[QUOTE=Cub Mistress]
I recently set a classmate straight: she thought Somalis and Samoans were the same. I think she is in her 30’s.
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I find this hilarious. An average Samoan is roughly equivalent to 2.57 Somalis.
[QUOTE=1010011010]
The FedEx logo thing is so played out that I now go out of my way to remark how that sideways lowercase b formed by the “ed” whitespace blows my mind.
“I only see a q.” is my favorite response to this.
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That’s quite clearly a teaspoon.
Until I was 22, I thought the word “stoic” was pronounced “stoyck”. I’d never heard it outloud until then and I tried to correct someone for it.
How embarrassing.
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
My geography teacher in sixth grade told us that Central America was a country.
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…and those who can’t teach, teach geography.
In other news, my 7th grade music teacher told us that jazz originated in Europe and brought to America by veterans of WW1. I didn’t even believe that at age 13.
[QUOTE=PastAllReason]
I continue to wonder about the pronunciation of the name Joao. Sorry I’m missing the appropriate "o"s. Can anyone help?
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You have all the o’s. You just missed the squiggle (tilde) over the a: João. Say “zhwonh” (the nh comes out your nose).
I used to mentally hear it as “Joe-OW,” myself…
[QUOTE=Ms. Pumpkin]
Also, when I asked where babies come from, my mother told me something that led me to believe that all little girls had a baby growing in them, but it took years and years to develop, and then when the woman was grown up and married, the baby would become big enough to be born. I remember a relative talking about how she knew a 13 year old that had a baby, and me indignantly saying how that was simply not possible; it wouldn’t have had enough time to grow.
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Aaaw, that one’s kind of cute, actually.
[QUOTE=Nava]
Oh, I only found out about two years ago that maps haven’t always been drawn with North on top.
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I’ve known about that forEVER, but I still get tripped up whenever I see a map from the founding of Canada…the shape is all wrong, and it takes me some time to mentally reorient it. (This may be related to the fact that I almost invariably screw up East and West, and my problem switching mental gears when switching between manga and western comics.)
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
My geography teacher in sixth grade told us that Central America was a country. I was, like, hell no, and showed him the dotted lines in it - he said those were states. I brought him the encyclopedia article on Panama. No dice. It reduced me to tears of frustration.
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If we’re getting into teachers’ mistakes, one of my Religion teachers in HS didn’t know that Simon didn’t take the name Peter until after meeting Christ - and, in fact that Christ gave him that name. (Let’s ignore the issue of both Simon and Peter being translations of the actual names.) We had to enlist the school chaplain before he believed me. (In his defence, he was a history teacher, primarily, but I’ve always thought the renaming of Simon was, you know, common knowledge - not ‘immaculate conception’ level.)
I’m another who learnt about the Mississippi Delta here. >_>
I was well into my 20s before I figured out that ‘segue’ wasn’t just a short form of ‘segueway’. (I still habitually say ‘seg’ instead of ‘segway’. But now I spell it right!)
I had the hardest time pronouncing ‘non sequitor’, for the longest time (although I got it right before I figured out segue.)
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
Slight hijack. Jack deriving from John makes me think of something that’s puzzled me for years. Why would anyone in his right mind call himself Dick? My grandfather, named Richard, commonly went by Dick. He was a Dick but not a dick, if you know what I mean. Same with Willy or Willie, but that’s not as bad as Dick. Are these people completely oblivious to the snickering around them?
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Perhaps, in your grandfather’s time, “dick” was not slang for “penis”. Considering the name Dick van Dyke, perhaps the slang didn’t take hold until sometime in the early sixties? Someone taking the nickname “Dick” now would have no excuse.
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
Perhaps, in your grandfather’s time, “dick” was not slang for “penis”. Considering the name Dick van Dyke, perhaps the slang didn’t take hold until sometime in the early sixties? Someone taking the nickname “Dick” now would have no excuse.
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That’s exactly right. Ever notice how “Dick” used as a nickname is pretty much exclusively for the 60-and-over crowd? Both my husband and I have uncles named Dick who are in the 70-80 range of age. When “dick” started being used as a slang term for penis, I think they were probably in their 50s or so…a little old to suddenly try answering to “Rich” instead!
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia]
I thought planes flew by Bernoulli’s principle. It was this board that convinced me otherwise.
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Crap!
I know of a Dick who is my age, early to mid 40s, and when I met him (just post-college age) I was stunned he allowed himself to be nicknamed that!
