A good fraction of Americans think that folks speak Spanish in Brazil. Probably the same folks that think that all of Canada speaks French.
Boy, this thread has been interesting and enlightening!
I’m not out to make sweeping generalizations about people, but it seems, from some of the folks to whom I’ve spoken in the last few years, that Americans are not taught geography in school. I had a guy tell me he thought Niagara Falls was on the Atlantic Ocean.
I was born in the city at the end of Lake Ontario. When I try to describe where it is, most people can’t picture where the Great Lakes are. Apparently, Canada is that pink place on the map, where it always snows and everybody is an eskimo. They know about Buffalo, but only a few miles away, it’s the freakin’ tundra?
I work at a radio station. It’s totally computer-driven. I have, by default, become the guy people come to for basic computer and sound recording information. The news staff uses computers and minidisc recorders all day, every day. More than once, a reporter has come back from an interview, disappointed because the 30-minute conversation they had with a Senator is so distorted that you can’t make any of it out. Shouldn’t people who are required to record sound for a living know that you can’t plug the line-level output of a mixer into the microphone input of a minidisc deck? (Admittedly, that’s pretty esoteric knowledge for most, but this is information they should have been taught at Journalizm Skool.)
Last week, I showed one guy how to arrange the icons on his desktop so they weren’t all over the screen, and how to change the view in Windows Explorer to show the date and filesize. One asked me if I knew what an mp3 was, and how to send one to somebody. I made the file for her, and told her to attach it to an e-mail. “I don’t know how to attach anything.” I asked if she was using Netscape. “I don’t know. What’s a Netscape?”
I recently learned that my supervisor spent hours changing the dates on a text file that he sends me every week, for upcoming promos on the playlist. He asked me if I could start doing it, because it was so much work. Awhile later he asked if I had the current week’s dates done. I told him they were done for the next six months. He was incredulous about how I could have accomplished it so fast. Then I showed him what Search and Replace was.
There are undoubtedly more examples of blissful ignorance I could relate, because I am regularly seeing examples that make me despair for humanity. But I’ll stop here, and await feedback, if anyone cares to comment.
My wife and I are on two sides of a great cultural divide: Her formative years were before the publication of Silent Spring, and mine were after. My wife grew up in the age when the ideal lawn was as green, smooth and perfectly manicured as a billiard table, and gardens were maintained with enough herbicide, insecticide and fertilizer to defoliate Vietnam.
Anyway, what appalls me is that my wife is convinced that “weed killer” is a chemical that somehow magically knows what plants gardeners consider weeds and which ones arent. I’ve tried to explain to her that broad-leaf herbicide does kill many unwanted plants and spares others, but it’s not a razor-sharp dividing line; but to no avail.
well, i didn’t know the pentacostal thing, but i’ve known most of the other stuff. i dissected a sqid in high school, so i knew about the beak. it was pretty cool. here are some things that scare me:
I worked at a coffee shop with a 16 yr old who didn’t know who the muppets were.
A 23 yr old woman I work with didn’t know the band Pink Floyd. She asked, “Oh, is he a new singer?”
When I listen to my Barenaked Ladies CDs, the girls at work call it my wierd music; however, the the song “One Week” came on they all said, “Oooh, I LOVE this song, who sings it?” I guess if it isn’t on top 40 radio it isn’t worth listening to.
I had to find cites once to prove to a piano player that his instrument is often considered a percussion instrument.
there are too many more examples to keep going, but don’t get me strated on what people don’t know about computers!
Oh geez, I forgot one, the mother of all “god, how stupid can a person be?!” moments, in keeping with my OP about the lack of geographical knowledge of some Americans.
On a trivia program on WBZ, Boston, back in the mid-70s, I heard a guy say something that I have never been able to forget.
The question was: If you go due west from the United States, what’s the first continent you’ll run into?
This contestant had to think about it for almost the entire allotment of time before the buzzer. At the last second, he blurted out “Cuba.”
Aaaand… I’m not! Glad we settled that. 
