My parents and grandparents all warned me that I’d one day regret going barefoot in the winter (inside the house). Apparently a thin layer of cotton between my feet and the floor would prevent future arthritis.
My mother makes me turn off the TV and the computer before vacuuming because she’s afraid it will cause a circuit breaker to pop.
I’m confused here- if the lightning jumps through an open window, crosses the room, and shoots out the other window, what’s the problem? Was your grandma worried you’d grow disillusioned when believed you about the time you saw a bolt pass right in front of your eyes while you were indoors?
Here’s an interesting one, told to me by a young man who popped out of a time portal and claimed to be Chefguy’s grandson: “My grandparents believed that there were apparently no reliable sources of information before the internet existed; that before this technological miracle popped into existence in the 1980’s, there were no such things as books, and no one ever bothered to fact-check dubious sounding information before parroting it. Also for some weird reason they thought it was inappropriate to open time portals right next to people in the past and start talking to them without giving any introduction or warning.”
My Mom always calls me with iPhone problems and I always tell her to turn the phone off and on and try again and if that doesn’t work to call me back. She used to be scared that something would go wrong with the phone if she did that. I finally disabused her of that with the following conversation.
haj: Why are you afraid of turning off your phone?
Mom: Something might change.
haj: Are you scared that if you turn your tv on and off that it might end up with everything being in Chinese?
Mom: No.
haj: Are you scared that if you lock the door to your house that all of the furniture will be rearranged what you open the door again?
Mom: Ok smartass, I get your point.
Before the house had centeral A/C, we had an exceptionally hot night. My mother warned me not to wear a dark t-shirt to bed, since it would be hotter than a light one. I had to explain to her that it only made a difference when you’re out in the sun.
She also thought you had to keep the TV remote pointed at the TV, or it wouldn’t stay on the right channel.
“The Figgerin’ of Aunt Wilma” - possibly the funniest short story ever written…
My grandmother is among this ilk. the whole “you’ll catch a cold if you go out without a jacket,” or the “you’d better bundle up! It’s only March!” when it’s 75 degrees outside. And she has the total inability to understand that other people do things differently than she does. I had the folks and grandma over for dinner at my place some years ago, and made coffee. When I set out the half pint of milk I bought specifically for this, she was dumbfounded.
Grandma: “How come you only have that small carton of milk?”
Me: “I don’t drink milk.”
G: “Well what do you have with your cereal?”
M: “I don’t eat cereal.”
After that, the look on her face was that of someone whose mind had just exploded.
I don’t see why. even on old cars, if the A/C was on when you started the car, the compressor clutch wouldn’t engage until after the engine was running anyway. The compressor lubricant flows along with the refrigerant, so it’s not like the compressor was bone dry after being off for a little bit. Tom and Ray may have been entertaining, but they weren’t always right.
In no particular order (mainly because all of these things are equally embarrassing):
[ul][li]"Yet another ‘Black bastard’ will become president.[/li][li]Those damn Mexicans are taking over the country.[/li][li]If you can’t speak English, you can’t be American.[/li][li]Muslim veterans cannot join the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, or any other veterans’ organizations because “Muslims cannot love America”.[/li][li]Inter-racial marriage is wrong but a White man marrying a Black woman is better than a Black man marrying a White woman.[/li][li]“You know I’m not prejudice. All I know is ‘The robin doesn’t mate with the bluejay’.”[/ul][/li]
Yep. “Greatest Generation” my ass! I’m looking forward to when the generation that has so many people believing that nonsense is history.
In the late 60’s, my great aunt was traveling with my grandfather when he happened to drive through a college campus. On noticing this, she yelled, “Lock the doors, Frank! There’s hippies here and they’ll come right into the car!”
I was making a pot roast one time and my wife watched me cut the end off of it. When she asked me why I did that, I said “You’re supposed to cut the end off.” After some back and forth with her, and then with one of my brothers, who said the same thing, we called our mom, who also said “you’re supposed to cut the end off.” So we called her mom and asked her about it.
After she was finished laughing, MaMaw explained that she only did that to fit it in her small roasting pan.
I’m not allowed to mail anything for my grandmother unless I bring it to the post office. INTO the post office, not even using a blue box outside of it. No matter how safe and secure the location of the blue mail boxes are, the mail inside is in danger and is only safe inside.
My beloved step mother spent years, with all possible sincerity, trying to convince people that cows grew magnets in their stomachs. She believed this was true because her father (a butcher) once teased her by telling her it’s where magnets come from.
