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!

I tried watching TOWIE once but I had to give up because I couldn't deal with how stupid and vacuous the people were - and yet they're becoming celebs and making lots of money for being like that. The world has gone mad.

I always thought that baseball was American for rounders and not a separate sport. I always wondered why grown ups in America got go excited about a nice game of rounders.

@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)

@TittyGolightly "That might not be right. It's where they put celebrities in a jungle. (Never seen it.)"

Your colleague may be a bit generally dim, but you have managed to point out, twice, how you are so far above knowing about celebrities in jungles, quite unnecessarily too. So it's not just her who is a bit proud of ignorance in some matters.

Watch it or don't watch it. Nobody cares really.

I think drenching might not always be through a tube? I think there's a bit in James Herriot which describes using a drench bottle to give a horse medicine.

The PM thing, I wonder if it's because people might think that there's an election and somebody becomes PM? I know that that really oversimplifies it, but a GE is an event and you can see the count etc. If they change during the term of office then you don't have that. I mean, it's still hard to miss, but some people are really disengaged with politics.

I agree it's lack of curiosity that's the problem and where people celebrate ignorance.

Everyone does have gaps in their knowledge, but some are more likely to come up in the education system, news/ TV and general life than others. I'd be more concerned at someone not knowing that Paris is the capital of France due to its proximity and cultural relationship to the UK, than not knowing that Ulaan Battar is the capital of Mongolia which is geographically and culturally more distant to us and an unlikely holiday destination.

I'm definitely better to have on a quiz team than DH. He's got a PhD but is very specialised and technical in his knowledge. Being likely to be an undiagnosed dyslexic, he's not well read for pleasure, but he finds the world interesting. My knowledge base is much more general from reading, quiz shows as a child and having a memory that retains random trivia well. I'd need someone to answer the sport and popular culture questions though as they're really not on mine (or DH's) radar.

I did despair in halls when a housemate asked how to cook pasta. We told him to boil the water first. He asked what boiling water was... he had GCSEs in science where he had to boil water in experiments. That's when I begin to get twitchy about general knowledge....

I know someone who takes the deliberate-but-fake ignorance to quite a level, to the extent she gets right up herself about certain things in general popular culture awareness. While it is blindingly obvious to everyone she is desperately Hyacinthing about it.

This sort of thing: " that bloke reminds me of a teletubby"
Her : "A what? I have no idea what on earth you could possibly be talking about! I have never heard of anything like that in my life"

I also know she is on here too, so yeah, go fuck yourself M, we all know you are desperately trying to make yourself look better than everyone else.

I think we all have gaps in our knowledge, but Im assuming the OP is referring to those people who don't know who the prime minister is or think that America is in Europe. How can people not know this stuff?! The PM runs the country for god's sake! Don't they watch the bloody news?

Oh, and believe me I can chat about reality TV and soaps for hours if needs be, but I still know who's running the country!

I used to work with someone who happened to be my boss at the time and she had no idea what county we lived in or who the prime minister was .

The main criteria for my friends isn't how cultured or knowledgeable they are...it's how down to earth and good humoured they are, how laid back, accepting of others and open-minded they are. Whether or not they make me laugh. Whether I can just be my whole self in their company or not.
I don't care if they think a kipper is a species of fish or that Reindeer are mythical creatures. I'd laugh at them...but I wouldn't care.

Your colleague may be a bit generally dim, but you have managed to point out, twice, how you are so far above knowing about celebrities in jungles, quite unnecessarily too. So it's not just her who is a bit proud of ignorance in some matters

This always comes up on these threads. Surely it's not actually being suggested that not knowing who the prime minister is or understanding the implications of Brexit or something as basic as your own anatomy is as unimportant as knowing who the celebrities eating kangaroo testicles on TV are?

Absolutely, we all have specialist areas of knowledge I have a doctorate in literature, so would expect to know far more about it than someone who reads a couple of thrillers a year but as regards non-specialised 'general knowledge' like how food gets on to your plate, who's espousing what policies ahead of the GE (even the fact that there is a GE), or why the moon doesn't always look the same, there's no excuse. I'm not originally from the UK and didn't do history past my home country's equivalent of GCSE and have never studied British history at all but, even though my country didn't fight in WWII, I don't think it happened during the 1920s, and if I did, it's no excuse to say 'Oh, we didn't do it at school.' [

A girl I went to school with asked where tinned carrots came from....

I think people could be forgiven for not knowing what drenching is. I've got over 30 years in the saddle and I've only seen it done once! Don't feel bad poster who didn't know what it meant, I'd judge you way more if you didnt know what a hoof pick was.

I remember my friend's girlfriend back in our teens. We were on a drive when she looked out of the window at the plastic mulch on the fields and asked, "What's all the plastic on the fields for?" My other friend dead-panned, "That's where they grow the plastic bags for the supermarket." "Ah" she said, "I've always wondered."

Anyway she was a nice lassie. We did take the pee. She took it very well. Certainly didn't think less of her company for it.

erm my dsis had a ga caearean and woke up with a baby next to her whats the ignorance?

Eek, again - I wasn't suggesting everyone should know about drenching - it was me admitting to something I got completely wrong when I probably should have known better! (Being all horsey and what have you). Sorry!

I presume people know that spaghetti grows on trees in Italy. The harvest was pretty bad one year....so bad it was reported in the BBC.

My favourite ever April Fool, Orlantina - I think it was 70 years old this year! Good old Dimbleby and Panorama!

Dumdedumdedum, I don't know if you were being tongue-in-cheek, but those are not pineapple trees! Probably some sort of palm. These are pineapple plants. They're a sort of bromeliad

I worked with someone years ago, who thought the Union Jack was a sex position.

I didn't ask for a demonstration. Kind of regret it now...

I have 2 degrees, and i thought sprouts grew individually like cabbages 

They do @OwlinaTree, and they are farmed by Sylvanian families. Don't let anyone one tell you otherwise.

Owlish, I have to admit that until I visited Thailand and saw pineapple fields, I did call small palm trees pineapple trees, only slightly tongue in cheekily

I had to stop a maths lesson once to argue with a class of intelligent Y7s who were convinced that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

'No, humans and dinosaurs weren't ever on the planet at the same time, and humans never rode dinosaurs'

'Cavemen were!'

Argh.

Our flag is not called a Union Jack, people! Unless it's on a ship. Otherwise it's just the Union flag.

Just thought I'd get that out there.

I presume we all know the correct way to fly the Union Flag?

Or is that not common knowledge..

On a pole?