I can't believe people don't know that?

[Doingtheboxerbeat]

Does anyone else get annoyed when people ask this? To me, It's sounds so smug and ignorant at the same time.

Now I understand Google is free and that we have answers to all things at our fingertips, but you would need to have starting point first. You can't just tap on your device Google, fill in the gaps in my knowledge or tell me all the things I don't know, about the history of everything.

We can't know everything and this is so different from those who don't want to know stuff.
Like the guy I went on a date with last year - I made a throw away comment about us being typical Gen Xers and he asked me what tf is a Gen Xer and when I tried to explain he promptly stuck his tongue in my mouth 🤭 he didn't give a shit, obviously. Like I said, that's a bit different.

It’s almost like putting people down. “I know and you don’t therefore you’re just dim.” It’s really unpleasant, a superiority thing.

We all have different interests though. I don’t know anything really about planets, stars, gases, atmosphere, space, astronauts etc because I’ve not got even the slightest interest in it. The Lego Milky Way looks awesome. That’s it. That’s the only thing I’m interested in. So someone might thing ‘omg you don’t even know the nearest planet to earth?’ but I know lots of other random stuff they don’t.

I don’t know. Some things that should be basic core knowledge.

i’ve seen people not know other countries use different currencies.

there’s a thread about whether teens know whether Jersey exists. Fairly sure for most it’s early secondary history and geography.

the gen whatever stuff is fairly recent. My kids know all about it but when I was young no one defined themselves by their generation. You were more likely to know your star sign.

if something has escaped my radar I will fully hold my hands up and admit I didn’t know.

I don’t say this to people, but doesn’t mean I don’t think it. No I don’t think I’m superior, I’m of very average intelligence, but sometimes it’s basic, basic stuff that you wonder how someone has gone their whole lives not knowing.

Im talking about things like prunes being dried plums, raisins being dried grapes, that crab sticks are not made from real crab, that fajita is pronounced faa-hee-tah, not vag-it-taa, and many more! Some non-food related things too! Like how to pronounce pot pourri, that Sherlock Holmes was not a real flesh and blood man. Can anyone think of any more?

Anyway I have my duh moments too. Just as a disclaimer.

Ageee totally!

I got told on here once that it was "unfathomable" and that i was uneducated for not knowing that Scotland had a different education system to England. I'd never thought about it as id never needed to.

I also had an ex who told me I was thick, stupid etc etc because I didn't know who composed various movie soundtracks. When i said its because i wasnt interested he told me i should have bothered to learn as i know he was into that. I pointed out that he couldn't name the composer/choreographer for various ballets and he said that's because he wasn't interested. He didn't seem to see the irony! He was an abusive dick though.

My generation knowledge is poor but I mask well and avoid pub quizzes!

Im not stupid at all, but Im just not interested and i don’t retain facts about sport or films and music easily.

But if you want someone to identify a tree or a plant, spell or define an obscure word, or talk me about fiction books before 1950 - I’m your girl.

I agree. We’ve all got different knowledge about different things

I don’t get involved in conversations about films at work any more because I got sick of people saying “Whaaaaaat? What do you mean you’ve never heard of <insert name>? You haaaaaaave! You must haaaaaave!” No I bloody haven’t and I’m not having you try to make me feel as if I’m thick!

There are many many areas of knowledge where it’s fine for every day to be a school day for all of us. However, somebody on a recent MN thread thought that Canada was a US state, and on another somebody else was confidently proclaiming that rice is a processed carb made of wheat. Yes, I had your thread title running through my head.

The only time I had a fleeting thought of that was when I once had to try to explain to a grandmother that cows are mammals and had to produce calves in order to produce milk. She didn't believe a word of it, but I reminded myself that it was just something she never knew.

You are right the time when one person could hold all of human knowledge in their head has long since past.

The opposite to that which does get on my nerves big time is the competitive ignorance some people have.

@ComtesseDeSpair
somebody on a recent MN thread thought that Canada was a US state

How could they think that when in fact Canada is a village in the New Forest? 😆

I had someone berate me on here during the early days of Covid because I’d referred to a city within Wuhan province as a separate place. She actually said, “Oh my” - as if this was unbelievable and embarrassing. I’d put my house on most of Britain having never heard of Wuhan, never mind being conversant in the intricacies of it’s geography, before Covid.

Still, she made a twat of herself on the same thread saying we should be grateful to China as lockdown was “their gift to the world”. Yeah, thanks - any chance of Amazon vouchers next Christmas instead?

