Must be Puerto Rico and DC. But that also leaves out Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands. Northern Marianas, and so on. But who’d bother with the less internationally-known ones like New Braska and Our Kansas?
Or possibly the (correct) facts that they heard just got conflated/confused over time.
“We all know” that the US has 50 states. Point to the US on a map and one generally points to the contiguous states. But wait, there’s also Alaska and Hawaii, so add two. For a total of 52.
Basically, they just forget that the contiguous states do not include all 50.
Or it is just “adding” DC and Puerto Rico; I wouldn’t expect a lot of non-Americans to know about Guam and the others, since very few Americans do.
My guess would be that they knew there were 50 states, but then remember the US acquired 2 more (relatively) recently, so that’d make 52.
I dont forget the working man’s favorite…I the ho.
This reminds me of another one: it came out that a former co-worker of mine did not know that North Carolina and South Carolina were separate states - he thought it was just a big state called Carolina, and people were using the “North” and “South” in the way they might refer to Northern and Southern California. :smack: When I cleared it up I asked if he knew that North and South Dakota and Virginia and West Virginia were all separate states; he claimed he did, but I’m not sure I believe him.
The irony, it burns!
I went through University with a girl who had come from a well-to-do background and was in a tutorial discussing the issue of poverty. She got increasingly restless, then blurted out that this academic discussion was all very well, but there weren’t actually poor people, were there?
Lots of stunned silence. The poor girl was only 17, and not at all a snob, she just didn’t ever see poor people in her day to day existence and so just thought all the talk about them was about some infinitesimally tiny minority group.
I was very fond of her (still am) but that was a :smack: moment.
A friend of mine once asked a girl around twenty years of age if anyone ever told her that she looked like Nancy Sinatra. She looked perplexed for a moment and then said, “Oh, is she, like, related to that Frank guy?”
And that was twelve years ago.
I wouldn’t expect a younger person to recognize all of them, but I would expect them to know a few, if only because the styles of pop and rock music have been cruising along and evolving slowly since 1980. The parents of today’s 30-year-olds grew up listening to the Beatles, Motown, the Doors, Pink Floyd and what have you; in other words, music that’s different from today’s, but not utterly so. But their own parents grew up with Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. We have yet to see anything like the massive shift in popular music that occurred between about 1953 and 1969.
Hmmmm…Kenny ROGERS!?
I remember being on a bus tour in Toronto with two guys from Israel and two girls from Belfast. Somehow we got onto the topic of the Troubles and one of the guys made a remark along the lines of: yeah, we know what it’s like living in that kind of situation. To which the girls replied, “Really? So you guys have something like the Troubles from where you come from?”
I thought she was trying to make some kind of sarcastic joke, but she was being completely sincere. The guys were a bit disconcerted, to say the least.
My husband has a niece who is planning a holiday in Europe this year. She says she has done her research but was stunned when we told her that places like the Eiffel Tower would have admission charges.
My daughter (16 at the time) had to ask what a typewriter was when we were watching "Weekend at Bernie’s. I felt a 100 years old.
I’m saving the story of what my son thought a “blow job” was for his 21st! 
I can do you one better. When I was in 9th grade, I had a teacher who insisted, insisted, insisted that Belize was **not **a place, that I had made it up.
That was my geography teacher.
I had to pull down the classroom map and call her up to it and point the country out to her. And tell her that it used to be called British Honduras. And she was still skeptical at me, even when she saw it in print, as if I had perhaps replaced her classroom map with one that showed some cockamamie non-country I had invented.
No, no Rod Stewart in the We Are the World video.
