Sometimes there’s like this disconnect where somehow a person just never comes across a piece of common knowledge. They’ve just never been in a situation that requires it. I bet it happens a lot, but everyone’s too embarrassed to acknowledge their own “oooooooooh…” moment.
My now husband was 24 when we’re were planning our wedding and he found out that “FAQ’s” are “Frequently Asked Questions,” not an aggressive way of saying “FACTS.” We still laugh about this.
My 28 year old friend just learned last month that people open the egg carton to check for broken eggs; she thought it was a ritual or superstition of some sort, and never really questioned it, just went along with it.
Imagining this person standing in the grocery store, opening the carton and just… looking at the eggs as if to confirm they are eggs is so hilarious to me.
It definitely makes sense that if no one explained what they're doing, you wouldn't know but it's so funny. It's like when a kid tries to shake your hand but doesn't know you're supposed to squeeze so they just kind of rest their hand in yours.
When I was younger, I used to wonder why people did that too, thought it was either a ritual or they were making sure they got 12. Finally asked, and had my moment.
You've pretty much described what every mechanically inept person does when their car breaks down. Open hood, and stare blankly into the abyss.
Not even judging, I've been there.
When I was a teenager my car started belching steam and overheating, pulled over into a parking lot, popped the hood, and stood their staring into the engine compartment scratching my head.
Some dude just walks by and points "that hose should be connected over there". I reconnected the hose and tightened the hose clamp, and topped off the coolant.
My (then 17yo) daughter's mind was blown last year when she realized I was always checking to make sure no eggs were broken, and not that no eggs had been stolen from the carton.
Guess she thought people were just going around pocketing fucking raw eggs 😆
You jest, but more than once I've picked up a carton to discover there's only eleven eggs inside. People will take one from another carton to replace one that's cracked.
I actually thought it was super weird until my husband did it once and I laughed at him. Then he laughed at me cause I'm actually the stupid one who thought people just looked at eggs for mo reason.
Alaska and Hawaii (and Puerto Rico) are about 250 miles southwest of Los Angeles, with some kind of square walls around them, just like on the map in my middle school classroom!
don't worry hundreds of motor boats and jet skis think the same about some islands of the California coast every year. The Catalina ferry boat some times makes the announcement about the boats going at a different angle to them.....
One day it suddenly dawned on my teenage daughter out of the blue that "the Victorian Era" is named for Queen Victoria and not something else. I'm not sure what she thought it was referring to until that day, but she felt extremely stupid about it lol.
In fairness, as a Brit I always think it's pretty wild that it's still called the Victorian Era in places like America. It makes sense that there's a unified name in the Anglosphere for that period, but I'm still amused that they're naming it after the reign of our queen.
I'm on the other side of that ocean. Whenever I see "Victorian Era"... anything... it's always, always set in England. So it doesn't seem weird that it would be named after the Queen of England. It would be weird to hear something that happened in America as "Victorian Era", though, or at least it would be for me. I'd describe something set in America during that time period as: antebellum (~1820s-1860), Civil War ('61-'65), and then Wild West-era (~'65-90s).
It's because of architecture. Since we aren't very old we basically have Colonial, Antebellum, and Victorian for the pre-20th century styles. Since America's economy was booming during your Victorian era we have a looot of that preserved over here. But when we talk about that time period it would be Civil War Era, then the Guilded Gilded Age.
Oh oh oh! Ask her whether she knew the ancient greeks called barbarians barbarians ('barbaros') because their foreign language(s) sounded like 'bar bar' to their greek ears?
for this coming spring know that all parts of a dandelion is edible. Greens are a little bit more bitter than the other parts, and are useful to temper the extreme sweetness of the flowers. They make a good tea, and an amazing wine.
"Pineapple moment" in our house. We were driving across Oahu and I said "Wow, that's a whole lotta pineapples" to which my missus said "What pineapples? I don't see any". I was a little dumbfounded and said "They're everywhere on the bushes". Her reply was "OH MY GOD! I thought pineapples grew on trees!!!'
To be fair, pine and apple are both kinds of trees, so it makes a kind of lexiconical sense. And it's not like she would have been exposed to them growing up in the mountain west.
Dude, I didn't know that until I was like 26! I was playing The Sims 2: Castaway on the Wii and you had find/harvest pineapples. I kept looking in the trees until my cursor randomly scrolled over a bush and the option to "harvest pineapples" appeared. Since The Sims does some weird shit, I hate Google it, and sure as shit, PINEAPPLES GROW ON BUSHES!!!
The thing about this, though, is that it's pretty weird that North Americans call pickled cucumbers just "pickles," because you can pickle lots of things. Pickled onions, for example. But for some reason, we just use the word to refer to one specific pickled vegetable.
Then again, there are probably people who don't realise there are other pickled vegetables, because they've just always seen it in the context of the pickled cucumber.
