That meant I was desperately hoping he was pulling my leg.
I apologize for not framing my contributions in the form of questions. What my roomie said was, “I suppose I could buy my stamps here. Do they cost the same as back home?”
I had always dismissed tales of rural “backwardness”, but this did give me pause. (or course, this was 1982, long before the internet etc).
My father, sister, other sister, and myself were walking down the Cape May shore one summer evening, when my sister looks out towards the horizon and sees lights out in the far distance. Excitedly, she points and exclaims "Daddy!!! Is that SPAIN!??!?!?" :smack:
This, from the same now fully-grown woman who says that people who double-back do “a complete one-sixty”.
Tripler
I got the brains in the family. She got the ‘Valley Girl’.
I can guarantee you that there’s any number of English people who couldn’t identify more than half of England’s counties if you gave them a blank map. If you tried the same thing with a blank map of Britain I bet the number becomes a sizeable majority.
Not asked directly to my face, rather, overheard coming from the next-door biology classroom while I was in the middle of a rather trying chemistry exam on atomic theory:
“So…so…are you telling us that if a human and a sheep have sex, they can have babies?!?”
More just plain stupid than odd, but it was especially hilarious in conjunction with an essay question demanding a thorough explanation of how ligands in transition metals affect the colors reflected by the electron configuration.
Working in San Diego, at a facility that was next to some open land, it was common to see things like rattlesnakes, lizards, ground squirrels etc… One day, while coming back from lunch, I happened to see a roadrunner in the parking lot.
So I was telling a co-worker about this, and she asked “what do you mean, ‘a roadrunner’ ?”
“You know, the bird. Long legs, kind of blue-ish gray feathers.”
“You mean those are REAL ? I thought they were just a cartoon !”
(as you can see, I never let her live that one down. In her defense, she was originally from europe. Not a native San Diegan).
Did it go “beep-beep”?
Not of me, but one day in highschool biology class, the teacher was discussing the basic makeup of blood, and made reference to why you hang around and have something to drink after donating blood.
One of the guys in the back, (not really there for the education) suddenly came around and asked “Wait, so if you give blood, you have to drink blood to get it back?”
Of course this was the same individual who later cheated on the colour blindness test the teacher had passed around.
This is true, of course, but it must be partly due to the fact that the counties have been buggered about with to a considerable extent. I was born in Northumberland, lived for a time in Tyne & Wear, and now I’m in North Tyneside: yet I’m still in the same town I was born in.
As far as I’m aware, that amusingly dangly bit on the bottom right has been Florida the whole time.
Yeah, I know, but what was so bad about what Rilch said? It sounded like a good explanation for why someone might not know that Texas and Mexico share a border.
All this question about not knowing whether Texas and Mexico share a border would be a lot more comprehensible to me, if it weren’t for the attention that things like the Alamo receive in popular culture, even outside of Texas, let alone within the state.
And if one doesn’t realize that Texas shares a border with Mexico, how does one explain that the Mexican forces were the ones to kill the men of the Alamo? Or that Texas was effectively formed by people who seceded from Mexico to become the Republic of Texas?
I grant that knowledge of history is not always something that’s safe to assume, but in Texas, not knowing who fought at the Alamo seems a bit much. And from there, a certain proximity between Texas and Mexico seems like it would be an automatic assumption.
A few months ago, I was waiting on the center platform at an above ground light-rail station, reading the paper. And this guy just walks up to me and asks, “Is it OK to run across the street so I don’t have to use the overpass?”
The platform is in the middle of a highway, slightly raised. There are concrete retaining walls on both sides of the road, as well as both sides of the platform itself, about meter high, with vertical flexible reflecting rods another meter high spaced about every 20 cm to keep cars and people separate. Traffic was light, but people drive 50-60 mph there, with slight curves in either direction, limiting visibility (hence the retaining walls and reflectors).
That floored me. I had absolutely no idea (1)why he ask that question, (2)why he would ask that question of me, or (3)what answer he might possibly hope to get.
I genuinely had no response. ¿¿<:-o??
Asked by a classmate in my Catholic high school:
‘Is the Pope Jewish?’
(She was confused by the skull cap he wears. Well, wore, since it was JPII she was talking about.)
Question, only mildly odd. Situation it was asked in, OMGWTFBBQ:
At work, one day. my boss was reading a newspaper story that mentioned a ‘bondage actress’, and, well, he asked me what that was.
I gave a vague answer, then found something that needed doing to avoid being asked to elaborate.
Tengu, I can beat your boss’ question.
I once asked a total stranger (about a 20 yo woman) what a safeword was. She did turn a charming shade of pink, while she explained.
To explain: I was 17, or so, and a bit innocent at the time. And she was working at an SF con, on a dealer table selling a collection of stories titled, Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.
I think I ended up as red as she was before her explaination was done.
Well, for a while it was “um swampy place where white men no go”, but yeah.
Thing is, though, even the most clueless Americans can identify Florida because it’s the most physically distinctive feature on a map of the lower 48 states, given that it sticks out and is one “corner”; most Britons can identify Cornwall or Norfolk for the same reasons. Before I’d ever visited the States (or studied its geography) I knew where Florida, both Washingtons, California and Texas were.
Besides, the mucked-aboutness may make it a bit more difficult, but there are only 46 of them, as opposed to 50, and they’re all shaped more distinctively than the American states, two of which are perfect rectangles and another dozen or so of which are almost perfect rectangles.
Plus, they’re all a good deal physically closer to Joe English than most given states are to Joe American. Truro to Inverness is 500 miles, which is about the furthest distance I could find between major cities in Britain; by way of comparison, it’s 1000 miles from me in Orlando to Providence, Rhode Island. Those aren’t even the most distant cities on the East coast of the country, and of course the distance from here to the West coast is even greater.
By way of comparison, it’s 1500 miles from your house to Tripoli.
ETA: All those distances may be completely wrong, since Geobytes’ database has a couple of truly bizarre issues. For one thing, it thinks Newcastle is in Wales. Did I miss something?
Why the crap would you WANT to or care about cheating on a color blindness test?? I’m so confused right now.
My own story has been posted here before in a vaguely longer form, but to shorten it I was asked, while standing exactly 2 borders and 2 and a half hours from, where New Hampshire was. I was in Connecticut at the time.
In retrospect, I should have asked her if she knew where Massachusetts was. That would be only 1 border and a half hour from where we were.
The UK/US Geography thing reminds me of 1992 when I was driving out west and camped at Mesa Verde (SW Colorado). A group of German tourists were there as well. Allegedly, they were questioning some of the park operators about “Where are all the people?”, just mystified that the land (high desert and mountains) in the region was so devoid of people.
She asked the same question. (No, it just stared at me).
Please let this be a Whoosh. 
Um, I’m not saying that I don’t know that Mexico is just south of Texas. I’m saying that Rilch’s explanation for someone else not knowing is pretty good.