Also, those things that look like black ducks with little, white beaks are coots.
Being “three sheets to the wind” did not originate from " the sails (sheets) on a boat flapping around out of control". Sheets are actually the lines that control the moveable corners of the sail, not the sail itself. Minor nitpick but hey…
Unless you’re a pagan, and know that the equinoxes and solstices were originally in the middle of the seasons.
Happy beginning of Spring on Imbolc, Feburary 1st!
The difference between “rein” and “reign”.
My clever mnemonic device:
A King reigns.
A horse has reins.
I know the error in written English over this, is a pet hate of many people; but though I know the difference, and write accordingly, it’s not a thing I can get all that upset over. It’s understandable: few people nowadays are au fait with the details of transport-by-horse, but many more know that “reign” kind of equates to “rule / be in command”. Thus, they come up with the homophone-job of “reign in”, for “take control”. Language often changes through people’s botching of it – IMO there are worse outrages.
more to the point:the symbol itself is not a hashtag. it’s a hash mark that’s used as a tag. it doesnt become a hashtag until its applied to something. #(un)commonknowledge
mc
The Immaculate Conception. A lot of people think it refers to Jesus’ conception. Nope - it refers to Mary’s conception.
It’ll always be an octothorpe to me. A pound sign is £.
I harboured that misunderstanding until a couple of years ago – SDMB set me right !
There’s too many definitions for beginning of seasons to log them all. Each European country seems to have a different idea of when summer begins. Midsummers Day on the summer solstice persists in England. Even in the US, a lot of people consider summer to run from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day Weekend. And on and on.
Like I said, it’s the use of “official” that really bothers me.
History. People seem to know that WW2 was later than WW1, and that’s it. And no, Jeopardy player from a few years back, the Romans did not fight on 2-wheeled vehicles called “bicycles”.
And the number of people who don’t know the difference between “amount” and “number” (unless you’re measuring people by the #).
Well, I say the # sign started being more commonly referred to as “pound” when it began to be used during phone calls. It would be really confusing to call it a number key, as there are nine of those on a phone without the # key.
As to the amount/quantity/number less v. fewer feud, I blame the confusion on English teachers of my era. They were adamant that fewer (or less, I can’t remember which) was for amounts, and the other was for quantities. The problem is amount and quantity are synonyms and as such are useless terms to use here. Even though these teachers were generally high priestesses of dictionary use, it seems they didn’t crack one open to check on this “rule.”
Most people don’t seem to understand the difference between percent and percentage points.
If an interest rate changes from 3% to 5%, it is not a 2% increase. The interest rate increased 2 percentage points.
If the relative humidity changes from 80% to 70%, it is not a 10% decrease. The humidity decreased 10 percentage points.
Wait. Why not? The Oval Office is on the eastern side of the West Wing with a view from its eastern windows across the South Lawn toward the Treasury Bldg. See here: SunCalc - sun position, sunlight phases, sunrise, sunset, dusk and dawn times calculator
Looks to me like the Oval Office in the West Wing is probably the best place in the White House to view the sunrise.
By “middle of the night” do you mean midnight? I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Venus is visible in the evening 3-4 hours after sunset at this time of year in the western sky and starting in April will be visible 3-4 hours before dawn in the eastern sky. On April 30, when it’s at peak brilliance in the morning sky, it should be visible as early as 3am. So, not the “middle of the night” exactly but certainly in the middle of a lot of people’s sleep cycles.
The rule I was taught is that if you can conceivably count it, you use fewer. Use the express lane if you have 10 items or fewer.
Use less it you can’t count it: I am having less pain today.
However, the singular v. plural rule might be of interest to you
And to me, # means “sharp”… when it doesn’t mean “Paul Lynde in the center square”.
Which leads into my obscure knowledge (being a meteorology nerd):
The difference between relative humidity and dewpoint. Also: why understanding the current dewpoint can be a much more useful way to understand how humid it feels.
Because Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth is (its orbit is inside of Earth’s orbit), it can never appear to us to be more than 48 degrees away from the location of the sun in the sky.
By “middle of the night”, I assume that Chessic Sense meant midnight, or close to it. At that time, the sun will be, more or less, directly “underneath” the viewer. And, since Venus can’t ever be more than 48 degrees away from the sun, Venus will always be beneath the horizon in the hours around midnight.
(All of the above also holds true for Mercury, which can never appear more than 27.5 degrees away from the sun, but Mercury is only infrequently visible to the naked eye.)
Speaking of Slovakia/Slovenia, a surprising number of Americans conflate Thailand and Taiwan.
And it’s come to my attention that some don’t know the difference between two punctuation marks: hyphen and dash. 
I’m also surprised by people who can’t find Orion, or don’t know the brightest movable star is Venus. (I know very few constellations, but Orion always seemed especially distinctive and easy to find.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
But I was especially startled to learn that many people think 1900 was a leap year! (When I was a boy I read all the essays and tables in the back of my parents’ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, then read an encyclopedia cover-to-cover, then all of Asimov’s Science for Twelve-year Olds books. I got annoyed after he explained the Gregorian calendar for the fifteenth time – Everybody knows that!) Yet I met a computer programmer who answered “I dunno. Is 1900 divisible by four?” :eek: when I asked him if he thought 1900 was a leap year.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
If you get confused about uncles and cousins, it should help to remember that siblings are zeroth cousins, and uncles and nephews are zeroth cousins once removed. (You are related to your own parent or child as minus-first half-cousin once removed though this formulation may be more obfuscatory than elucidatory.)
(My bolding) – you said it 
! Going back briefly to hobbits and their passion for the arcana of this kind of stuff: in the bit cited in my previous post, from LOTR in reference to Frodo – at first encounter, I misread this quote as saying that Frodo was his own first and second cousin once removed either way. This maybe contributed to an over-hasty judgement to the effect of “all this stuff is totally crazy, and incomprehensible”.