I’m pretty impressed at the depth of pineapple ignorance in the world. I swear I learned it in school when we did Hawaii in about the third grade. Or maybe I just read the encyclopedia obsessively. That, too, is a possibility.
[QUOTE=zelie zelerton]
In which case, I’m a freak as I still have my baby molars.
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You’re not a freak, zelie. I myself had four baby molars until adolescence, at which time they were pulled when I got braces and everything was readjusted and realigned. My daugher, 12, has inherited the same lack of permanent molars, and instead of pulling the baby teeth, we’re leaving them in. To move them would necessitate moving several of her teeth forward whole positions in her mouth, and the orthodontist advises against it. (Although this is indeed was what they did to me.) Instead, she’s going to keep her baby molars as long as possible; the doc says they can last well into adulthood, if not life-long! Should she some day lose them, she could have implants (or perhaps a ‘partial plate’ like my father wore; he is who we inherited this tendency from!). So, cherish your baby molars, zelie!
Regarding the Federal Express logo – a while ago I was out for lunch and saw a FedEx truck. Thinking of this thread I looked to see if I found it “impossible” to see the logo without the arrow … and found I didn’t see it at all. After all, the type is not stylized at all (as is with the case of the sports team logos) and is not of any different color that the truck. So, I really didn’t see it. Now I’m wondering if it’s so “intentional” after all! (Although of course it does make sense, given their business.)
Does somebody want to explain the immaculate conception thing to me?
[QUOTE=Christopher]
Does somebody want to explain the immaculate conception thing to me?
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Yes, Here is a previous thread I started about it. DON’T POST THERE, IT’S OLD!
Basically, Catholic thing:
Immaculate Conception (of Mary) - Mary was conceived through her parents having sex, it’s just that she was conceived without original sin which humans are usually conceived in
Virgin Birth (of Jesus) - Jesus was conceived without Mary having had sex
So when you ask someone if they’re pregnant and they say “Ha, that would have to be an immaculate conception, since I haven’t had sex in a year”, uh-uh.
[QUOTE=Tengu]
I had the hardest time pronouncing ‘non sequitor’, for the longest time (although I got it right before I figured out segue.)
[/QUOTE]
Oh god, I thought the same thing, until a friend (whose first language wasn’t even English) corrected me when we were in college.
[QUOTE=gigi]
So when you ask someone if they’re pregnant and they say “Ha, that would have to be an immaculate conception, since I haven’t had sex in a year”, uh-uh.
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And you can correct them about it just before they murder you for having assumed they were pregnant.
ETA to delete non-funny off-topic reply
[QUOTE=robardin]
I can clearly recall the day (in a ninth grade English class) when I gave an example of a “false friends” pair of words: “The two words MISLED (“MY-zled”) and MISLED (“Miss-led”) are pronounced differently, yet are spelled the same and even mean the same thing!”
(Insert sound of mental defrag operation kicking in)
“Ah… Never mind.”
Somehow I had read the word “misled” before hearing it, pronounced it “MY-zled” in my whatever-year-old head, and subsequently acknowledged the existence of the word “mis-led” without ever realizing they were the same until then.
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I was a very precocious reader, and determined at an early age that both misled and infrared were very obviously the past tenses of the verbs misle and infrare, and soon worked out the meaning from context (I was usually too lazy to get out the dictionary and hadn’t discovered the fun of word origins yet). It was years before I ever heard them pronounced. I still think the MY_zled pronunciation sounds better 
.
[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]
Regarding the Federal Express logo – a while ago I was out for lunch and saw a FedEx truck. Thinking of this thread I looked to see if I found it “impossible” to see the logo without the arrow … and found I didn’t see it at all. After all, the type is not stylized at all (as is with the case of the sports team logos) and is not of any different color that the truck. So, I really didn’t see it. Now I’m wondering if it’s so “intentional” after all! (Although of course it does make sense, given their business.)
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Interview with the logo designer. Pretty interesting. They actually had to create their own font, as the available ones didn’t work to make a proper-shaped arrow. When they pitched the logo concept to Fedex: “Mr. Smith (CEO) was the only executive in a room of 12 that spotted the arrow right away.”
[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
And you can correct them about it just before they murder you for having assumed they were pregnant.
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:smack: OK, yep, this only works if you’re asking for purely clinical reasons, like you’re a doctor. And only the kind of doctor who would really need to know.
[QUOTE=1010011010]
Until discovering this site last week, I would have totally rejected any argument that there are or could be well defined genres of electronic music.
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That is an excellent resource. Thanks for posting it.
Cool! Thanks Waenara!