To share the stupidest thing I have ever heard

[Sparklfairy]

My friend is away in a country that a few days into her holiday brought in quarantine restrictions upon returning to the UK. No big deal to her, she can wfh and organise deliveries etc.

She just told me she was chatting around the pool and people are confused about when quarantine actually 'starts'. Most have convinced themselves it's the day after you land 'to give them time to go shopping and get food and everything ready and stuff'.

So you're quarantined, but you have a magical window of time where you can get supplies and merrily skip round the supermarket infecting everyone saying 'Oh, I'm not in quarantine until tomorrow'.

I'm not sure if they're spectacularly thick or just so entitled they've twisted the rules to suit themselves. I don't normally get annoyed about CV or what other people do but really!?

@Curlygirl06

My friend's mum was a twin and I asked my friend if they were identical. She said no one knows as HE died at birth. Took her a while.

I have identical twins and the stupid questions I've had could fill a book!

Rather embarrassed to say that took me a few minutes

^

Now that's funny!

I worked in an office with serial dieters, they tried every one in the book, lost a bit of weight, started eating scones and cream, drinking bottles of wine, couldn't understand why they weren't losing weight.
We were talking about concentration camps (no idea why) and someone remarked how thin they were. One of the dieting ladies piped up with "that's because they don't eat much". She could not see the connection.

I'm pretty sure that you have to go home and immediately into self-isolation on getting back to the UK; unless you are displaying symptoms in which case the entire family must drive to Barnard Castle and visit family for a few days.

@TrixieMixie When I started working in pharmacy, my boss said "assume everyone's an idiot, and you can't go far wrong".

Sorry I'm only catching up on the rest of the thread now. I feel like I have to explain that my ex friend is not an ex friend because he was daft, but because he was so stubborn he couldn't admit when he was wrong and would argue and argue he was right despite all evidence to the contrary. He would also go on long mainsplainy rants, about stuff he had absolutely no clue about.

When I say he thought Jesus spoke English, he meant as his first/ only language. Even though he was aware Jesus was born and raised in a foreign place (had no idea where though). A pp's suggestion he was probably confused by how white Jesus etc are depicted as, had something to do with it. That and the fact the bible's in England are translated into English (he probably thought Jesus and co wrote in English, and thus probably spoke English).

He also thought people in Britain had been speaking modern English, since they came here. I tried to show him a Shakespeare anthology I have, and how different the language was then, never mind many hundreds of years before that. But he was convinced what I was showing him was written by a foreigner/someone barely literate who didn't have a full grasp of English (it turns out he had no idea who Shakespeare was other than he "wrote some books").

In a maths class at college, we were doing geometry and the tutor was describing the different angles on a triangle.

We started with obtuse angles, then acute angles, reflex angles and finally right angles.
One girl, quite innocently asked when would we be taught about left angles

Mackay: "You consider yourself to be 'working class', do you?"
Fletcher: [winding him up] "I used too, but then I visited Glasgow and now I consider myself to be 'middle class'." Reminds me of the "Class Sketch" from the Frost Report.

@Cheddarcheeseandsodabread

In a maths class at college, we were doing geometry and the tutor was describing the different angles on a triangle.

We started with obtuse angles, then acute angles, reflex angles and finally right angles.
One girl, quite innocently asked when would we be taught about left angles

@Cheddarcheeseandsodabread I think that’s mean over that. I don’t think that the majority of people would be able to tell you why it’s called a right angle. Without that knowledge, why wouldn’t someone think there could also be a left angle? I think that perform was badly educated if they’d reached college level without knowing the types of angle - but not stupid. I’d be questioning more a college level teacher who did reflex angles before right angles - although perhaps you’re not in the UK, where right angles are the first angle type taught.

There are loads of geography ones though because I think kids don’t get taught where places are the way they were in the 40s-70s.

To be fair half of Europe is different now.

I had a conversation with a German friend, her being German is relevant, it was about the time of the Good Friday agreement.

I was trying to explain how the Island of Ireland had become divided with the NI belonging to the UK.

She said she couldn't imagine living in a country divided like that.

I just looked at her about counted the seconds until the penny dropped.

Brideshead was wonderful if only for the psychology of relationships.

Round my friends house & she was petrified to go in the kitchen as there was a dead bat in the sink. Her boyfriend investigated and it turned out to be a large hairy bodied moth and he told her this. She argued it was a bat, so he said the only bat around here is you, you daft bat!

