I see what he means, but it’s hardly a better outcome for the little zef never to be born, especially if all the mother meant was that she figured there was a certain kind of mother/daughter bonding that would be totally inappropriate for mother/son. It didn’t necessarily mean that she’d keep the kid in a barbed wire cot and never show it any affection, now did it?
I think I told this story ages ago, when it happened in…let’s see, 2002. I had this boring job and one of my coworkers was a recent high school graduate. One day she told me that she wanted to go to Vancouver because it was legal to smoke pot there. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but I didn’t really want to have a conversation about it until I remembered an anecdote I’d heard from a former classmate.
Me: You know, when I was in college, I knew a girl who got arrested at the border for trying to bring a little tiny bit of pot into British Columbia that she and her boyfriend were smoking. They didn’t go to jail or anything, but the border guards wouldn’t let them into Canada. So I don’t think pot is legal there.
Her: Well, all I know is that it’s legal in Vancouver.
Me: Well, Vancouver is in British Columbia, so I doubt it.
Her: Wait…what’s British Columbia?
Me: It’s the province where Vancouver is?
Her: What’s a province?
Me: It’s like a state? But in Canada?
Her: What’s Vancouver then?
Me: A city.
Her: Oh.
I know this might make me sound elitist, but I seriously do not know how some people can have so little interest in the world around them. It’s shocking, really.
SiL was terribly angry when her upcoming baby turned out to have a dick. She felt betrayed because the poor tyke wasn’t behaving according to plan (and he hadn’t even been born!). She was convinced that she’d never be able to play with him or love him… there were times we seriously feared for that kid. Her best friend reminded her that even if it had been a girl it might have taken after her auntie (that’s me) and not been into pink frilly dresses with bows.
Mom thinks SiL’s obsession with having a daughter is cool because it means there will be another baby. I think that given the male:female ratio in the Daddy’s family, it may well be more than one. SiL’s best friend thinks that if there ever is a daughter and given God’s sense of humor, she’ll be an engineer like Auntie.
All I can think as I read this thread “All of these people can vote. And their votes count as much as anyone else’s.”
If they can find their way to the polling station.
That’s OK, I have a thermometer story that’s more of a forehead-slapper because the other person involved didn’t learn a thing. A friend of mine (let’s call her Kay) had an old thermometer mounted on her wall. It was a lovely metal bracket with interesting designs, holding an old-style real mercury thermometer. Another friend of ours (call her Ann, in her mid-30s like us) was at Kay’s house, and saw the thermometer. Admiring the design, Ann then said how unfortunate it was that it was broken. Kay realized that depending on the light, the silvery column might be hard to see and also unexpected, so she said, no, it’s a mercury thermometer. Ann said yes, and it’s such a shame that it’s broken - yes, she was expecting to see red liquid, and… I dunno, thought the silver was residue left behind when the thermometer broke, maybe? Kay dropped the explanation efforts when it became obvious that it didn’t seem that Ann got the ideas that the silver was a liquid and not a stain, was actually the stuff known as mercury, and that there are old thermometers that work using it rather than red fluid.
Read the last sentence of the next paragraph. :dubious:
(But hey, I’m a atheist too.)
I think that’s quite a common problem. Certainly I have seen foreign (i.e. non-American) black athletes referred to as “African-American” in the media. I can’t find the cite for it now, but I swear I saw that label applied to Nelson Mandela on one occasion, too!
People seem to have been so conditioned to say “African-American” rather than “black” that they don’t stop to think whether it’s appropriate.
I love this. For some people, dumb is not just a hobby, it’s a vocation.
Sig line! May I?
One of my good friends (danish) is a lapsed Nordic Pagan, who spends a good deal of time in Minnesota every year with family. Ever time he comes back he regales us with stories of how people think:
- Denmark is in Amsterdam (or Sweden, or Germany, or Bulgaria)
- We speak “dutch”
3)Copenhagen is the capital of IKEA (or of Hamburg, or Berlin) - human sacrifice to the old gods is perfectly legal in Denmark
(my personal favorite, a 20-yr-old girl studying to be a teacher)
- Polar bears roam the streets of Copenhagen, don’t they?
Oh yeah. I remember seeing a letter to a tabloid agony columnist from a distressed new mother who couldn’t get over the disappointment of having produced a boy instead of a girl. She was weeping and wailing over the old proverb “your son’s your son till he finds a wife, your daughter’s your daughter all her life” 'cos she wanted the mite to be focussed on her to the exclusion of all else for the remainder of her natural span, and she’d made all the plans for the pink frills and the bows and the white wedding too, I shouldn’t wonder.
