One of the low moments of my life occurred after I bought a Green Day t-shirt at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which should have been my my first clue. Anyway, I was at the Home Depot and the young lady at the checkout counter looked at my shirt and said, “Green Day. Who are they? Is that like one of those new European bands?"
You think that was the low point, but no. The low point was when our boy’s youthful babysitter came to watch him and she was wearing a Green Day shirt. And I said, "Ooh, Green Day. Good choice.”
And she was like, “Thanks. My Dad made me listen to them all the time growing up."
I was thinking this when someone compared the Dustbowl migration to the Gold Rush.
I was born 99 years after gold was found at the site of Sutter’s Mill, but I not only am familiar with the Gold Rush-- even though I haven’t given it a thought it years, I know off the top of my head that gold in California (well, the gold that sparked the Gold Rush) was first discovered during the construction of a mill by a guy named Sutter, along a tributary to the American River, in 1848.
I also know it took a while for the news to spread, so 1849 was the highest year of population growth due to the Gold Rush, but it continued for several years. It ended about 1852, when the surface gold had been pretty much mined out, corporations bought up individual claims, and began using hydraulic equipment to do deep mining.
So is it not unreasonable to expect someone born recently (but an adult) to know that much about the Dustbowl?
Or is the Gold Rush just a bigger event?
My contribution is a 21-yr-old college junior who did not know how to pronounce Gestapo. I suppose “Jestapo” is a good guess, if you’ve never heard it before, but know how to pronounce gestation and gesticulate. Still-- had she really gone 21 years and never heard the word before?
I was very happy when I learned that my high school only required three years of English, so I wouldn’t have to sit through it again in twelfth grade.
To quote H H Knibbs, “I ain’t much strong on poetry”, and usually avoid it. I do like Kipling, the Knibbs poem I just quoted, and “Carmen Possum”, but that’s about it. I can name a buch of American and British poets, though. (And one German.)
I took typing in high school and again in night school a few years later, and half of my Navy ‘A’ school consisted of typing. To finish ‘A’ school I had to be able to pass a test at six hundred functions a minute (a “function” being the pressing of a key, be it a letter, a number, punctuation or the space bar), but I now use a six-finger-one-thumb hunt-and-peck system.
I think it depends on what facts one was exposed to:
in school
in one’s cultural milieu.
Also, it depends on how curious one was to learn and absorb those facts.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, a great deal of mainstream entertainment was geared towards the generation that had fought in WWII. So there were endless movies and TV shows in which Nazis were the antagonists. While watching those movies and TV shows, you would often hear the word “Gestapo” spoken, with correct pronunciation. Furthermore, my family was Jewish. So the subject of Nazism probably came up in conversation more frequently than in a gentile household.
My high school history class included the sad story of Anne Frank, and it is likely the word “Gestapo” was mentioned in that context.
These days, however, one does not hear about the Gestapo too often, if at all.
As for the Dustbowl and the college junior: if it wasn’t covered in her history class (or it was, but she wasn’t paying attention)…and she hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath (nor seen the movie)…it is reasonable to expect that she would never have heard of the Dustbowl.
I was surprised by my SO’s random knowledge of antique popular culture: she’s just 5’ tall (leaving no room for a shred of self doubt) while I’m over 6’. Oddly paired but otherwise compatible, she’s labeled us “Mutt & Jeff.” (somewhere there’s a tall woman with her short king likening themselves to Jiggs and Maggie)
(Actually – confirmation bias – I notice my birthday mentioned pretty frequently. A ‘wanted poster’ at Knotts Berry Farm (or similar place), an episode of The Young Ones, and other movies/TV shows.)
Well, winding a hardcover Moleskine into a typewriter is tough. Might as well learn cursive.
Speaking of which, whenever my kids got a note from Grandma, they’d try for a second to read 1930s Spencerian Cursive (written with flourishes from Mom’s favorite fountain pen). Then they’d roll their eyes and hand it to me for translation. Which wasn’t easy…
To me also; that’s a very clear hand. That’s the old middle-of-the-word long S; which I wouldn’t expect to see as late as 1930. Is that sample from earlier?
Unfortunately, I hadn’t kept any of Mom’s thank you notes, so I tried to find something close online. None of the Spencerian examples have my mother’s random angles and quirks (Q’s and F’s look like numerals), and occasional ‘blobbing’, which adds to the detective work needed to decipher it.
.
Aside: whenever my Graphic Design students would get enamored of a borderline-illegible font and try to use it all the time, I’d make a “Bridge OUT, 70 feet!” sign and ask them if it’s really appropriate everywhere… (It’d take 7000 feet to figure it out in vintage cursive).
My Wife miiightttt be 5’1". I’m 6’2". Yet she has stunned me on the move to our new house. She’s quite strong. How did you get that in your car? Oh, never mind.
After 27 years of marriage, we still manage to surprise each other. She was in a dart league? Really? New dart board is coming Friday. She’s gonna kick my ass I’m sure.
I taught her how to play chess, something I think everyone should/would know. She has gotten quite good.
Yep. I get sort of annoyed when people say “Everyone should know about this - it’s common sense!” in relation to some fact or other. That’s not really what common sense means; common sense means stuff like ‘fire is hot and rain makes you wet’ - stuff that anyone can figure out from one experience of the phenomenon. Nobody is born knowing stuff.
My all-time favorite in the stuff-you’d-think-everyone-knows category dates from the ‘80s, when Mrs. J. was working as reference librarian at a state university. A student asked her “What war was going on in 1943?”
He was a journalism major.
While it’s likely most Australians today wouldn’t know what the Battle of the Coral Sea was, there used to be Coral Sea celebrations there each year in early May, in honor of the Allied victory that essentially eliminated the threat of Japanese invasion of the Australian homeland.