The things people don’t know about their bodies does worry me sometimes, mostly because it can be so damn dangerous not to understand the basics of how you work.
There’s a Doper (not just some random schmuck, a Doper) who until a few days ago thought that the stomach drained into the kidneys, which somehow drained the water in distested food into the bladder while diverting the solids into the intestines.
What worries me even more is that several doctors gave pretty detailed answers to the questions about the causes of diarrhea, but none of them ever bothered to correct this fairly major misunderstanding.
Welcome aboard(s), Slow Blink!
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. People who act like they know everything really tick off those of us who do.
PS: Life will become much easier (and your posts much more compact) once you stop using hard returns in your text.
Well, I can’t blame Americans for not knowing about Brazilians speakng Portuguese – I mean, Portugal wouldn’t make a decent sized COUNTY in most American states outside the Northeast. I’m sure they’ve got some historic reason why they HAD to have a language all their own, but really, any sane country that size would just speak Spanish for the sake of convenience. Then they have to go and inflict their language on a decent-sized country like Brazil!
I mean, you might as well be mad at folks for not knowing where Basque is spoken.
I’ve been in Texas for 5 years but I’m originally from California.
I’m not sure things have changed that much. Have you seen the deluge of commercials for products like Roundup, and a whole bunch of herbicides and pesticides, in spring and early summer? All of these ads, with their smug wanker-type characters, imply that if your lawn is not billiard-table green and smooth, you are somehow morally deficient.
There’s an old James Thurber cartoon with the caption that goes something like “She heard someone say the Soviet Union was bigger than the USA so she called the FBI.”
As we were going over our work schedule for the upcoming month, a woman I worked with asked me what day Thanksgiving came on that year. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, laughed and said something brilliant like, yeah right, and she (I swear upon all I hold dear that this is true) said again and in a louder and more strident tone, “cut it out and just tell me what days it’s on this year.” That made me very afraid.
I’m assuming you mean she meant the day of the week, rather than the day of the month, because I’ve always been under the impression it falls on the third Thursday in November…
But doesn’t a nice little Bossa Nova tune sound so much more pleasant in the soothing Brazilian tongue?
About people not know how to do what seems to be basic stuff on their work computers. My company will roll out new programs or operating systems without any training what so ever. On those of us who are geeks, technoids, or just curious become power users.
We are due to migrate to XP in a couple of months, this could be fun.
I dated a girl in college that swore she had never heard of Schoolhouse Rock until she was in college. Her excuse was, “They didn’t have it where I grew up.” She was from New Jersey. And she is about 29 years old now and grew up when schoolhouse rock was on every Saturday, at least in the midwest. Maybe someone can confirm that the east coast did indeed show it, too, but I am going to be surprised if I am wrong. Of course this same girl spelled “Might as well” as “Mida’s well” (possessive) on one letter.
I have a BS in Biology. I am a member of Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I didn't know a squid or octopus has a beak. I had never even thought about it before. The question would have never popped into my mind.
Most Americans are woefully ignorant of world geopraphy and politics. How many world leaders can most Americans name other than Bush? I admittedly cannot name more than probably four offhand (Putin, Chirac, Major, Fox). I could think of more if given a couple minutes, but still very few. However. I can actually name all 50 states in a short amount of time. I learned the "50 nifty United States" song in 5th grade. I can't count the number of times that has come in handy. I could name most of the capitals, but I'm sure I'd miss a few.
I knew Alaska had earthquakes, but I didn't know the largest ones in the US occurred there. Probably has to do with the fact that California is heavily populated and as a result any earthquake there has the potential for much more personal injury.Major?
*Originally posted by IUHomer *
…when Schoolhouse Rock was on every Saturday, at least in the midwest. Maybe someone can confirm that the east coast did indeed show it, too, but I am going to be surprised if I am wrong.
If she lived where there was reception of an ABC affiliate TV station, they showed Schoolhouse Rock. And that, my friend, is everywhere.
This was my first ever use of HTML coding!
Some people don’t know there’s a difference between HTML and vB code! 