Wait...crab sticks aren't made of crab? I honestly didn't know this. I know "wasabi" often is just horseradish, and that only wholetail scampi is actually made of 100% scampi.

I remember asking a British man for help knowing how to order a ticket in a queue at at a Parisian train station age 20 or so. He was so angry at our lack of french conversational skills and tried to make us look stupid, saying "Didn't they teach you at school?'. I replied with, 'We were too busy learning Mandarin!'

Wasabi is very hard to grow and only best eaten fresh otherwise it doesn’t stay green and goes off quickly, and this was an interesting one to find out too, given that I love what I thought was wasabi! Crab sticks are imitation crab but it doesn’t stop me from loving them!

The Gen X/date thing was to lighten my rant 🤭.

I'm currently in touch with a childhood friend who has had a traumatic life of domestic violence,homelessness, sickness, drugs/ alcohol abuse and 7 kids and she will tell you anything you ever want to know about the entire benefit system - no judgement from me but she thinks everyone should know everything social services, social housing, prison system, Pip etc - all the agencies and how they operate. She makes me feel like a naive idiot to have limited experience of these things.

However
, she doesn't understand or want to about her 2nd DD degree's, diploma's , various other achievements and career path - it's not her world, she just doesn't understand it and will tell her not to bang on about it 😞. It's really sad.

She also hates politics but has some surprising insights about political things.

I absolutely adore her, and I do understand why she's like this, but it's very one-way.

I hate it when people try to make other people feel small for whatever reason.
I do think that some gaps in knowledge are more problematic than others. I find it really, really problematic how many people seem to think that Ireland is part of the UK, for instance.

It's a good point. Nobody knows what they don't know and even the cleverest person in the world will have gaps in their knowledge.

I try not to judge anyone for not having learnt/been taught something, but am afraid I probably do judge people who have literally no curiosity about anything, so there's probably some overlap!

Like not knowing the prime minister (or your country's equivalent) or that there were two world wars or that different countries use different currency (not what each currency is, just that not everyone uses the US dollar as one American person I know was convinced)...things that it would be actively harder to avoid knowing than to know!

I do get that it would be rude to say out loud, and I personally wouldn't BUT I come across so many vacuous lumps that don't read books, newspapers, don't care about history, world affairs, but are more in tune with reality TV and social media doom scrolling. I think humanity is rolling backwards in many ways and there are all too many instances when people may internally eye roll at such utter stupidity.

I don't ever have a problem with people who don't know something. I do have a problem with people who very confidently tell people they are wrong, when they are actually right.

I am very easy on younger people not knowing music or TV stuff from before they were born. That takes years- there is so much.

And I'm way behind on modern music, film and TV. People seem to get told off for not knowing who Led Zeppelin are but you apparently get a free pass on not knowing who Sabrina Carpenter is.

DH does this and it's really fucking annoying. We're about the same age (born mid 80s) but he is a wealth of knowledge about 90s/early 00s pop/tv etc whereas I was living abroad in various countries during that period (and it was mostly pre internet so not as easy to keep up with this kind of stuff!).

We're sometimes watching tv or whatever and a reference to 'x' band or film or tv show will come on and he'll look shocked and say something like 'But HOW could you not know that?!'. It doesn't happen that often but I'm actually not sure if he's forgotten I had limited access to pop culture in that period or he's trying to wind me up?! If it's the latter he's succeeded 🤣

The other day we were watching some programme about British boybands and he seemed to be in a permanent state of (mock?) shock. I don't even bloody like pop, I doubt I've missed out on much not knowing all of the words to East 17's entire discography 🙈

Grr, I want a Lego Milky Way now (but not at that price).

If anyone says 'You don't even know the nearest planet to earth?' you could always tell them it depends on the date and you don't have time to calculate it right now (it does, it could be Mercury, Venus or Mars, depending on where they are in their orbits).

I am in NI and once had someone from an English bank who didn't know that we use the same currency as the rest of the UK and thought we were using punts. This was pre Euros. It was at least 17 years since parity broke.

You have a very food focused intelligence.

Bit off topic but I was watching the 2024 tsunami documentary. And I was amazed that many people didn't seem to realize that the sea withdrawing dramatically was a sign of an impending tsunami. Apart from anything else it has been in so many films. But I guess when presented with the reality it must have been so shocking as to paralyse.

I hate to tell you this, but fish don't have fingers either.

It's literally not off topic, because this is one of those things I didn't know 🤭 and reading through the comments, there's history, geography, Geo politics, food, Space,plants - all of which that poster knows something about but others won't necessarily .