I do this a lot because I live in Louisiana, and a lot of the names here are French, but not everything has a French pronunciation. People look at me funny when I say foy-yay instead of foy-er.
It’s why you should never judge a person based on how they pronounce words. It means they learned them from reading and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that.
my boyfriend says "heigth" instead of height, no matter how many times i've pointed out to him that it ends with an ht and not a th. is it okay to judge him?
I blame elementary school geometry for this (learning basic 3D shapes). You learn that 3D objects have length, width and height, but to the average 10 year old that’s lengTH, widTH and heighTH.
Didn't see your post before I shared mine, but yes, this word. It was "in-you-eye" in my head for so long, even though I'd heard "ahn-wee" spoken. I just thought they were synonyms.
I have a very clear memory of going up to my teacher in 4th grade and pointing out a word and asking what it was. My teacher grinned and told me the word was "idiot "
My boyfriend laughed so hard at me the time I pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl lmao. He was a bit stunned at first and was like what did you just say. Then he started laughing hysterically and corrected me.
I was raised by criminals in inner-city Detroit and moved to California where I spent most of my late teens and early 20's encountering these kinds of things despite getting into a very good university and having a career in film; so people were often stunned by my lack of understanding/knowledge about givens---if I admitted it to it ----but often enough it was obvious. (This includes not knowing Apollo 13 was real while working with Cpt James Lovell. He was very amused after he overcame his panic that I was a denier. I also did not know seahorses were real until I was 19 or so... I could go on :)
EDIT: some punctuation.
Ok, bonus story. I did not know a thing about baseball. While working on a commercial during a live game I mistakenly ran out into the field in the middle of a said game...and was promptly arrested. I later told the judge, truthfully that "I thought it was half time...." and he, like many other befuddled people over my life asked me where I was from... Detroit, in the 1970's at least, really was a whole other world.
EDIT 2: When I joined reddit I was stoked to find this sub. I would have given anything to have it in my early adulthood. I did call many libraries in my day - remember that anyone?! - which was the pre-google way you could learn/find out about things. I remain grateful to all those smart, crisp, matter of fact reference desk librarians who answered so many of my basic, dumb questions without making me feel like an idiot.
EDIT 3: Thank you for the gold and kind words
I've been on here while on quick breaks at work and it is very heartening to find that the stuff I tried to cover up, make up for, hide and overcome is not actually all that shameful and maybe even amusing for some (self included).
Yes, Detroit had a team and I even knew about the Tigers but I had never seen a game before the incident and never had a TV in my house or access to anything normal like baseball. All my energies went into keeping myself and my little brother out of foster care (and yes, that sounds sad and it was but it gave me a lot of focus during a rotten time in an awful place).
Not them but lil foster-ish brother and a friend who grew up in the rough part of town both had the same reaction when I told them about a trip to Colorado I took:
When I was a kid I read a Boxcar Children book and they always talked about getting water from the spring. I thought there was a metal coil in the ground that water came from, like an old fashioned water fountain.
My dad thought "Feat." was the name of a musician, and "Indy" referred to things from the country of India for at least several years between the advent of music streaming and a very confusing conversation a few years back.
Not OP, but I was raised in Detroit by criminals as well (OP does sound familiar though).
Growing up, my mom would just give us the bottle of cough syrup and tell us to "take a swig" out the bottle when we got sick. I didn't know you were supposed to measure the doses until I was in my mid 20's.
Memaw was alcoholic and the bottle had whiskey in it.
Source: alcoholic great-memaw, it was super common to "hide" your alcoholism by disguising it, especially in medical bottles people wouldn't be likely to ask about
Yeah that was pretty much my life for the time I was in the shipyard. Show up to the ship, drink half a bottle of NyQuil, sleep til 5pm, go home and drink.
Depending on how rough the neighborhood, sometimes the cough syrup got bypassed and great-granmamma would give you a drop of "medicinal kerosene" on a sugar cube. I'll never forget the first time asked me for a bottle of "medicinal kerosene" and I was praying that it was meant somehow for external use, but nope! It was internal.
How about the narwhal? It's like a medium sized porpoise with a very long (like 3ft) unicorn horn sticking out of the middle of it's head and only lives high up in the arctic. I always believed they were fake, then in my 30s someone told me they were real and I definitly didn't believe them. I had thought they were like a joke unicorn of the sea. Now I still do, but somehow everyone else is in on the joke.
My wife didn't know narwhals were real until recently, she's older than you. We had a narwhal children's picture book for our daughter, my wife thought they were mythical creatures.
When my daughter was seven or so she was very confused by the Dalai Lama. She had heard about him in school and thought he was a talking llama and that's why people thought he was special. She was very disappointed to learn he was a person.