In the interest of clearing it all up, the solo performers in the video, in order of appearance, are:
Lionel Richie (father of Nicole)
Stevie Wonder (blind pianist/singer, braid enthusiast)
Paul Simon (half of Simon & Garfunkel, ex-husband of Princess Leia)
Kenny Rogers (country singer, former chicken restaurant owner)
James Ingram (sang the theme song from that animated movie with the lost mouse)
Tina Turner (please tell me I don’t have to explain)
Billy Joel (again, if I have to explain…)
Michael Jackson (not even trying to explain)
Diana Ross (and again…)
Dionne Warwick (former psychic friend, cousin of Whitney Houston, very popular in the 60s - mid 80s)
Willie Nelson (country singer, Farm Aid founder, marijuana enthusiast)
Al Jarreau (sang the theme song from “Moonlighting”)
Bruce Springsteen (The Boss)
Kenny Loggins (sang the theme song to “Footloose” and “Top Gun” and “Caddyshack” he liked singing theme songs)
Steve Perry (lead singer of Journey, don’t stop believin’ kids)
Daryl Hall (the taller, blonder, handsomer half of Hall & Oates)
Huey Lewis (lead singer of The News, sang the theme song to “Back to the Future”)
Cyndi Lauper (beyond explanation)
Kim Carnes (sang that song about Bette Davis Eyes)
Bob Dylan (…)
Ray Charles (…)
In the ensemble, there are 4 Jackson brothers, 1 Jackson sister (LaToya), 3 Pointer Sisters, Sheila E (Prince protege, wanted to lead the Glamorous Life), Bette Midler (she was a redhead then), John Oates (the shorter, brunet, mustachioed, less handsome half of Hall & Oates), Lindsay Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, Harry Belafonte (he sang those calypso songs that people danced to in “Beetlejuice”), R&B balladeer Jeffrey Osborne (you’ve heard him, you just don’t know it) and, inexplicably, Dan Aykroyd. The conductor of the group is the legendary Quincy Jones (father of that horrible chick who came between Jim & Pam on “The Office”).
And now you know.
I’m not particularly a fan of Kenny Rogers and never have been, but at one time (roughly late seventies/early eighties) he was about the biggest star in the country, with tons of hit records and awards and several popular motion picuture and television movies. According to Wiki "He was voted the “Favorite Singer of All-Time” in a 1986 joint poll by readers of both USA Today and People". So at the time of We Are The World, he was still a bigger star, and for a longer period of time, than many of the other performers.
I worked at a plant that manufactured vinyl siding for homes, and one cold winter night me and one other guy were loading up a container when one of us wondered out loud who would need all these supplies in the middle of January.
The container was going overseas so this guy tells me that it was because it was going to Japan or China and those countries were in the southern hemisphere and it was summer there.
I didn’t want to just directly contradict him so I politely suggested that I was pretty sure both countries were in the northern hemisphere. He agreed that China probably was, but insisted that Japan definitely wasn’t.
:smack:
Somebody also missed out on the fact that overseas containers take several months to arrive. Did y’all think they would be airlifted?
OK, I give up. Vhy a duck? Vhy-a no chicken?
Lou, a very sweet but intellectually incurious friend of mine (in her mid-twenties) had the following conversation at work last year:
Lou: “Where is Metropolis anyway?”
- “Er… ‘metropolis’ isn’t a place. It’s a description.”
“No, I’m sure it’s a real city.”
- “It isn’t. Do you think Gotham City is a real place too?”
“Isn’t it??!?”
- “No!!!”
“Well why do they make movies about it then? What’s the point of making a movie about somewhere that doesn’t exist?”
- “Lou - Batman doesn’t exist either.”
Then the penny dropped and she became very embarrassed at how dumb she’d been.
I am just gobsmacked when someone’s brain works like this. I mean, she is not unintelligent at all - she has a good degree and when we worked together, the stuff I delegated to her was always done brilliantly. Yet she comes out with insane stuff like this. I don’t get how you can get to that age without knowing stuff.
Wha? According to the link you posted, “A rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɨk/, sometimes /ˈrɒtɨk/) speaker pronounces the letter R in hard. A non-rhotic speaker does not pronounce it in hard. In other words, rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound in the same phrase or prosodic unit (see “linking and intrusive R”).” Most Americans pronounce the R in hard.
Kimmy has got “rhotic” and “non-rhotic” muddled up. Most (but not all) American accents are rhotic, while most (but not all) British accents are non-rhotic.
ETA: and I’m shocked to find he didn’t know that! ::Badoom-tish::
:dubious: I live with a guy from Belfast and I’m positive his pronunciation of “arse” rhymes with my American pronunciation of “farce.” I hear him say " ____, my arse!" often enough to be certain of this fact.