How can you not know?!

[TittyGolightly]

I work with a woman (29 and a mother of one) whose lack of general knowledge I can't quite believe to be normal. Ask anything about TOWIE or IACGMOOH and she knows it (unlike me) but the following are just some of the things she hasn't known in the past couple of weeks:

• that we aren't "doing cows a favour" by milking them
• that tea grows on bushes (or that it's a leaf)
• that coffee comes from beans
• that bees are being threatened by modern farming practices and that if there are no bees we will have no plants (inc fruit and veg)
• that reindeer are real
• that early humans lived in caves
• that a month isn't 4 weeks

She "has no idea" how anyone can know this stuff.

Is this normal now? My 6 year old knows most of this!

We were marvelling at the high percentage of people who liven in houses with no books. I suppose they rely on the internet in some cases. Having been woken up by a book avalanche this morning I think we might have too many, or not enough bookshelves.

• that a month isn't 4 weeks

This is SO common in my work place. We're paid four weekly and if you mention the month we're paid twice, half of my colleagues argue that it doesn't happen.

I was feeling irrationally angry that the pp suggested that Scotland wasn't a country, until I remembered that up until recently, I wasn't sure whether Japan was a country, or a really large city in China.

My general knowledge is terrible but I won't give any embarrassing examples of my own. I will tell you though that my friend thought that we wee out of our vaginas!

I love this thread.
If I take a moment to think about it I do actually know the difference between wheat and corn but if I am not concentrating I will refer to a field that is clearly growing wheat as a cornfield as I thought the two were the same thing when I was young.

peuk in the U.K. " corn" could be wheat, barley or oats.
In the USA corn is sweetcorn.

These are pineapple trees. Clearly.
(God, embarrassingly, that 3 holes thing is big news to me. I'm 61 and have given birth naturally and also somehow managed to get a good degree (Humanities) when I was much younger. )

A colleague saw a book on my desk and said to me 'oooh that's the guy from Men behaving Badly!'

It was Morrissey's Autobiography. She'd never heard of Morrissey. Late 30's

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses though, surely? I knew 99% of the facts on this thread (and would contest a few!) but I can easily get lost going somewhere I've been 100 times before because my sense of direction is shite, and I struggle with doing relatively simple calculations in my head. I know which strengths I'd find more useful!

I can also see how a lot of these misunderstandings occur, and it's mostly not because people are wilfully ignorant or stupid.

I have a law degree and I didn't know that Reindeer were real until quite recently. I thought they were to deer what unicorns are to horses.

I'm not thick I just never happened across that piece of knowledge.

Don't be judgey. She might know something blindly obvious that you don't know you don't know yet!

I can kind of understand the csection thing as when my mum had us she was given a general anaesthetic each time and woke up to find us all wrapped up in the recovery ward. My younger brother is 27 and was an elective so it wasn't that long ago really that this was done.

I was feeling irrationally angry that the pp suggested that Scotland wasn't a country

But country tends to be used synonymously with sovereign state, and Scotland is not a sovereign state but part of the 'country' that is the U.K. If someone asked whether Tibet was a country, most people would say 'no, its a region of China', though it has a national identity and was an independent state (1950) long after Scotland was (1707 or 1603 depending on how you define it). Whether Tibet should be an independent country is another matter.

I once worked in an office where my colleague thought I was thick because I knew nothing about current celebrities and fashion designers and I have no clue about the football pool or who plays for which club. I couldn't be less interested in sports tbh.

I have an IQ of 129 and do know some other stuff. I guess that our interests were on a very different level. She was a party girl. I think that I'm a bit nerdy tbh.

I don't think I have ever eaten a kipper.

I've read about people in books eating them, but only in books set in the past.

I do know that it's a smoked fish (mackerel?) and not a species of fish in its own right, but I wouldn't consider it surprising if I didn't know.

There are lots of people who grow up in environments where reading isn't encouraged and where even reading a newspaper isn't a norm. And where knowledge isn't passed down.

It's pretty sad but very common. If we valued knowledge more instead of shrugging our shoulders then it might not be popular and even cool to be clueless. As it seems to be with this generation.

windygallows - I've read books and newspapers, but none of them told me what a kipper was. I think that might depend on whether your own family eats kippers or not. It's not something I've ever eater and have only a vague memory of seeing someone else eating one.

RarneyRumbleton a Kipper is type of fish love, a herring! But I am also shocked by some folks lack of "general knowledge", but not always people in their 20 s either, you have a "normal" casual chat, but I always have a problem with people who say they didnt know things like if you eat and huge amount of (fatty,sweet?) food you will put on weight, if you have a TV how can you not know.

Up until a couple of years ago I thought that Sinn Fein was the old guy in glasses and that he was the leader of the IRA 😂
I also thought a kipper was a fish.

I never knew a kipper was a herring .

"I genuinely dont know the order of the alphabet! "

Why not learn it? Or do you have some difficulty with it? How do you file and organise things and find things already filed in alphabetical order?

"My astonishingly smart, v accomplished friend genuinely thought that 'leopard' was pronounced 'LEE-oh-pahd."

Maybe she learned the word from a book instead of a kids' cartoon on tv

Next time, keep in mind this quote.

"Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading."

-anonymous

Barney kippers are herring, which are fish.

""Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading."

That one's good.
The ones I've learnt from MN include segue being pronounced like segway and reprise being repreese rather than repr-eye-se. Hope I've got those two the right way around now.
I was pronouncing awry as spelt (ohree) for years until I realised.