I work with someone (answer to, actually) who thinks that insects aren’t animals and that penguins can fly. Go DeVry!
There was a VP in our company who had never heard of Stalin.
I’ve known this intellectually for a decade or so, but I still picture Rod Stewart singing every time I hear the song. . .
I’m not surprised or offended when teenagers today dont know who my favorite bands were. Heck, I don’t know who THEIR favorite bands are. Pop culture changes. There’s no reason to be outraged by that.
I’m fine with college kids who don’t know or care who Emerson, Lake & Palmer were. I’m horrified by kids who’ve made it through high school and to good colleges without knowing basic facts about history.
When I first moved to Austin, back in 1986, the economy was in terrible shape, and I had to work several part-time jobs. One of those jobs was at a tutoring service just off the University of Texas campus.
One day, I got a call from the service saying a female sophomore needed help with a history paper on “Nuremberg and Vietnam.” Now, I’m not an expert on either subject, but I could infer what the class and paper were about. Clearly, she was supposed to write a paper discussing whether American politicians, generals and soldiers should be tried for war crimes in Vietnam, as many Nazis were tried at Nuremberg.
When I showed up for our session, I met a very nice, very bright young lady who knew virtually NOTHING about either World War 2 or the Vietnam War. I mean NOTHING! It reached the point where I had to frame everything in terms of TV and movies. I was asking, “Did you ever see ‘Platoon’? No? What about ‘Apocalypse Now’? You DID see that one? Okay, that was the Vietnam War.”
I spent about 30 minutes explaining what the Nazis did, how some of them were tried at Nuremberg, who William Calley was, what happened at My Lai… and when I was finished, she had a blank look on her face. Then her first question was, “Okay, so… like Hitler fought in Vietnam?”
Well that depends where you live really. A lot of places do consider it midwinter, even if the weather patterns don’t reflect that.
Friends reference? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikd9sHFSF0A
Several years ago there was a lunar eclipse starting at about 5 PM. I commented at work about how we would be able to see it begin as we left work (it was winter). “Ooooh!” exclaimed one sweet young (blonde) secretary. “Don’t look at it!” Why? She didn’t know, just that you weren’t supposed to look directly at an eclipse. Um, I think you heard that about a solar eclipse. After all, you can look at the full moon, why wouldn’t you be able to look at it as it was being blocked by a shadow? She appeared to be even more confused. I asked her to think about what caused a lunar eclipse. She answered, and I swear on the souls of my grandchildren this is the complete truth, “Isn’t that when the sun gets between the earth and the moon, and casts a shadow?”
In other common-sense cluelessness, I was commenting to a woman here at work how nice it is that the nights are getting a little bit shorter these days. Now, this is a woman over 60 years of age. She said, “Yes, I noticed that. Must be global warming.”
I think that needs to be qualified somewhat. I just spent 30 minutes googling around to see what other cites I could find for this new classification and couldn’t find any. Then I saw that the site you references states it is by and large written by college students.
I know that taxonomic classification is a gray area and evolves over time as we learn more about species relationships. It could be that some time in the future having birds as a subclass of reptiles might be commonly accepted. But I don’t think we are there quite yet.
When I was taking some graduate astronomy course one professor told me this story.
Some student was getting a masters in geology from the geology department. But is was some kind of specialization regarding martian geology. So, he had to take a few sorta generalized undergrad and grad courses from the astronomy department for whatever reason.
During the oral exam, it because obvious that this guy had NO clue how lunar or solar eclipses happened. I think they even bent over backwards to try to let him get it remotely right one way or another during the exam and even that didnt help.
They made him take another few courses before they passed him.
She could be right. And the days shorter too.
I was surprised a few years ago at how many Dopers not only didn’t know what artist recorded Strawberry Fields Forever, but didn’t care. Sure, some pop references are a little age-dependent, but that one floored me.
Still not sure who this Michael Jackson is that everyone is talking about. He was a US president, right?
Okay, obviously that chica wasn’t all that bright (especially proven with the last part).
But
I’m 27 and I’ll say that I got hosed WRT learning about the Vietnam War (also the Korean War). Every single history class I had in grade and high school stopped after talking about the post-war baby boom. The problem seemed to be that anything after that “seemed” too recent to the textbook writers (and teachers) to really be covered in HISTORY class. Probably because they remembered it happening, so it’s not HISTORY. HISTORY is OLD stuff. I’m not OLD!
So I’d learn about the Greeks and Romans, England’s history, all of this American history between Columbus and WW2… over and over and over and over… and that’s it. Every single time, we’d stop after WW2.
US History always went:
- Columbus
- Spanish Conquistadors
- Pilgrims
- Colonial times
- Revolutionary war
- Setting up the new country
- The Civil War
- The usually vaguely-covered post Civil War period that also included all those “other wars” (Spanish American War, etc.) that was jumbled together into a week or so because the teachers realized they still had world wars to cover before the school year was over
- WW1
- THE ROARING TWENTIES AND THE SAD DEPRESSION
- WW2
And then the school year is over.
Basically, anything that I learned about the Vietnam War was from self study. Heck, a handful of classmates would have parents who were in 'Nam, but they were the kids who had “old parents”. Most of my classmates had parents who were too young to have served in Vietnam, so we couldn’t even really learn from them, either.
Carnes and Stewart sang a duet of the song on some awards show, back when it was a hit.
Not knowing the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon is really bizarre, as every set I’ve ever looked at had the words printed on the handles.
I’m 46 and had the exact same experience as you in grade school and high school. I always thought either our school was too poor for recent textbooks or the Vietnam War was still too controversial. Nothing explains why I know nothing about the Korean War.
Call me crazy, but I can hear non-rhotic Rs. Granted they are just barely there, but they are there nonetheless. It’s more just a slight closing of the lips, and not much in the way of tongue curl (although maybe just a tiny bit of tongue lift).
And, as already pointed out, some types of UK accents pronounce the R in arse quite distinctly.
Which reminds me… I can’t tell you how many recipes I run across which call for “3 teaspoons” of something. I can’t for the life of me figure out why you’d write it that way (let’s measure three times instead of once!), unless you seriously had no idea what the obvious conversion is.
Re: typewriters: When I was [some number between three and ten] I would sit around playing with this old typewriter we had lying around the house. So I knew about the banging on keys and pushing it back when you got to the next row. I had a lot of fun with that typewriter. Sometimes there was even actual paper in it.
Yes, consider that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream set during the summer solstice; he didn’t call it The Beginning of Summer Night’s Dream.
I think the difference in seasonal “calendars” breaks down very roughly along American/European lines. I personally think of the quarter holidays (solstices and equinoxes) as the middle of the season. It just doesn’t make sense to me that summer doesn’t start until late June (or winter at late December); it’s been warm (cold) for at least a month before that. And given that solstices are the longest/shortest daylight periods, it makes more sense to me to think of the season as waxing (summer) or waning (winter) toward the peak/valley in the middle, rather than having that peak/valley at the beginning.
Back in 2008, an educated co-worker working (for three years by that point) in U.S. congressional relations asked out loud which members of the U.S. House were up for re-election that November.
She was offended that anyone could think she should have known the answer without having to ask.