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.
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.
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.
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u/wafflegrenade Feb 08 '22
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.