On a thread here recently the Op described how her DP had treated her as a princess and put her on a pedal stool...😂

Does make you wonder how many of these sorts of mistakes are coming about due to people mishearing/misinterpreting things and does it reflect a society that is reading much less nowadays (other than social media feeds)? Clearly the "should of" for should have/should've is one obvious example.

@bettytaghetti I have an amazing vocabulary / spelling and it’s all due Mills and Boon books read them when I was 12.

@Notso as a veggie of over 30 years I've heard some crackers - eg that fish, chicken etc aren't meat that gravy isn't "breaking the rules", that all vegetarians are anaemia etc

With the current trend towards veganism, which is absolutely flooding my Facebook feed, I do wonder - based on the veggie comments having been directed towards me over the years by some of those now claiming to be vegan - whether they're actually all managing to truly be vegan.

I don't ask, up to them what they do/eat but I have noticed on a few occasions supposed vegans displaying products on their pages, that I know from my own experience (and I've checked the ingredients haven't been changed as can of course happen) are not only not vegan but aren't even vegetarian as they contain animal fats or carmine or whatever. Several are also still getting shellac nails.

As I say I don't feel it's my place to comment unless they ask but it's...interesting!

One just bought herself a sheepskin coat.

Most people won’t bother reading past a headline, hence the 3 word slogans that are currently winning elections.

Classic example of the need to check your own facts before posting on thread?

3 word "slogans" and the ideology behind them has been around for ages! It's a distillation of a certain style of argument/debate speech the 3 part rhetoric which goes back at least as far as Aristotle.

But I agree on the woefully short attention spans and people not appreciating and using the wealth of knowledge available online.

I love learning, not always good at it (see maths and physics inability) but still love it.

I was educated mainly in England and Wales but I'm a Scot, I had SOME knowledge of Scots history and monarchs through my parents/family but mostly I knew more about the English monarchy (if you think you and your dc are taught "british" history in English schools I'd urge you to investigate and reconsider, it's heavily skewed towards English history with English monarchs almost always the "hero")

On the back of watching a tv series about a certain period in Uk history where they massively got some stuff on Ireland and Scotland wrong I decided to do some reading online on the Scots monarchs, can't say I remember it as well as the many years of English history I had drummed into me but I enjoyed reading it and trying to unlearn some stuff too.

Which actually reminds me...there was a baby name thread posted by a Scots poster who liked the name William aesthetically but coming from a west of Scotland Catholic family knew it wouldn't go down well and so was asking mners for similar alternatives...

Cue a number of mners (very likely English) completely not understanding WHY it might be a problem and on occasion receiving some pretty sharp responses from various Scots and catholics and even non Uk posters who absolutely understood the problem!

I think we've ALL done the looking for the phone/keys/purse/glasses while holding/using/wearing them! I've done that loads! Plus of course going in a room and then entirely forgetting what you went in for 

@TheOrigRights I had a similar experience on a french exchange trip where the french native speaking teacher of English in the school I was linked to was teaching the class an English poem, the word in question being "temperate" which the teacher insisted was pronounced "tempeerart" 

@Mairyhinge One of my dads siblings is CONSTANTLY sharing utter shite in shock believing it to be fact on Facebook, another of his siblings gets VERY irate EVERY time and posts the snopes/full fact rebuttal and then gets annoyed when the 1st sibling argues they've got it wrong "cos reasons" it's fucking hilarious! The 2 siblings are actually very close but get very aerated in these discussions, what's really puzzling is they of course had the same parents, are only a year apart in age and went to the same schools and had the same teachers, so how one is totally switched on and the other easily flummoxed I don't know!

@sueelleker I've a few friends who are pharmacy workers, 1 in a hospital the other 2 high street. They've come out with some crackers patients have misunderstood about directions on meds. As a result they're very skilled at breaking down instructions into words of one syllable! I queried the "house" Epsiode with the patient who was spraying her asthma inhaler either side of her neck as if applying perfume and so not actually inhaling anything as being too far fetched - apparently not! Apparently patients frequently do this, or spray in on their throats OUTSIDE the mouth, or onto their chest skin... utterly bewildering!

@bettytaghetti I don't necessarily think errors like that are always down to the writer. Autocorrect can be a total bastard! And certainly on here I've had posts I've written completely correctly and between writing and posting autocorrect has butter in and made it totally nonsensical! It's very annoying!

