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.

I’ll never forget a few years back, there was a thread on here asking whether people used the term Father Christmas or Santa in their families. I replied on it saying something like although Santa was becoming more popular in the UK, I always think of it as more of an American term and Father Christmas as more British.

A MNetter replied to me absolutely apoplectic with rage, saying I was an ignorant and stupid moron if I didn’t know that Santa/Santy was commonly used in Scotland. I replied saying well no, actually, I didn’t know that. Thanks for telling me. She was still incandescent and continued posting in a fury over how “uneducated” I was.

Sorry my education didn’t cover minutiae of Scottish culture and linguistics, I must have been off sick that day.

And I can understand people getting mixed up about Ireland.

Because after all part of it is in the UK.
Lucky I checked before posting. I'd confidently stated that part of Ireland was in Ukraine...
As to GB UK etc I'm from London burbs and only recently got the distinction clear in my mind.
And guess what...it's to do with Northern Ireland again.

I only realised a fortnight ago that the channel islands are not part of the UK when I heard it mentioned on the news.
Is that right?
They are something to do with us.

A crown dependency?

It’s not my job to make people feel better about their own wilful ignorance.

“It's a way for someone to feel momentarily smart.”

It is this isn’t it?

But of course I have no gaps in my education because I have a thirst for knowledge, and at the school I went to that mummy and daddy paid for I was surrounded by bright young people. I too am very bright. When I did my Masters I was surprised at how some people get into Oxford. Of course though, it’s so wonderful they encourage everyone to give it a go now. My children are so bright too, so terribly bright.

Honestly, these people may know all sorts of ‘stuff’ (because that’s all it is) but do they know compassion? Kindness? Do they realise the different starting points people have? Do they realise some people grew up scavenging for food and the horror of poverty has not and will never leave them? For these people, who gives a shit who famous singers are or who the PM is? Some people grow up in poverty and make it out, yes. Lots don’t. Does it really matter they don’t have knowledge of this politician or that book?

We all only know what we've been interested enough to find out?
My DH is a history buff, and has been since primary age. He's well read, watched films and documentaries, and has generally made a hobby out of finding out as much as he can.
My knowledge of history extends to what I learned at school. I probably should know more, but I don't.

My passion is politics. I immerse myself in it, and gather as much information and commentary as I can. DH has barely a fleeting interest.

We can't all know about everything.

Loads of people on here - even actual vegetarians and vegans - will refer to meat AND fish, as though they are inherently ethically different things.

There's a perfectly good word for people who choose to eat fish but no other meat for whatever personal reasons - pescatarian - but it's amazing how many people who ARE pescatarians don't know that word.

A good friend of mine insists that she's a vegetarian, although she will happily eat fish. When I first realised that she ate fish - heard her ordering it for herself in a restaurant - I just commented good-naturedly "Ah, so you're a pescatarian", and she took great offence at that. Apparently, she is NOT a pescatarian, but she IS indeed very much a vegetarian... but one that also happily eats fish?!?!

@DappledThings
No she has never lived in the UK. She came to visit her boyfriends family for a funeral

Tbf this isn’t entirely unusual- a suprising amount of people think fish is vegetarian.

At a wedding recently i was served fish as a starter as my “vegetarian” option. (While the non -veggies got onion tartlet!). This was a very well known wedding venue with a very expensive caterer.

i’ve also had the argument with Subway several times. For some reason staff training includes the “fact” that tuna is a vegetarian option.

lord knows how that particular idea seems to have stuck, but it has.

me, I go with Phoebe’s definition- “nothing with a face”.

I guess we all have some gaps in our knowledge and I wouldn't be bothered if someone didn't know the odd thing or two that is considered common knowledge, it happens to me too. But when it's lots of things, and if the person is wilfully ignorant, that's different.

I once dated a guy who had grown up in the USA, then moved back to the UK in his early 20s (he was British) and I couldn't help but be shocked.

He couldn't name the capital of Italy and other major European countries, couldn't name a single artist (not even someone like Leonardo da Vinci), didn't know anything about the two world wars or other major historical events, thought classical music meant classic rock, had never heard of Labour or the Tories and knew nothing about UK current affairs.

His argument was that he'd grown up in America and at school there they weren't taught much about Europe/the Uk but he knew lots about the USA. Ok, but there had been 5 years since he'd left school and for 3 of those he'd been living in the UK. His parents were also British. Didn't they ever discuss things at home, hadn't he read/watched any news since he'd moved back, listened to the radio, read a magazine?

The answer was no, it didn't interest him but he did know a lot about the science subject that he studied at uni and read a lot about that, plus other science things.
I mean, I get it, we all have different interests and he was very good at his subject... but to not have any curiosity at all about things outside of a few specific interests, including your own heritage and the country you're living in, just baffled me.
Even pop culture references - he'd never heard of David and Victoria Beckham. Not that I'm interested in them, but at the time they were ALL over the media. You'd have had to literally never look at any news outlets to miss them.

I'm afraid it was a turn off for me.

