One of the funniest, and on the same token, saddest moments of ignorance I ever encountered was a few years, while talking to a friend of mine. We were (veryvery slight TMI ahead) debating the use of pads versus tampons and her reason for not using tampons was that they “made your pee stay inside you”. Utterly fucking confused, I asked her how in the hell that was possible seeing as a tampon went in the vaginal canal and not the urinary opening. Her response?
There’s two holes?!
:o
I love hitting submit before I’m done with my post. LOVE IT!
How much you want to be she Googled that? I’m just saying.
I’ll expose a bit of my own ignorance here. About the birds not being mammals thing…after thinking for a moment, that made sense to me seeing as how they don’t birth live young, but I honestly don’t think I knew that, if that makes sense. Now, QueerGeekGirl, she Googles. I desire to know what, in fact, birds are.
My boss didn’t know what an agnostic was. I told her and she said, “Wait a minute. Isn’t that an atheist?”
“No…not exactly,” I said. Sheesh.
Within the animal kingdom, birds and mammals are classes within the phylum Chordata and subphylum Craniata. See Biosis, “Guide to the Animal Kingdom for Students and Educators”.
TVeblen’s been rock’n lately!
I was having an argument with a certain gentleman once, and he kept trying to make the same illogical point by just changing certain words.
I called him on that and said the words were different in meaning and so it helped further his cause (which, for the life of me I can’t remember now, because what happened next eclipses the original argument in my memory).
So I said, “Look, let’s leave semantics out of this and get back to the original subject.”
He looked at me quizzically and uttered,
Wait for it…
Ok, now:
“What in Hell do the Jews have to do with it?!”
I very nearly died laughing.
Um… " …he said the words were…"
Screwed up my own beautiful story. [sigh]
Related to this birds not being mammals thing, I remember a girl I knew in 9th grade being surprised to find out that penguins were birds. That isn’t so bad in itself, I guess, except that we were in an Honors Biology (ie, advanced) class, and I kind of figured everyone there knew that kind of stuff.
Thank you! And thanks doubly for the link!
Don’t you hate that, **NoClueBoy
** I screwed up my smart ass comment in my previous post with a typo.
:smack:
When I was just starting out in 1st or 2nd grade, I asked my parents whether or not “Selfish” tasted good, and if we could catch some in Lake Erie.
More recently I had a conversation with someone my own age (30) and she had no idea who David Bowie is…
I’m surprised that there are some people who don’t know TVeblen is female ;). (Heh, NoClueBoy?)
QueerGeekGirl, there has been a lower court case over here of a girl who sued the tampon company because she inserted (with great difficulty) a micro-tampon in the urinary canal, with the expected unhealthy consequences. She lost the case, BTW.
I once found out a girl I knew didn’t know what a dodo was.
I have been “corrected” many times when I have said that insects are, in fact, animals.
“No they’re not! They’re insects!” :rolleyes:
A checkout girl at a supermarket in australia, upon learning that my wife and I were from the US, said “You must be pretty broken up, about Tupac.” I had rattling around somewhere in my brain that Tupac Shakur, the rapper, had been killed. My wife, after a moments blankness, said “Who? I don’t really follow football.”
I can’t post such about her without telling my own shameful moments: she sent me off to the fresh market to get her some lettuce. I triumphantly returned…with, apparently, a cabbage. How was I to know? I don’t eat that sort of stuff.
I used to work with a woman whose husband’s family was from New Mexico. She related that they had several times encountered US Postal Service employees who told them they had to put extra postage on items being sent from Massachussetts to New Mexico “because it is being sent out of the country”. I mean, come on. Isn’t it part of their job to know what geographic units comprise the 50 states?
maybe its not so much about ignorance, but about what each of us likes and dislikes etc etc, i remember a couple years ago a national tabloid in the UK done a survey on some british MP’s asking them who the spice girls were (really bad group), about 60% or so didnt know, and were accused of being completely ignorant…but then why would they know? or why should they know? no offence to the legions of spice girls fans(?) out there, but would they know?
maybe that same example could be applied in a lot of these so called ignorance cases… although, i cant understand how some people dont know about certan major events…
I was about 15. And due to an amazing (to me) sey of circumstances I found myself hanging out with :eek: college kids. college kids who were :eek: DJ’s (at the local college station). College kids who were DJ’s and what with having cars and all, took my with them to clubs and shows in NYC :eek: :eek: .
In other words, the coolest people I had ever met.
So one day we were walking around Greenwich Village waiting for some concert or other to start and, given the location I mention Lenny Bruce.
None of them had ever heard of Lenny Bruce. The coolest people I knew.
Fortunatly my faith was strong and I went on regarding them as inpenatratably cool…but still.
We were travelling through Asia, talking to another travelling couple about where we were each going to be for the ‘millenium’ (New Years 99-00). When we replied with “Paris” one of them asked where that was, and the other chimed in with “It’s in Europe, isn’t it?”
Both Mr Goo and I just looked blankly at them for a moment, before confirming that it was indeed in Europe, and actually in France, too. We had no idea that people existed who hadn’t heard of Paris. It’s not as if we had said our hometown, or somewhere equally obscure, it was PARIS for diety’s sake !
deity, diety, schmeity, schmiety 
Wasn’t there a story floating round that Dubya had never heard of Britney Spears? C’mon! Doesn’t he drink Pepsi? Where’s Bob Dole when you need him? 
A girl at work thought that we celebrate MLK day because he freed the slaves.
There’s also the occasional customer who sends back a glass of white zinfandel (they ordered!) b/c “they ordered white wine!” I can understand being cheerfully ignorant about something you don’t drink, but why is someone pretending to be a wine expert when they don’t even know what color white zin is?
My roommate’s teenage nephew, going through a “magic” phase, went to the bookstore to find a book on David Copperfield, the magician.
And went home with the Dickens novel. Not just “saw” it, becoming momentarily confused…no, he found it in the fiction section and purchased it!
And there is, finally, the infamous, never-to-be-outlived moment when S, one of my friends and coworkers, was playing one of those touch-screen games at the bar. She was playing one of its trivia games, and it asked her upon whose head did the famous apple fall, thus leading to the discovery of gravity.
And she hit…yes, she did…
Wayne Newton.
This is filed under the computer illiteracy field. A friend of mine wanted to use a picture in her .sig file on a MB we both frequent. I went through the lengthy explanation of uploading the pic to a server, etc. To make a long story short, she finds a server, and then said “How does the picture get here?” Confused, I said “You upload it from your hard drive.” Her reply…here it comes…“It has to be on my computer?”
Doh!
My good friend, whom I adore, called me the other night to ask me what acetominiphin was.
I have also had people insist to me that Nebraska is on the Canadian border.
Many, many people I met in Texas would ask me “What time is it in Nebraska right now??”