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Original poster

How can you not know?!

423 replies

TittyGolightly · 19/04/2017 19:52

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. Confused

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

OP posts:
Thread gallery
6
SnickersWasAHorse · 20/04/2017 12:59

RarneyRumbleton a Kipper is type of fish love, a herring!

No it isn't. A kipper is the way a fish is prepared. To say a kipper is a fish is like saying that a chop is a pig.

GrandDesespoir · 20/04/2017 13:15

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.

There's something going wrong in education if a pupil isn't able to - or being encouraged to - make the connection between the act of boiling water in a school science experiment and the act of boiling water in order to cook food (or for some other everyday reason).

The current approach of teaching "to the exam", particularly at GCSE level, doesn't appear to encourage lateral, or logical, thinking, or further exploration of the subject in question. It seems to focus more on learning certain key words, without necessarily gaining a proper understanding their meanings.

GrandDesespoir · 20/04/2017 13:17

of their meanings...

GrandDesespoir · 20/04/2017 13:25

A kipper is the way a fish is prepared. To say a kipper is a fish is like saying that a chop is a pig.

But a chop isn't the way - or a way - that a pig is prepared, whereas a kipper is the way that a type of fish is prepared. A chop is the culinary (as opposed to anatomical) term for a particular part of a pig.

It's more analogous to say that a hog roast is a pig, or a spatchcock is a chicken. That's not implying that you would expect to see a hog roast or a spatchcock roaming in the wild.

ineedmoreLemonPledge · 20/04/2017 14:12

Yes the discussion was about the flag on a ship.

IloveBanff · 20/04/2017 14:50

SomewhatIdiosyncratic I simply can't understand how he didn't know what boiling water is! Shock Children know that.

Amperoblue · 20/04/2017 15:16

I think knowing that there is a certain way to hang the flag or that you get milk from cows or that kippers were once fish , without knowing technicalities is different though.
Learning things incorrectly like where women wee from or confusing capitals with counteries suggests a lack of education not stupidity.

Jux · 20/04/2017 15:21

Badlad, so she'd missed the entire coalition/Cameron thing??? OKaaaay.

I expect she was fab at other things though.

carbuncleonapigsposterior · 20/04/2017 15:38

Between A levels and university one of my children had a job in a clothes shop a colleague allegedly said this "have you heard about that bloke Hitler, he sounds awful, someone needs to stop him!!!" apparently this person was absolutely deadly serious. The same person also said "are the sun and the moon the same thing" Gems I have encountered from 20 somethings "Catholics, they aren't Christians are they?" "Is Yorkshire in Devon?" and "Is the Pope Jewish?" confused by the skull cap I guess!

ladyratterley · 20/04/2017 15:45

I can believe this. My general knowledge is pretty good and I'm regularly appalled by the things some of my friends and peers come out with!

Examples are.. A work client who was querying getting unicorns for a photoshoot as "they would probably be out of our budget". Didn't seem to understand they were a mythical creature and we'd ress horses up instead!
Also a friends husband recently admitted that he thought a couple couldn't conceive unless the woman comes. For some reason he thought the egg comes out when the woman comes?! I mean... WTF. You have to worry about some people's education.

ladyratterley · 20/04/2017 15:45

DRESS horses up.

realale · 20/04/2017 15:48

1st post.Wanted to share this gem...... I was a teenager in the 60s. Tampons were just becoming popular and we were trying them out. One of my friends tried them out and claimed 'they didn't work'. No wonder they didn't ......turned out she was sticking the tampons up her bum!

NotCitrus · 20/04/2017 15:50

Leopard rhyming with leotard would make sense! I was an adult before I realised that patrol wasn't pronounced like petrol with an a.

But it must be down to families and individual curiosity to impart 'general' knowledge - I remember being 10 and the teacher decided to do a quiz round the class, for last-day fun, except within 15 minutes she was fed of both of most of the kids exposing huge amounts of ignorance, and of me being what she called a smart-arse for knowing all the answers (should I have lied?)

In contrast my uncle and family have never voluntarily encountered a fact since leaving school, with the highlight being a cheap holiday in a country they had no idea where it was. You'd think that if you were assigned a flight at the airport and trainsferred to your hotel at the other end, you might ask what country you were going to, but no. My mum went rather apoplectic when regaled with holiday photos and searched all their bins to find the tickets to find out where the hell they'd been!

Though my mum has blind spots around UK dialect words and sports. Her reaction to catching sight of the World Cup final was "Why don't they just kick the ball into the other net?" Turned out she'd got through US high school and another 30 years of life without realising most ball team games have one team going one way and one the other...

megletthesecond · 20/04/2017 15:56

If she didn't know about reindeer does she know about narwhals? (They always pop up on those things people don't know threads).

IloveBanff · 20/04/2017 16:10

I can't believe a poster on this thread doesn't believe Scotland is a country! What the hell do they think it is then? Confused

Goldfishjane · 20/04/2017 16:10

NotCitrus - how did your uncle know he wanted to go on that holiday if he didn't know where he was going?

PaperdollCartoon · 20/04/2017 16:12

NotCitrus you're exactly right, I've always been a knowledge seeker since a small child, which my mum encouraged. My younger sister has never been very inclined towards learning stuff, though I think she'd be better than many in this post!

ChaiTeaTaiChi · 20/04/2017 16:40

Ahh we've all got gaping holes in our knowledge but then we all compensate by being very clued up on something niche

It would be nice if it were true, but truly some people just have gaping holes and then more gaping holes.....

ChaiTeaTaiChi · 20/04/2017 16:46

Elquintoconyo: "I know the after effects of the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indianesia in 1886 created the novel Frankenstein "
erm, Krakatoa erupted in 1883 and Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. Sorry

I think the PP meant the eruption of Tambora in 1815 that led to the Year Without a Summer in 1816, that meant Shelley was stuck inside on a Swiss holiday and wrote Frankenstein.
The same events were also responsible for the Book of Mormon and the accompanying religion, as well as the settling of the American Mid-West.

2017SoFarSoGood · 20/04/2017 16:56

For years I was convinced that the word PREROGATIVE was "perogative" until one day another women (college grad) asked how to spell it because she could not find it in the dictionary. Looking under "PE" words. Even Britney Spears knew this one Blush

Firesuit · 20/04/2017 17:07

I had a 20 year old ask me during the Second World War

How old are you?

ifcatscouldtalk · 20/04/2017 17:16

2017 I had no idea. You learn something new everyday.

DixieNormas · 20/04/2017 17:19

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

DameSquashalot · 20/04/2017 17:26

...

How can you not know?!
IloveBanff · 20/04/2017 17:28

DixieNormas if they're that clueless maybe it would be better if they didn't vote.