Gee, olivesmarch4th, thanks for the thread. You realize that you’re responsible for melting my brain?
I wasn’t there, but my ex-GF was visiting her grandmother, and they were watching TV. Some black people came on. “You’d think that with all the modern medicine, they’d figure out a way to turn those people white.”
When I was a teller (not at World Bank, thanks), I had a supervisor that was too stoopid to live. Too many examples to list, but she actually believed that old trash transformed into maggots.
The bank was right across from a music school that I once attended (Berklee College of Drugs). Conducting was a required course, so you’d often see students carrying batons. One left his at my window. Being that I had a renewed interest in the craft, I kept it. (We had no idea who lost it.) On seeing it, moron supervisor said “What, do you use that to pinch girls up the butt?”
I was walking down the street with a co-worker of mine and a couple of mexicans came up to us and asked us to buy whatever it was they were selling,I don’t remember what it was,but the fellows were persistent in their salesmanship.My co-worker(a redneck through and through) had had enough and said “Get the hell away from us…goddamn foreigners! Go back to wherever you came from!” Problem was we happened to be in Cancun at the time.
That’s the first one I thought of,I will probably think of a few more throughout the day.
I think I’ve told this one before, but my first husband insisted that the only reason for the first woman astronaut to go up in the space shuttle was so that the male astronauts could have sex. :rolleyes:
I was actually going to post something rational in here but the two comments about Sanskrit and Hinduism have really depressed me.
Oh, and Sanskrit is not an obsucre language. It’s one of, and I can’t remember, but might be, the first written language. It’s also not “Buddhist teachings” - it’s the language, still, in which every one of our prayers is written. It may be a “dead” language in that no one uses it to speak, but it’s certainly used every day in Hindu temples.
Sigh. I’m going to go bang my head on a rock now. What’s the point? Everything is Western-centered.
“If monkeys could turn into people a million years ago, why don’t you see monkeys turning into people today?” This was said to me in a triumphant tone of voice by a Creationist. I can only hope that my flabberghasted silence wasn’t taken by him as an indication that I had no rebuttal, but I know that it probably was. I was deeply, deeply impressed by the amount of ignorance such a comment indicates. You really have to work at it to be that stupid.
This is possibly the most depressing thread I’ve seen in a long time.
It brings to mind the lady I was having a sort of a running feud with this summer over an issue of whether her kids lived far enough away from school to have to ride a bus. At some point, for her it turned personal, and she commenced shooting off e-mails to the superintendent and board members calling me names.
Ok, I can deal with being called dishonest, and whatever else she could throw at me.
Then, the day after I ran into her at the library, where I was dropping off Harry Potter and picking up the next one (I sped read them all at in a row this summer). The HP books are in the youth section.
Next day the bosses get an e-mail saying I was in the library trolling for kids to molest.
And FWIW all the traditional yoga posture terminology is Sanskrit, too. In many cases, the relation of Sanskrit to modern-day Indo-European languages is quite evident from what the postures represent, e.g. Trikonasana, (Triangle posture).
“I can tell you’re a good witch, because your star-thingie* points up. If it pointed down, you’d be a devil worshipper.”
Sadly, I hear only slightly-less ignorant commentary along that line on a fairly regular basis. Granted, my religious beliefs are not all that common, and there are loads of misconceptions out there, but I truly am amazed that when I tell people I don’t worship Satan, I don’t even BELIEVE in Satan, they tell me I do so. :rolleyes:
I just like the idea of a tattoo reading “impermanent”.
The ignorant things I’ve heard are more subtle, but involve perspective shifts people don’t make.
For example, some (white) girls and I (white) were talking about our ideal man. One said, brown hair, blue eyes, etc. I said a black man, such and such build, etc. So I get the “Why do you specify race?” with no thought on her part that a race of white is implied in everything she said.
Or a friend and I discussing pregnancy scares and her saying, “that’s OK, there’s an excellent market for healthy white babies”, having not met my partner and just assuming he was white.
I took Sanskrit lessons in high school, but sadly like most languages (including English) I had a lot of trouble with it. There was a sound that was something like an L and an R mixed together with odd tongue placement that I just couldn’t get.
This past summer, our sales rep told me with a straight face, “I can’t learn.” A month later, he told me, “I won’t take a class.” I’ve never heard anything so appalling in my life.
LifeOnWry, your post reminds me of a Wiccan friend of mine has been known to say when confronted with appalling ignorance of his religion, if never to anyone’s face. “Their your rules. He’s your god. You go to hell.”
My uncle once asked my ex-wife, an epidemiologist, this same question, except that he thought AIDS happened because black people were having sex with monkeys.
I’m always amazed at how people* who loudly insist that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” are often completely convinced that condoms have sex of their own accord.
*Not that all gun enthusiasts are anti-sex ed, but I have noticed a significant overlap.
In the Nuclear Navy there’s a saying: give a Nuc a 50/50 proposition, he’ll get it wrong 90% of the time. The shorthand method for describing this was “fifty fifty ninety ten.”
I think that this concept was first described in class sometime around the first week of training. Anyways we’d gotten to about halfway through the course, and the instructor looked at one of my classmates and asked him for the answer to a yes or no question. Apparantly the he’d not been paying too much attention, because he had no real clue. Exasperated the instructor said, “It’s not a difficult question. It’s just a fifty fifty ninety ten proposition.”
I think (and I’m going on memory here) that while there are a few older scripts that have been discovered (Linear-A? [and maybe Linear-B?]), Sanskrit is the oldest written language which we are still capable of reading and understanding.
This is one of my favorite anecdotes, among many, from my museum guard days. I was working in the Islamic Art galleries that day. A high-school girl comes up to me, because she is having trouble finding something. She shows me her assignment sheet. One of her tasks is to find an item of Islamic jewelry, and describe it, including the metal it is made from.
Says she: “I saw some things that say they are made out of gold, and a ring made of silver, but nothing that says it is made out of metal.”
Me: (with as much patience as I can muster) “Gold and silver are metals.”
sorry
According to most Christians I’m worshipping Satan because I don’t believe in God.