I guess back in the day, magnets were used to attract stray barbed wire cattle might ingest while browsing their pastures. (How they got the cows to swallow the magnets, I have no idea.) When the animals were slaughtered, the magnets were retrieved.
Not crazy at all. My Grandmother once had to call the repairman for her TV, and the problem was that vibration (possibly from the vacuum) had loosened one of the tubes, so it didn’t work right.
I don’t think this happens as much with TV’s now, unlike her 1954 Admiral set.
psychobunny beat me to the punch. I was gonna post a link the the Google search.
My most embarrassing elderly relative was really just kind of bonkers. My aunt would go to a restaurant, and my uncle would just stand near the entry while his wife was seated by the hostess. He knew from experience that she’d try the first spot, find it unsatisfactory, ask for a different table (for any arbitrary reason - too close to the kitchen, too close to the door, too hot, too cold, too small, etc.) and repeat at least once more. Highly, highly annoying. Same lady was never allowed to order first at a restaurant, because, if anyone placed an order after hers, that final order would sound so much better than hers that she had to change her own.
I guess some folks might have been embarrassed by my Grandma, who became increasingly deaf with age. She sincerely believed that she was cussing under her breath, but we could all hear her. “Shit fire” was her favorite epithet. I thought it was the funniest thing ever.
My mom’s cousin/foster brother is certifiable. If I can avoid being in public with him, I do - he’s a hoarder, a know-it-all, and one of the symptoms of his very real mental illness is a lack of attention to basic hygiene. I love him, and wish he would accept treatment, but I don’t like being around him…
I believe it’s true that you should not use the telephone during a thunderstorm, but my Nana took this to mean any kind of rain at all, or even if it was very overcast. i remember being at her house, and if it was raining, she would let the phone ring and ring and we’d all have to back away from it.
Likewise, if we were in the car and it was raining (again, small drops, mist, anything) we were instructed not to touch anything, like the arm rests or door handles, and pick our feet up from the floor (if our feet reached), in case lightning struck the car. So we had to ride along, curled up like shrimp. Please note no seat belts were being worn here. The real danger was lightning.
She also believed that variances in temperature could cause disease, like if it was a warm day, it was okay to eat ice cream, but if it was a VERY HOT day, you couldn’t eat ice cream because if you did, you’d get polio.
Let’s think of it as that you saved your daughter from an extremely elderly serial killer.
That’s not odd, sadly. Once my sister in law (a GP) “got confidence” and started talking work at our family table, we needed to remind her and the then-in-her-60s woman that shit is not an appropriate subject for the lunch table unless everybody involved is: elderly, a little child or in the medical profession.
When my mother starts trying to describe her bowely details in a situation involving food, we ask her whether she’s in her second childhood or is it already the third one (Grandma is in her third).
Both sets of grandparents had books. For a bunch of Dopers that’s probably “well, d’oh”, but hey, I had classmates whose house only had the phonebook and my classmates’ schoolbooks… Anyway, at one point some of my uncles took their childhood books to their homes, and Abuelita filled the spaces with those gilded-back, horribly-translated collections which sometimes even pull stunts such as have the second half of the Decameron without the first (seriously, I checked and that particular collection was complete, but it only had half the book). They looked strange beside the other books, and the texts themselves were of a much lower quality. Some of those have gone to my mother and we’ve already told her we don’t want them, as even those which happen to be Spanish have so many typos it’s ridiculous.
My other grandmother blames books on her elder sister’s stupidity (I’m reasonably sure aunt Laura was born stupid); specifically, she blames the shotgun wedding on romance novels and says that “novelas, no vellas” - novels, I don’t even want to see one (vellas is an archaic form of verlas). Definitely not something she had in common with her husband. We’ve been clearing out his books and they come in three kinds: bilingual dictionaries, novels involving exotic places (Pearl S. Buck, Zane Grey, Lovecraft) and essays about war.
My Nana thought that Jesus wouldn’t go looking for you in a movie theater when He came back, so she refused to go and didn’t like us going. But she and Granddad loved their soap operas.
My dad thinks that you’ll start a fire if you repeatedly flick the lightswitch on and off.
When I was in 6th grade, our school got new windows. Our teacher wouldn’t let us go near them to look outside because she seriously was afraid they’d fall out of the frame and hit us. No, I’m not kidding.