Yes, but one was the reason for the other.
Not to a silly teenager growing up in a Spielbergian suburb - “spazz” or “spastic” was just a word we used with no regard for its origin, like “queer” “gay” “lame” or whatever. Ignorance was…ignorance.
And the story is also semi-real. There have been non-handicapped people who cheated by competing in the Special Olympics.
I learned right on this board that the cheesy song in “Animal House” that the guy with the guitar sings at the toga party - “…I gave my love a chicken that had no bones…” was a real song, not just written for the movie.
The episode of Seinfeld where Kramer gets kicked in the head and starts blurting out “YOYOMA.” At first I thought it was just some funny-sounding gibberish that the writers had made up, and it was only later that I learned Yo Yo Ma was actually a cellist.
In “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Miss Brodie refers to her ancestor William Brodie, who fathered a number of children by his two mistresses, robbed the Excise Office, and “died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising.” I had always assumed that he was as fictional a character as she was–but it turns out that he was a real historical figure in 18th century Edinburgh.
When I was a child, I thought mitochondria were something that Madeleine L’Engle had made up for her book* A Wind in the Door*. (The children travel inside Charles Wallace’s mitochondria in order to save his life.) Imagine my surprise in biology class several years later.
And my disappointment when we never covered farandolae.
That the song “Red Solo Cup” as seen in a recent episode of **Glee **is actually a real song by Toby Keith.
Another James Bond one. I always assumed Fleming made up SMERSH for the books, but at some point I discovered there actually was a СМЕРШ counter intelligence agency during WW2.
For those of you who don’t watch the show, this was actually the second time Glee featured an stupid song about a cup. The first time was “My Cup”, an intentionally bad original song that had been made up in-universe by the dimwitted cheerleader Brittany. I’m sure many viewers wondered if “Red Solo Cup” was supposed to be Brittany’s second attempt at songwriting.
The first time I ran into the original poems and realized Carroll had parodied them, I was amazed. And amused.
Very amused.
Was “only later” less than a minute? Right after Kramer says it Jerry asks him why he’s mumbling about a cellist.
Madeleine L’Engle’s novel *A Wind in the Door *includes mitochondria. I was amazed to find out (in Biology I, in high school) that they’re real.
Apparently farondolae aren’t, though.
That doesn’t spell SMERSH. That doesn’t spell SMERSH at all!
Joe
I’d heard references to “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life” for years before learning, after becoming an Internet user, it’s a real song.
When I was a very young child, I watched Saturday morning kid vid cartoons. One character I saw from time to time in some cartoons was some sort of genius professor type, a certain Albert Einstein. I didn’t understand at the time that this was a real person (and in those days, only recenly deceased).
There really is razzleberry dressing. (Although I’m not sure if the name only came into existence after it was used in Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.)
Who is whooshing whom here?
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
A popular test of gullibility is to tell a friend that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary; a gullible person might respond “Really?” and go to look it up. Unsurprisingly, modern English language dictionaries do indeed contain the word, although some of the earliest dictionaries did not.
[/quote]
Well, if you can call it that. :rolleyes:
I knew it but a lot of people don’t know that the J. Peterman company isn’t just a Seinfeld invention. It is a real company that predates Seinfeld. The writers put it in the show because the company’s catalogs are written with really over the top narratives along with hand drawn interpretations of what they think the product look likes. In some weird twists, Seinfeld helped business for them but caused them to overexpand into retail locations where they almost completely failed and had to sell. John Peterman was eventually able to by back his name along with the help of John O’Hurley, the actor that played him on Seinfeld. They are still around today. I get their catalogs and they are as entertaining as always.
Indeed. The John O’Hurley/J. Peterman story was featured on a segment of the public television series Growing Bolder. You can watch it here.
As a teenager I read a short story that featured refugees escaping (or not getting to escape) from Biafra. My memory has it as an SF story but who knows. At the time I had no idea that Biafra was a real thing–to me it sounded like a made-up word. It was a long time later that I found out the actual story, but even now the name has a slightly SF in my head.
This one came to mind because I’m reading a novel about Biafra today.