Thank you for so casually dismissing my personal life experience. :rolleyes:
When I was living in California I had one lady ask me if Texas (because I’m from Texas) had a coastline.
People pronouncing Arkansas “R-Kansas”.
Talking to two middle aged women. I mentioned something about the aurora borealis. Neither one of them had no clue what I was talking about.
So, they both understood?
On Galileo’s experiment, see here:
Most people think it was a gedankenexperiment that a biographer mistakenly took for the real thing, although there are some who think he actually did it.
In the real world, if you drop two balls of different weight but so heavy that drag is negligible, they will fall at the same rate. Galileo’s reasoning is relevant to this. Why do you find this amazing?
I didn’t realize that the word “eavestrough” was a regionalism until I tried to use it in the southwest and got blank looks.
Re-read what Xema *actually *wrote, not what you skimmed and *assumed *he wrote. 
I had to double-take it the first time to get the joke too.
When sharing a regionalism it’s polite to tell the rest of the planet (i.e. us) what the crazy-assed word you’ve found actually means to the poor benighted locals who use it and where on Earth those goofs can be found.
I believe the muggles know them as “rain gutters” (the ones on the edges of roofs, not the ones on the edges of streets). It is nevertheless a common term in the glorious motherland.
It makes some sense, you just have to go back to the original primary meaningof “of”.
Bolding mine
Sure, the word “away” could still mean before or after the hour, but if I said “it’s 15 minutes away from 8:00” I think most people would infer 7:45. I grew up hearing “quarter of”, “quarter 'till” and “quarter to”, but had to look up the reason why “of” makes sense. I had never given it a thought before.
…
The floppy disk is an icon too, but it doesn’t mean I use them any more. Also he’s not quite dead yet, so you might want some accurate media. 
This just in: Bob Seger is still not dead.
But Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Having grown up in New England, I’ve always been amazed at how many people are unaware that typical lobsters originally have green shells that only turn red when they are cooked. In fact, that bit of knowledge is apparently so obscure that live lobsters are usually red when appearing in cartoons.
I’m neither left-handed nor cross-dominant, and I need to think before determining where is my right and where is my left (right is the on the side of the hand I use to write, so I need to figure out first which hand this is. I in fact briefly think about writing. As a child, I needed to actually mimic writing in the air to determine which hand was which). I commonly point to the right while saying “turn left after this building” when giving directions because I motioned automatically without thinking first.
From previous threads on this board, this inability to automatically and immediately identify right and left or your right hand and your left hand is pretty common.
Which makes utter sense, if you’ve only seen it written.
Even at the Kittery Trading Post!
http://www.woodstogoods.com/store/images/maineLobsterMagnet.jpg
I believe you call them gutters. In Canada we call them eavestroughs.
Regarding “hydro” (particularly BC hydro!) electricity is not the first thing that comes to mind. What I first think of is hydroponics and a certain plant that is grown with that method.
Arkansas? I grew up in Pennsylvania but now live near Atlantic City, NJ. After moore than 30 years I still can’t get used to the R-Kansas Ave. that everyone refers to. Or the not-to-distant Fork-ed River. WTF?
In Kansas, the Arkansas River and Arkansas City, KS are both pronounced R-Kansas.
A while ago, talking to an Irish cousin of mine, I mentioned going to Connecticut. She gasped and said, “Wait, Connecticut actually exists? It’s not just something they have in TV shows?!”