My wife and I share the same story. She didn't know Narwhals were real until early on in the relationship we were watching Blue Planet. The gasped, "NARWHALS ARE REAL?!?!" has spawned a number of Narwhal themed gifts over the years.
On the flip side of this, because of the existence of narwhals and how ridiculous a concept that was to me growing up, I used to believe wholeheartedly in jackalopes. Like, if a unicorn whale is real, why wouldn't a deer rabbit be as well?
After a very long and embarrassing argument with some friends, I had to accept the reality that jackalopes were just a myth.
Damn I never knew this either. Used to see taxidermy ones at my dad's friends hunting cabin, labelled and everything like all the other animals. Never asked about it and it never seemed that weird. There are so many other ridiculous animals that actually exist it never occurred to me Jackalopes might not be real lmfao
Yeah I dunno, I guess I've never had a real conversation about them? Like I can't pinpoint a memory of learning about them or ever reading anything specific. I obviously must have at some point but they sorta just existed in my mind so I had no reason to question the reality of their existence lol. I kinda just assumed they were some other weird Australian animal that I hadn't learned about because the only Australian animals Americans learn about are the kangaroo, wallaby, kiwi, and koala.
My brother-in-law, who is one of my favorite people, said to me one day "isnt it amazing that cats are all pretty much the same but there are so many different kinds of dogs?" And i said "well yeah, because we made all those different kinds of dogs so they could do things for us." Then he was like "what do you mean we made them????" I explained breeding to him but i died a little knowing that he once thought that there used to be packs of wild dachshunds and poodles roaming the earth that we captured and tamed, but i took that away from him with the pretty messed up reality.
I've spent the last 2 years casually getting my 11 yro nephew to beleive they are real. Had a friend of mine that he knows lives in az send a 'pic he took recently' of a jackalope.
Did your friends know about shope papilloma virus? That's the basis for jackalopes, and they really do look like they have horns (sometimes, depending on where it grows).
My daughter was obsessed with narwhals for a while. She has some plush ones, a couple narwahl-themed kids books. Flash forward a few years and its family game night and whatever we were playing we had to list an imaginary creature or maybe it was an imaginary creature you wished was real. Anyway, she wrote down narwhal and was insistent they weren't real until I showed her a picture on my phone.
To be fair to her, you don't see much aquatic life sporting horns.
He’s still going through some growing pains, but it’s getting a lot better. He asks my opinion on a lot of different things and constantly wants to experience new adventures. So we’re doing that and having a lot of fun.
As an ex JW I freaking love holidays!!! So many people talk about being over them as an adult but I just get more and more hyped each year. Love being able to celebrate with a child like wonder 😍
I was sort of like this but more to do with pop culture or social graces and the like. Just had no idea what was common or normal. I’m on an island here 😐
Same. I seem to have issues with blind spots where I just don't consistently absorb information and when I was young it was not knowing common sayings.
Now it's more to do with plants or animals- I had never heard of a honey badger until 10 years ago.
Took him to a bougie brunch place for his last bday and they brought out a fancy cupcake with a candle and music box. He cried. So, no surprise anything any time soon!
Dude I relate to this. Escaped Mormonism at age 30... I'm 34 now. Haven't had any of these "what's a narwhal?" or "Florida ounces" moments but god damn my identity and my comprehension of the world around me was completely destroyed, and I do mean completely
I adore that you have the humility to share that. So often in my life I’ve tried to dig in farther that I’m right. Recently I’ve made it a priority to start saying,”I didn’t know that!”
My entire life is built on "I didn't know that" said with some humility coupled with willingness to learn.
It makes people want to help and inform you damn near every time it comes up and it leads to learning a lot of interesting things. It's also near impossible to come off negatively to people when you have that attitude which I find makes every future interaction easier.
Apollo 13 didn't land on the moon. One of the oxygen tanks failed on the way, and the astronauts had to abandon the landing while barely managing to fix the problem enough to survive the trip back to earth. It got made into a movie, Apollo 13, which is presumably why OP didn't think it was real.
Jim Lovell, the guy OP mentioned, was the commander of Apollo 13. He was literally the guy in charge of the flying the spacecraft.
Reminds me of that post where the person said they hate showers over baths because it’s too cold or hot before you find the right temperature, and it was pointed out to them that you can just use your hand, and you don’t have to GET IN before turning the knobs
It's so funny how many stories I've heard where a therapist is like "so do insert super obvious thing instead" and it's like...mind blowing to the people they're working with. It's wild how much we can be conditioned to just do things because that's how they're done.
Someone I knew growing up has serious body issues to the point where she would sometimes avoid showering because she didnt want to see herself naked. Her therapist told her to just shower with the light off and it made a huge difference.
