I was once doing a crossword puzzle with a coworker, who was a very traditional and observant Catholic. One of the clues was “St. ____'s Fire.” When I told her the answer was “Elmo,” she cracked up, and denied that there was ever a St. Elmo. The only Elmo she ever heard of was on Sesame Street.
I bet her $20. Wish I’d bet more.
Same here. Most of elementary school was just random bits and pieces that later turned out to be false/half truths (Columbus discovering America when everyone else thought the world was flat, Pilgrims/first Thanksgiving, etc…) and local state history.
7th and 8th grade were ancient history (Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mayan/Incan/Aztec.)
9th grade was the fall of the Roman Empire up colonization of America.
10th grade was America from colonization to the end of the 19th century.
11th grade was 20th century.
12th grade was a mish-mash of US politics, economics, and current events. We also had AP US History as an option, which was all of US History, but a bigger focus on 20th century.
I’m also surprised by the lack of basic astronomy people got. I must have had some damn good elementary teachers, because by the time I left 6th grade (Hell, even before that) I knew all nine planets (back then it was nine…still is to me…), that the Earth had one moon that rotated around it, several other planets had moons (though I didn’t (and still don’t) know which ones have how many and their names,) the size of all the planets relative to each other, that the sun is at the center and is a star, there’s an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a few basic facts about comets, the difference between a lunar and solar eclipse, and sort of the difference between a meteor and a meteorite.
I was told that any free floating rock in space that isn’t a comet or in the asteroid belt is a meteor, and if it hits Earth, it’s a meteorite. That last part is true (if by hit you take to mean strikes the surface,) but that’s not quite the definition of a meteor…that’s a meteoroid.
I don’t know why no one else can get it, but New England shows up on Google Maps for me, though it strangely asks “Did you mean New England?” after I spelled it exactly that way the first time.
And I wonder how many Americans would even know what New England is if the Patriots hadn’t adopted the name?
I actually got someone to do that recently. OK, so he was 11 years old, and I should perhaps be ashamed, but I hadn’t actually expected it to work.
A few years ago I caught an episode of Password on the Gameshow Network that had a strange moment. It appeared to be from '65 or so (Allen Ludden made a big deal about how nice it was for the viewers to see the celebrity in color! ). The word they were going for was handwriting or something and the clue the contestant gave was “cursive”. Ludden, the two celebrities and the other contestant had never heard that word before. When they came back from commercial, they had looked it up in a dictionary and gave it’s definition for the viewers. Was that really an obscure word back then?
The normal term in the UK is “joined up”. I’m wondering if “cursive” was introduced by a particularly influential textbook or something.
Back when I lived in NYC . . . At work, one of our clients sent us a nice map of the world, so we put it up on a wall. One of my coworkers was standing there staring at the map, and finally asked “Where’s Flatbush?” (Flatbush is an area within Brooklyn.) I pointed at a black dot on the map, and told him it represented all the boroughs of New York City, and even all of Brooklyn was too small for its own dot. He was amazed.
He also didn’t know that the U.S. isn’t the largest country.
We called it cursive when I was in second grade, in 1952. I can’t believe Allen Ludden didn’t know that.
But it isn’t.
Wind chill is the effective cooling RATE of an object, warm blooded, cold blooded, or inanimate. As you correctly stated, the “real” temperature is as cold as an object will get, but the “wind chill” temperature defined the speed at which it will get there. If it’s 5 degrees with a wind chill of -10, a warm object will cool to 5 degrees at the same speed as it would if there were no (or minimal) wind on a -10 degree day.
Heck, the effect was originally measured by freezing water in a suspended container – no warm-blooded anything involved.
It’s in the top five, isn’t it? Russia, China, Canada, U.S. and something else?
Brazil.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_total_area]Third or fourth, dependent on certain country definitions.
- Russia
- Canada
3/4. China
3/4. USA - Brazil
Weren’t you supposed to say “No offence, but…” in that case? Everyone knows that’s the standard boilerplate that excuses everything.
I wonder how that list would rank for “usable” land rather than just square mileage. Obviously usable is somewhat subjective.
The USA would likely move up, but I imagine Brazil could leap into the number one spot.
And I’ve always heard it called cursive writing here in the deep south. Once I left school my cursive went to hell (not that it was very good) with the typewrites and mainframes and computers and whatnot. Now I can barely write cursive and I must do it slowly if its to be readable. For fast remotely legible writing I have to go to print.
He probably had this map in his head.
OK, this is not as bad as velcro and cookie cutters (cookie cutters??? who doesn’t know cookie cutters?). However, I was a little stunned the other day when three separate Target workers did not know what distilled water was. OK, I can understand not knowing the difference between distilled and purified water (which is what the fourth worker sent me after), but I thought that people would have at least heard of distilled water and could take a rough guess. The instructions on my humidifier seem to think that it’s something one ought to know about…
In a similar vein to the velcro and distilled water stories, my local supermarket went through a long phase of moving the pasties to different sections ever few days. I was buying a lot of them at the time and always ended up having to ask for help. None of the staff knew what a pasty was. Many of them insisted that I meant pasta and would not believe me that pasty was a different word. This is a very common product in England, btw.
The other day I used the word “iPhone” and a friend asked me what I meant. I repeated it a couple of times assuming she had simply misheard me. No, she was unfamiliar with the product. This woman is not a recluse either–she has lots of friends, two kids, two jobs–oh, and a cell phone. But she watches no TV (obviously, with two kids and two jobs).