to embarrass myself and I don’t want to embarrass the questioner.
So if I hear what sounds like a silly question I first think, “Did I hear him/her right?” and “Have I correctly parsed the sentence?”.
Then, even after being sure it’s a daft question, I might just mutter something about not being sure and walk away – rather than call someone out.
I posted this before somewhere, but it still boggles my mind. I went to a Sears store looking for a package of Velcro. A sales person came up to me to ask if I needed help and the conversation went something like this:
SP: can I help you find something?
Me: I’m looking for Velcro
SP (looking confused): For what?
Me: Velcro. . .?
SP: I don’t know what that is.
Me (a bit taken aback): Really? You know: it’s that material with the hooks and loops that’s used on things like wallets and shoes to keep them closed.
SP: I’ve never seen anything like that.
Me: Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you’ve never seen or heard of Velcro? It’s been around for at least 30 years.
SP: Never heard of it.
Me: But it’s used on everything. It makes that tearing noise when you pull it apart?
SP: Sorry, I don’t know what it is.
Me (now getting pissed): How can you NOT know what Velcro is? Have you been living in a cave all your life? (wife tugging urgently on my arm)
SP: ::shrugs helplessly::
Wife leads me away, frothing at the mouth about the idiots of this generation.
I had an otherwise intelligent gf (in her 40’s) who insisted that the confection and the fungus were the same kind of truffle.
My mom (81 and pretty clever) only recently learned that the moon causes tides. She still does not understand the phenomenon, though: “If the gravitational pull is strong enough to move entire oceans, why don’t we feel it when we’re walking around?”
And don’t get me started on fundamentalist Christians. A different category, I know, because they are aware of scientific facts, but choose to ignore them. Like the relatively intelligent guy I talked to who was absolutely convinced that the earth is no more than 4000 to 6000 years old.
The original truffle candy was made by cooling ganache (chocolate melted with heavy cream) so that it was thick enough to form into a solid ball, the size of a small walnut. The ball has a rough exterior and is rolled in cocoa powder. When done, it resembles the truffle just dug from the dirt.
Reminds me of an experience I had in the grocery store a while back. Young couple with cute baby in the cart walk up to me at the dairy section of the grocery store. The young man has a print out in his hand and it looks like it might be from some social services program where they get a certain amount of money to use on food, but healthy foods are listed – I think the program won’t pay for junk food. That was all invented in my head from a glance at the paper, mind you. Because it seemed very important to this guy to get all the right things on his list.
So he asked me what “whole wheat bread” means. What makes it whole wheat?
I knew the answer, but I was afraid to give too much detail and didn’t know why he needed to know, so I tried to sum up as briefly as possible. (My BF later told me he didn’t know and would have told the guy that it’s just a term the government makes up to control what you eat. I did not LOL.) I told the guy, “Okay, you know they plant wheat and grind it up to make bread, right?” Yep, he had that part down. “So wheat is actually a grass and what gets ground up is the seed part. Okay?” Guy nods. Got that part. “Before they grind it up to make flour, they sift off the outer seed coating, called a chaff. That’s how they get white bread. If they don’t bother to sift off the seed covering, that’s considered ‘whole’ wheat.” His wife/baby mama and he both considerably brightened at this, that I’d taken the time to explain and gave him valid information. I was tempted to go to the bread aisle with them to help them pick out whole wheat bread, but I just advised him to look on the package for “whole wheat” and just get whatever. He then asked why whole wheat was better and I told him there’s more fiber and maybe some vitamins that get bleached or sifted out of white bread. He pointed to his cute baby: “So he’ll grow up to be big and strong?” And I said, “Yes, and smart, too!” As they walked away, I thought, at least regular, with all that extra fiber.
I was glad the guy bothered asking someone to find out the 411 on the whole wheat bread thing, so I was more than happy to take the time to explain it to him. They seemed so earnest and appeared genuinely interested in the answer. I wish more people had curiosity about the world around them, instead of just ignoring new information that they don’t understand.
While waiting tables, a common question was what kind of meat was in the sausage. Having my sense of humor, I would answer, “Groundhog.” Rarely was the joke understood. One customer got so upset she complained to my manager who then felt it necessary to explain to me that the sausage is in fact made from ground pork. :smack:
Also, I was asked, "What kind of meat is in the veal parmesan?
I have a friend who reads a lot, without benefit of a dictionary. She often mispronounces words, or just assumes she knows what new words mean. She had a crush on a man with big, brown eyes. Well, she had read “limpid pools” for blue eyes, so she explained to me quite earnestly that “The man has got big, beautiful cesspool eyes!” :eek:
When I was in college about 30 years ago we were watching the Cleveland local news on the dorm’s common room TV (waiting for the weather report to come on) when there was a story about cable TV coming to Cleveland. It was a big issue at the time - which company would get the expected to be lucrative license, etc. - but one of my dorm mates didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “There can’t be that many people that actually live in Cleveland”, he said. “Nobody lives in those big buildings downtown. Why should they tear up the streets to lay cable for just a couple people?” This guy was some some small farm town and didn’t realize that some 400,000 people lived in the city limits. He thought Cleveland just consisted of the big buildings downtown.
I’ve offered, but she doesn’t want to change her GPS settings, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I think she’s just accepted that it’s a pain to get here and will stick to the “familiar”, if annoying, route instead of dealing with something new and different.
Her sense of direction is really not all that good, and I love her otherwise, so I let her do this her way. I just think it’s weird!
In response to the Florida election mishap of 2000, one Brit wrote: “Why don’t they just count the votes by hand? That’s what we do here.”
An American wrote back “You foreigners in your little countries don’t know shit. Any idea how many voters there are in a state like Florida?”
Set aside the fact that U.K. is larger than Florida. Since a polity has budget and volunteers roughly proportional to its population, the inconvenience of ballot counting is, to first approximation, independent of size.
I had a man stick his head in the door of my store last month and ask me when Valentine’s Day was. Not, “What day of the week does it fall on this year?” which I could understand. But the date. February 14th, for those of you in mild panic right now. He was over 50…he’s been to school. He’s celebrated Valentine’s Day since he was at least 5.
During story time, a librarian held up a toy sea creature and said, “This is an octopus!” (I knew she was wrong, but didn’t want to say anything because she had a book about an octopus that she was about to read.) “Let’s see how many legs it has! Everybody count! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight…nine, ten?”