I've even corrected the autocorrect several times and it just keeps reverting!

And there is proof! I wrote Anaemic - but it's posted sodding anaemia! Argh

Ffs autocorrect getting its revenge on me there eh?

@bettytaghetti I think the fact that we’re seeing the likes of pedal stool and Chester drawers is due to the fact that we’re now a society more driven by the written word. Forty years ago large chunks of the population would barely write at all except to write cheques, Christmas cards or three word notes to the milkman. Landlines were ubiquitous for communicating with distant relatives so if you weren’t good at writing you probably wouldn’t do it at all. And people outside their families would never find out how lousy their spelling was.

Texting and internet has made vast swathes of the population take to their keyboards for the first time and the quality of their SPAG is suddenly on view for all to see, but I don’t think it’s worse than earlier generations - it’s just that writing for public consumption is a far less elitist hobby.

Anyone else remember the glorious Tomasz Schafernake admitting on tele that he hadn't realised that lambs were baby sheep?

A couple of years ago, my DD1 (then aged 19), asked about the Voyager I and II spacecraft. When DH told her both had now left the solar system to wander in space forever, she was most indignant: “What about the people on board?!”

We had to tell her what an unmanned spacecraft is, and that no-one has ever been further than the Moon.

And this is my own DD!

[quote DilysPrice]@bettytaghetti I think the fact that we’re seeing the likes of pedal stool and Chester drawers is due to the fact that we’re now a society more driven by the written word. Forty years ago large chunks of the population would barely write at all except to write cheques, Christmas cards or three word notes to the milkman. Landlines were ubiquitous for communicating with distant relatives so if you weren’t good at writing you probably wouldn’t do it at all. And people outside their families would never find out how lousy their spelling was.

Texting and internet has made vast swathes of the population take to their keyboards for the first time and the quality of their SPAG is suddenly on view for all to see, but I don’t think it’s worse than earlier generations - it’s just that writing for public consumption is a far less elitist hobby.[/quote]
I don't think that's entirely true, @DilysPrice -- I think that any functionally literate person in the recent past would have seen standard SPAG in newspapers, magazines, library books etc, even if they weren't fluent writers themselves. The difference is I think that many people now see virtually all the writing they see on a day to day basis online, so that almost all their 'print' consumption is not something even minimally edited, but often ill-spelled social media posts, Gumtree ads, posts on chat forums like MN, autocorrect errors and text speak in text messages etc.

So they have far more exposure to 'chester drawers' and 'defiantly' for 'definitely' and 'pedal stool' and 'rest bite' -- if you only ever see them written one way, and your main source of exposure to writing is on social media or chat forums, then that's what you think is standard.

my neighbour died suddenly this year. I signed for his post in the aftermath, including a parking fine. To help out his ex-wife with all the red tape I said I would get in touch with the council and find out what had to be done about this fine. When I phoned explaining the situation the woman asked when he'd died, and what was the date of the fine. Then she said: "So, just to be clear, he got the fine before he died?"

@Matildatoldsuchdreadfullies

“I can’t understand why George Clooney is seen as a sex symbol... the big ears and everything. I mean, he seems like a nice man, but....”

Turned out DM was confusing George Clooney with Martin Clunes.

now that made me laugh

you've just reminded me of a vegetarian friend who decided there was a Bacon Tree

Ohhh you can't leave it there! What's the whole story?

I've come across a fair few Scots who genuinely don't know what's in haggis, love eating it but are put off when they're told the truth - but are perfectly happy eating all kinds of other meat!

@DilysPrice I agree it's showing our education system up and laying bare the shockingly high levels of illiteracy which previously went very much hidden for shame of those who'd slipped through the net.

I've worked in a number of manual jobs/for companies that employed mainly manual workers and it was heartbreaking how many were functionally illiterate and at times totally illiterate, and these were/are by no means stupid people but mainly people who'd been let down - by their parents, class, education system, nhs...

One of my uncles is like this, I suspect dyslexia or similar, he works in construction but frankly is getting too old to cope and is worried sick about how he'll manage especially with pension ages constantly rising. He absolutely would not cope in an office job he can barely manage texting, even retail would be difficult for him as he struggles with arithmetic too.

But through radio and television programmes he's very knowledgeable on wildlife, nature and history. He just wouldn't be able to prove that knowledge in writing.