Okay, as long as this has been resurrected, here’s my contribution for the episode “The Santa Simulation”.
When Sheldon is singing “Good King Wenceslas”, after he sings “Where and what his dwelling” (the second line of the second verse), he incorrectly sings the last two lines of the first verse instead. Also, when he ends the song, he incorrectly sings the last two lines of the last verse to the melody of the first two lines.
I actually did add this to “goofs” for that episode in IMDb, but someone deleted it, so I let it go.
That’s not as bad as the fact that he fails to correct Leonard for badly mispronouncing “Vaclav.” Even if Sheldon didn’t know how to pronounce it from knowing about St. Vaclav, he’d certainly know about it from Vaclav Havel, the first president of the newly independent Czech Republic, in office 1993-2003. A “C” in Czech is a “TS.” It’s VA-tslav, not VA-klav. (A CZ is like an English “CH,” if anyone is curious.)
Though I’m still not sure why you’d assume Sheldon would know the first president of the Czech Republic…unless he’s also the one who designed the flag.
Why would he know where fig newtons got their name? He knows an awful lot of things, and is fond of pointing out that fact. I’m a mere mortal, and I know who Vaclav Havel is, and I don’t claim to know every important thing in the known universe, like Sheldon does. And if he’s really in his thirties now, and went to high school at 11, he must have been politically aware during at least part of the time that Havel was in office.
Because that was interesting to him, at one point, at least.
This is a man who dismisses the humanities, whole fields of science, and vast swaths of pop culture and human interaction as unimportant. I see nothing about him that requires that he have an interest in international politics beyond how it overlaps with his interest in vexillology* or knowing what country he’d need to seek a visa from if he’s offered a chance to work at various scientific institutes.
Like Sheldon, I’m an insufferable know-it-all who collects trivia like a whale collects krill, and I also have a significant (though not complete) overlap in fields of interest with him (sadly, not aptitude). I could have told you that the Czech republic came into being when I was in high school (but not the exact year). I could tell you that it’s also called Czechia. I could not tell you who led it at any point in its history, because that’s not within my fields of interest, and not something I’ve encountered by accident.
I would not be entirely surprised if he did know, to be sure, but I’d be even less surprised if he didn’t. And even if he did, I’d be surprised if he had an adequate grasp of Czech orthography (or heard it pronounced by someone who did), in order to properly pronounce the name (though he’d be confident as hell he was pronouncing it correctly).
Why the hell wasn’t that in Firefox’s spellcheck dictionary?
That’s a good point, too. Someone like Sheldon, if he did know the president of the Czech Republic, would know it from some textual source, and so it would be of no help in knowing the pronunciation.
*Sheldon: I had the same feeling when I made my dad buy a Betamax instead of a VHS.
Amy: You were just a little kid.
Sheldon: Yeah, a little kid who picked the wrong format to record The MacNeil/Lehrer Report. Now I also was certain that HD DVD would win out over Blu-ray.
Amy: How old were you then?
Sheldon: Old enough to know better. You know, and now that I think about it, I stood in front of a case of iPods and I bought a Zune.*
He follows breaking news. He even points out to Leonard at one point that the exception to the established TV schedule is breaking news. And he watched the MacNeil/Lehrer report. He also knew about the “Velvet revolution” (the break-up of Czechoslovakia) because he talked about it on Fun with Flags. He knew about the new flags of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and he knew the old Czechoslovak flag. I’ll bet anything he’d heard the name Vaclav Havel at some point.
You know what? Sheldon apparently decided that having a lot of of cats was bad. From personal experience, having a lot of cats (7) is wonderful. Well, not on litterbox day, but you learn to stagger them, so no one changes all of them all the time.
Okay; this is not about Sheldon, but about the show’s writers. Several times they have had the actors talk about their basements. WE DO NOT HAVE BASEMENTS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA!!!
We have two-car garages instead, and the idea that we have basements convinces me that the writers are all from New York, and cannot imagine a home without a basement.
I have lived here all my life, and in that time I have seen ONE basement; for a house built in 1907 by refugees from Iowa.
They might be rare, but they exist. My uncle actually has a basement in his beachfront house, of all things. I’m sure it cost him an arm and a leg to build it, and another one to maintain it, but he somehow made it happen.
I’m pretty sure the show is produced in Hollywood.
But that aside, I don’t recall the characters talking about their basements. In any event, only Howard and Bernadette live in a house, and they explicitly have a crawl-space, because Howard and his FIL were in one episode. (They also have a huge garage.)
Everyone else lives in an apartment building. If they talked about basements, they were either talking about the basements in their buildings (and the Penny-Leonard-Sheldon building appears to have a basement, because there’s a windowless room where the washers and dryers are), or their childhood homes in other states.
Now, Howard aside (we know the house he grew up in had a crawl-space), Amy and Bernadette are from California. Did either one of them refer to a basement explicitly in a house? Do you have an example?
