RE: We Are the World, I knew off the bat 25 performers and looking at the list provided up thread, I knew every single one of the singers, but couldn’t immediately put names to faces. I’ll be 43 this year and this song was performed by my high school graduating class at our graduation ceremony. It gave me a warm fuzzy.
As to the OP, I’m always surprised when older people, like my mother, don’t know anything at all about computers, not even how a QWERTY keyboard is setup. She’s 60, so it’s not like she ancient or something.
Ha! That’s funny. I had no idea New England wasn’t a state. Don’t suppose that’s too surprising, though - I’m not from the US and it does sound like a state. Still kinda funny that it’s not on Google maps - it’d make as much sense to be able to find an area as a state.
It’s the area comprised of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, in case you were wondering - basically the far Northeastern corner of the country.
My GF was also wrong, since she thought it was three states. According to Wiki, the official name for that area was once New England, before it split up into the individual states. So I guess it’s kinda like looking for Middlesex in England - and that is on google maps.
Yeah, but Middlesex was still a county up until… the sixties or seventies? New England stopped being an administrative region sometime around 1700. I bet you won’t find Mercia on Google Maps.
I’m quoting this just because it reminds me of how Her Majesty’s English speakers will add an ‘r’ sound to words that don’t end in the the letter ‘r’. For example, in the old TV show Xena, the Australian and New Zealand actors pronounced the title character’s name as ‘zener,’ at least that’s what it sounds like to my American Midwest English ears.
I honestly don’t know if you are trying to prove me right or wrong. I hear an ‘r’, I even heard the ‘r’ in ‘arse’ in the skit linked upthread. I really don’t care why, linguistically or phonetically. It was just an off-hand comment. I’m sure I talk funny, too.
The difference is that, at least in the public high school I attended in 90 - 94, you got a new math class every year. You took American history exactly once. And mine went pretty much the way others have described, starting with the “discovery” of America and hitting the highlights up until WWII, with maybe 4 - 6 weeks left at the end of the year for everything since.
You said that the cast of Xena said Xenar. They don’t. It’s the intrusive r - an r appears between a word ending in a vowel sound and a word starting in a vowel sound (eg ‘Xena (r) is’). So you don’t hear an r every time an Australian or Brit says Xena - only in specific circumstances (this is explained in the link I gave you).
This is about the 8th or 9th time I’ve seen an American on here stating as fact that Brits and Aussies talk that way; they usually argue their case even after multiple cites, anecdotes and audio examples. It’s not your fault - you’re not responsible for them - but it gets annoying having to correct the same misconception again and again and again.
Which skit do you mean? If the speaker has a non-rhotic accent, then you won’t hear an r. There isn’t one. If they pronounced an r in the word arse, then it wouldn’t be a non-rhotic accent.
Yes, it turned up on mine. I think the difference might be that I’m logged in to Google and it automically searches for Mercia near London rather than other Mercias. Wessex isn’t there though. Of course, there is a difference between those two examples and New England, in that New England is still used as an unofficial geographical term.
I know at least one person who shares that misapprehension.
I suspect it starts with older siblings playing cruel jokes on their younger siblings, and the younger kids never getting the joke. It’s similar to my older sister telling me when I was four or so that spiders were baby octopodes and rabbits were baby kangaroos.
They don’t always. Did you really cover the same things in history class every year? Mine focused on different things entirely
From memory, my history classes:
4th grade: California (state) history
5th grade: US History (Columbus->WWII)
6th grade: Don’t remember.
7th grade: Ancient history (Greece, Rome, etc. up through the Renaissance)
8th grade: Don’t remember.
9th grade: US History
10th grade: World History Industrial Revolution through WWII. Alternate historical interpretations (I remember reading Marx and Howard Zinn, for example)
11th grade: History of the Americas. This was mostly not US history; it was colonial history and Latin American history.
12th grade: History of the Americas + American Gov/Econ. The History of the Americas wasn’t a repeat, but a continuation.
Yeah, we didn’t really talk much about post WWII, but there aren’t a lot of repeats there. And, to the extent that there are repeats, it’s because the level of discourse rises considerably in the intervening years. We studied Geometry in 4th grade and in 9th grade, but it wasn’t the same course any more than 5th grade US History and 9th grade US History were “the same thing.”
My brother knew that there was some guy called the Pope who was the head of the Catholic Church in Rome. He also knew that the Catholic Church was the dominant religion in Ireland. He was very surprised to learn that it was the same Catholic Church in both places. He thought it was two different ones.
Normally he’s an extremely intelligent person, if somewhat lazy.
Pop culture disparity isn’t only age-related. I grew up with little media exposure and don’t have much now. I’m equally ignorant compared to my peer group (mid-20s), my BF’s generation (early 40s) and my parent’s generation (mid 50s).
I just don’t talk about tv, movies and music with people. I’m left out of most ‘water cooler’ conversations… and it’s often awkward when people quote commercials, tv shows, and movies and I’m expected to understand the context.
I tell you what else is weird: if you go to the Mirriam Webster online dictionary, the common English word “gullible” doesn’t have an entry. Seriously–go try and look it up!
