As Kin Hubbard once said, “'Tain’t what a man don’t know that hurts him. It’s what he knows that just ain’t so.” And I’d hazard a guess that 99.999% of what most people know that just ain’t so came from their parents, usually their fathers.
I was just about to post to a thread about hanging people over in GQ that a proper hangman’s noose has thirteen coils. So I decided to do some Googling to see if I could find instructions on how to tie a hangman’s noose. And there, in the Wikipedia entry, it says, “It is an unfounded urban legend that the hangman’s noose is supposed to have 13 coils.” D’oh!
I clearly remember my dad teaching me how to tie a hangman’s noose, and saying that it had to have thirteen coils. I believed this for at least 40 years.
Fortunately, I learned about this particular wrong fact before embarrassing myself by forcefully insisting on its veracity in front of the whole world. But I imagine many people have not been so lucky and have only found out the hard way that dad was wrong. (I’m sure it’s happened to me, but I just can’t recall any incidents at the moment.)
So what did you learn from dad and believe for a long time before finding out he was wrong? You get extra points for anecdotes in which your enlightenment is particularly embarrassing or humiliating.
The word “eunuch” is pronounced the same as the word for one-sixteenth of a pound.
If your son wets the bed past the age of three, the best way to stop him is to beat him with a belt for ten minutes or so the next morning so he’ll learn that piss is basically concentrated, liquid sin.
Hmm…after being the latter lesson for five years or so, I stopped listening to Dad.
Well, I didn’t learn this from my Dad, but from the quotations section of my big honkin’ dictionary - “It’s not so much what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s all them things you know that ain’t so.” ~ Josh Billings.
Before I jumped in to correct you, I did a little googling and found two other versions of that quote, both attributed to Josh Billings. So it’s not just dear old Dad that misleads you.
[sub]This must be some sort of corollary to Gaudere’s Law.[/sub]
My source was Peter’s Quotations" (1977) by Laurence J. Peter (author of The Peter Principle). This site seems to suggest that Hubbard was intentionally quoting Billings, which might have been the source of the confusion.
And since Dr. Peter is not my father, this is entirely unrelated to Gaudere’s Law!
Oh dear, I remember a boyfriend who told me the thing about the hangman’s noose with the thirteen knots. Ought I to worry, in a Freudian sort of way?
And are we allowed to include mothers dishing out wrong information? You know, “if you have just washed your hair, you mustn’t go outside until you have dried it, otherwise you will catch a cold” - that sort of thing?
In Spain you have to choose your major and college at the same time.
Dad was an accountant. When he was the personnel manager for a factory, he’d had to write an analysis on how to prepare payroll, for a programmer to turn into code. The program worked on the first try; therefore, Dad was convinced that 1) analysis is easy, 2) programming is a cinch, 3) after some time, programming was going to become a basic skill everybody would learn, same as reading. There used to be a time when people made a living reading and writing other people’s letters, but not anymore.
So he refused to pay for me to study Computer Science. He never figured out that he was (and I am) incredibly good at logical analysis. I got my degree in ChemEng, then a Master’s in Compu Chem, now I work as a Computer Consultant, where a big part of my work consists of translating what the users want into analysis that the programmers can code. Long path to the same spot.
Today, my father said that Robert Taft was right all along and that the country should’ve listened to him.
I disagreed, but since Dad is in the hospital I didn’t have the heart to say that Robert Taft could pound sand in the very ass in which he hid his head for 30 years. I’m sure it was the drugs talking that made him say that.
You might not have the slightest idea about what I’m talking about, but trust me: Dad is so wrong.
When I asked him why airplanes retract their landing gear, he said “It reduces their weight.”
When hunting, always keep the breech open and unloaded. We went deer hunting under this rule a few times,him with my uncle’s 12 gauge, me with a BB gun. When a 6-point buck almost ran over us one time (only time we ever even saw a deer), he was fumbling with trying to get the shell into the shotgun. I shot the deer in the ass with my BB gun. I was only 9 years old, but it was the last time I went hunting with Dad. :mad:
1). It’s a prostate gland, not prostrate. I didn’t figure that one out until medical school.
2). Various and sundry misconceptions about non-white races.
3). Not dad - it’s mom - but that a bumper sticker that says “love a nurse PRN” is not nasty. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what it meant.
When Dad was living in Bradenton, Florida, and half his diet was seafood, he told me that the larger, all-the-same-size scallops were really shark meat, stamped out like cookies in that little round shape.
I brought that nugget to this board, fully confident of its truth. It was shot down from several directions.
He’s not the only one to discount new technology, though. AT&T thought hooking computers up to phone lines was a ridiculous idea and nobody would want to do it, and IBM said nobody would ever need computers except the Army.
Not actually bad advice, if you can find an employer who offers great benefits like that. Not very useful advice to a couple of teenagers with very low grade point averages and no real idea what career field they wanted to go into.
When I graduated from college, even the Peace Corps didn’t want me (I wish I had kept their rejection letter!). Many years later, however, I actually have an employer that will pay for my grad school.
I learned to fly about 35 years ago. My dad learned about 40 years before that, and told me to push the stick forward hard to get out of a stall. I did that and promptly turned a stall into a dive, which elicited much profanity from my flight instructor and a subsequent lecture on the advances of aeronautics.