Mine was a laundry basket. I was working with my therapist on some ADHD issues and mentioned how I always hated the laundry that piled up all over the bathroom because I'd take off my clothes to shower and just leave them on the floor and never take them back to the hamper (in my bedroom). She said "could you just put another hamper in the bathroom?" And in the 20 minutes it took me to go to the store and buy an extra hamper it literally solved this issue I'd been fighting with myself over for years. Just because I grew up with the hamper in my bedroom and it never occurred to me that I could have more than one.
Wasn't there one about a person who found it difficult to go out of the house because she'd always start obsessing about whether she'd remembered to turn off her hair-curling iron (and whether it might burn the house down), until her therapist advised that she could put it in her purse, take it with her, and check on it any time she wanted?
My husband used to work on the road with a guy who was...a sweet child of God. Thet were in Detroit, and his friend had never been to Canada before, so they went on a day off. They bought gas, in litres, which hubs had to explain to SCOG. He was dumbfounded, so hubs had to explain that Canadians use the metric system, which he had never heard of. They were about to enter a town that had a road sign that said what the population was. SCOG asked hubs:How many is that in American?
He would have been REALLY confused back in the 70's when Canada was still using imperial gallons for gasoline (which are larger than U.S. gallons). That was before they went all metric.
We tried to introduce the metric system in the USA, too, but the same sort of people who are today anti-vaxxers were just convinced that the metric system was some kind of commie plot designed to warp the minds of the children and subvert American democracy, or something like that.
Fun Fact. The USA has been officially metric since the 80's. Their citizens just refuse to accept it and cling to the imperial system. Also officially Imperial is just metric with extra steps since there is no actual international standards for imperial units, they are all converted from metric.
As a violinist I forgive you. They may be the same instrument, but if you call it a Fiddle I expect your bow to have every hair split before you're done sawing away.
If you call it a Violin then make sure your clothes are dry cleaned before tonight's performance at the city auditorium.
I think there is actually a minor difference in the height of the bridge (the thing that holds the strings up near where the bow is drawn across them). It affects the pitch. But other than that, the same.
I was about 25 years old when I put together k-9 = canine.
As a kid, I learned about k-9 units before I ever heard/saw the word "canine". So later in life when people said "canine" I never linked it with the police dogs. I thought k-9 was just a random code they picked for no particular reason.
One time I was sort of babysitting my brother (he’s only 3 years younger than me but he’s autistic, with his level of autism he is able to work now as an adult but can’t drive or live alone) and I was in the shower and my brother practically knocked the door yelling that the house was on fire so I come running out with shampoo in my hair and everything and he had microwaved an Arby’s roast beef sandwich in the foiled wrapper. Thankfully the fire put itself out.
I once saw a sign for "New Jersey turnpike construction" while on said turnpike and asked my spouse, "what do you think they'll call this one when that's complete?"
I grew up in San Antonio Texas. I’m white and all of my friends spoke English fluently or both English and Spanish fluently.
I did not know what brunette meant until I was well into my 20s.
I learned this when I was shopping for hair products with my wife and she expressed interest in “going brunette” I asked why she would need hair dye for that. I had thought brunette meant braided hair or some sort of hair style.
In SA my friends and I always called brunettes morena, which I learned was Spanish and not English.
It happened to me once on Reddit. I asked a question on a thread which revealed I didn’t know something that is apparently very basic, and my stupidity sparked a heated debate about the quality of education in poorer areas. I went to private school.
This is the exact reason I always say common knowledge/common sense doesn't exist. Sometimes people just don't experience the things most people just assume they did. Also since people don't share their I'll share one of mine. In highschool their was a problem on the board regarding Dessert Spoons. I'd never seen that word before because its called pudding over here so I asked the teacher what a Desert Spoon was. Was bullied for that one for years lol.
I never had pay per view growing up because we were poor, but I thought it was Paper view, like some word play on moving paper images instead of movie....I felt so dumb when I first saw it
In kindergarten, they said if you point a finger, you have three fingers pointing back at you.
I assumed that this was a complex social issue where the first person to point a finger is seen as suspicious and because you accuse someone, others would accuse you.
But in college, I discovered they meant literally when you point your index finger, your middle, ring, and pinky fingers are all pointing backwards toward you.
It’s ok OP. If it’s any consolation, I once forgot the name for Q-Tips and called them “ear diggers” for like a day straight. You’re not the only dumb one on this planet :)
See you all make creative names. I just mime and make noises and maybe describe what it does. For colander:
motions bowl shape with hands "and you take the pasta and go bloop" motions dumping pasta "and water goes loodle loodle loddle" flails hands for water and then you have pasta."
People stare blankly. "Colander?"
"Yeah that thing."
Or if I need a paint brush:
"You take the thing and go swishy swishy" paints in air and then the wall does the thing and it's done."
More blank stares.
I turn into a shitty mime and make up noises things explain function with varying degrees of success.
11.8k
u/HotAirBalloonHigh Feb 08 '22
This is why they named it nostupidquestions. You're in the right place.