Taken against that, a few wrong-headed ideas about how boys get to be gay don’t seem all that bad - certainly not to the extent that the mother-to-be deserves to be childless.
It does help to explain the whole Dubya phenomenon, though.
I don’t remember having been taught any ‘cute rules’. For as long as I can remember, the big end denotes the larger number and the small end denotes the smaller number.
I can’t think of any anecdotes that rate with those already posted. But here are some lame ones:
When I was ten I was at Sears, where a woman was buying an electronic device. The salesman kept talking about a ‘battery eliminator’ (i.e., an a/c adapter). The woman said, ‘Wait. It runs on batteries? I thought it ran on electricity!’
A potential employer said in all seriousness that ‘golf’ was an acronym meaning ‘Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden’. Since I was looking for a job I didn’t correct him.
And then there’s the old saw about evolution not happening, because a watch will not evolve from elements; it needs a maker.
Be my guest. Although, mine’s looking a little backward these days. 
Back in the 1960s, my uncle was a Junior High student and wrote a presentation on lasers for school. He went through what they were, how they worked, and all of the potential applications. By all accounts from the family, it was quite good and well researched. However, he got an F on the presentation. Why? Because his teacher said he was making it up. His teacher claimed there was no such thing as “lasers” and had never heard of them.
My fifth grade teacher put up a big inspirational bulletin-board display, featuring a huge headline of individually-cut letters: “Except Nothing But The Best,” or some such. After I figured out that he had meant to say “Accept,” I called him over and tried to correct him, quietly, without attracting attention. Unfortunately, by the time I was forced to retrieve the second dictionary out of my desk to demonstrate his error, enough people had noticed what was going on that his mistake was no longer a secret.
Some teachers loved me and some teachers hated me. I wonder why.
A while back, I remember reading an essay in abook of media criticism. (I think it might have been Bernie Goldberg’s Bias, but I can’t remember for sure.) A reporter was writing an article about events which happened outside of the country and the race of one of the people involved was mentioned. The reporter wrote the story using the word “black” to describe the man. His editor insisted that he change it to “African-American” even though the man had never even set foot on US soil.
And if they can be arsed to vote. Sure, they may turn out for the presidential elections, but people who take little interest in the world around them don’t usually bother to vote for anything else.
I had a similar experience in Christian school. I was supposed to write a paper on fossils, and how they were all created by Noah’s flood and such nonsense. My teacher was pissed to be getting a paper about Permian periods and fossil layering. She flipped through our “science” text and showed me that the words “pre-Cambian” were nowhere to be found therein, apparently finding great significance in that fact.
I didn’t get a good grade and the blame rests sqaurely on the shoulders of Stephen Jay Gould for leading me astray.
Okay, if this shows up twice it’s not my fault.
Earlier this week my husband, who is 41, a professional and holds a Master’s Degree, said to me “Wait! Diner and dinner are spelled differently?” I explained that they were and, when faced with similar pairs of words, you could tell which had single or double consonants by which had the long or short vowel sound: long vowels hand single, short had double. His reply: “I don’t know long or short vowel sounds.”
You know his parents paid tons of taxes for the good schools, too.
Oh! I thought of another good one. This experience left me confused and horrified for quite a while afterwards.
My sister was dating a fellow who was of some questionable intellectual ability. We’re of the private opinion that he might actually have been developmentally delayed in some key area. Well, one day he showed up at my house while I was cooking dinner and for some bizarre reason started talking about eating roadkill.*
He gave us a list of all the different things he’d eaten and rated them on their taste. Raccoon was supposedly quite good, as was chipmunk. I jokingly asked if he’d had possum, too, and he reacted with violent disgust. “No,” he said, “those are hermaphrodites. That’s just sick.”
At first I thought he was confusing marsupials with hermaphrodites and tried to correct him, but he insisted that opossums had the equipment of both sexes and were, thus, forbidden to eat.
*For context, let it be noted that we are in a rather backwoods area here. But still. Roadkill? 
I just remembered a world-championship example of ignorance that I witnessed during my ninth grade art class. Because it was an art class, the teacher would give an assignment at the start of class and the students were free to talk as they painted for the rest of the period. The table adjacent to mine was populated by four rednecks, and if I listed every ignorant thing they said during that year I’d more than double the length of this thread.
In any case, upon learning that a particular students was Jewish, one said, “So that means your Mom has to wear one of those, one of those, you know, Burqa things.”