Depends on if she carries her driving license and if she reasoned it out because she goes to Belfast from England. Or drives around the country of Ireland. Re IOW, again if you go to Gibraltar, you might not assume the side of the road a country drives on. The more you travel, the less you assume.
I do think that programmes did used to be more educational. I was surprised that very few people knew of the Spanish flu, but I'd done research on it as a child after watching that time period on Upstairs/downstairs. I've answered a few questions on The Chase thanks to the Simpsons/Dr Who/Star Trek and Black Adder covering the topic. I'd never go for the top prize because sport and reality tv is something that I haven't a clue on. YouTube/Tic Toc scrolling won't build knowledge like a range of other media will.

Perhaps it was me? I mentioned competitive ignorance which does get on my nerves but it's more the kind of discussions where someone insists their brain freezes when faced with any question of any kind and everyone else joins in with how much worse they are.

I worked with three highly educated, intelligent women at one place, who sat around my desk at budget time, all fanning themselves with their hands in a flustered attitude, going red, and all claimed to be rendered completely incapable where numbers were concerned. This was not hard maths it was things like counting boxes of items and hours worked per week on a particular project. This was not their first budget nor were they questions I hadn't already asked them to prepare for. Yet every one of them started to become ridiculously competitive about how dim they are to the point where one claimed to lose the use of her legs when she saw numbers printed on a page or on a screen. They weren't dim at all and perfectly capable with numbers on any day of the week so they weren't the kind of people who inadvertently panic about number work as some rare individuals do.

I told them, quite sharply, it was nothing to be proud of. Strangely enough the collective brain fog lifted instantly.

TBF when it comes to pop culture I haven't much of a clue however I don't go round telling people that being asked questions about it makes me loose the use of my legs though 😆it doesn't I just admit that I don't know.

Aberfan happened before I was born too! I was aware of it though through news reports of anniversaries.

I also wasn’t alive during WW2 but I still know it happened.

Also age helps. At my age I've simply had more time to be exposed to information than someone 30 years old. So I've had a very great many "oh I didn't know that" moments, recalled the data but forgotten that I had to learn it. Resulting in me feeling very knowledgeable and assuming I was born that way.

Also I'm ND so very very curious about everything and it feels natural, in fact wonderful, to me to explore stuff I didn't know.

Also born Encyclopaedia Brittanica was what bright kids had instead of iPhones, back then.

The post about the boyfriend from the USA has just stirred an old memory, of cultural divide in what you expect people to just know.

A friend, whose wife is a New Yorker, did not realise until several year down the line that he'd married someone who didn't know what a dalek is

Surely the fact that they're asking implies that they do know that there are different currencies in different places.

But it's not unreasonable to ask whether a big international holiday destination might possibly accept currency from one of the largest groups of visitors. Happens in Ireland/Northern Ireland/Mexico/Canada all the time. Not a completely stupid question.

If the question was actually "what's a Euro" then yes that is unfathomably ignorant.

I am in a FB group for overseas visitors wishing to visit Scotland and there are regular questions about whether they'll be able to pay in dollars. I suppose if you've never left your own country, or just been to the Caribbean or Mexico where dollars are accepted, fair enough.

It's the people who book hire cars and then are totally shocked when other posters make comments about driving on the "wrong" side, and they had no clue that we drive on the left.

It's the people who book hire cars and then are totally shocked when other posters make comments about driving on the "wrong" side, and they had no clue that we drive on the left.

I don’t think this is that weird tbh. The U.K. is in a minority of countries which drive on the left, and in a tinier minority of countries within Europe. You could travel quite widely without ever going to a country which doesn’t drive on the right, and have no reason to think anywhere did otherwise.

I do think there's different levels of this.

Someone (as described upthread) saying "I can't believe you didn't know x" about who composed a film soundtrack is just showing off and being a bit of a wanker. They privately know full well that most people won't have heard of it: they want to put others down.

I do think, though, that if your basic general knowledge is really poor you should keep your mouth shut in discussions which are over your head and go home and quietly educate yourself rather than blurting something out which makes you look ridiculous. If you haven't been taught it, educate yourself.

Case in point: someone I work with (who is a British citizen, a native speaker and university educated) said on a work call the other week that she didn't realise Belfast was a UK city and not in the Republic of Ireland. That's something anyone British with a basic primary school education should know and I would be ashamed to let it be known in public that I didn't know that.

I have to admit I’m guilty of saying “How can you not know this?!” In genuine astonishment to my 41 year old best friend. Sometimes I can’t get my head round things she says she doesn’t know or hasn’t heard of. Some examples:

After watching the film threads she didn’t know what nuclear weapons and radiation poisoning were. She also claimed she had never heard of the Cold War. When I was gobsmacked she called up her 39 year old sister to see if she’d heard of it - her sister said she hadn’t either.

She knew absolutely nothing about WW2, not just the reasons it started but she also hadn’t heard of pearl harbour, the atomic bombs being dropped, the D - day landings or that children were evacuated. She had heard of Anne Frank and said “she was someone who wrote a book in the war” and had heard of Winston Churchill but had no idea he was prime minister or his role in the war.

She also had no idea that humans were relatively modern and that we had evolved from ancestors of a different species and had never heard the word Neanderthal. She thought dinosaurs were around at the same time as humans and dragons were a type of dinosaur and is clueless about basically any kind of natural history or basic knowledge of astronomy.

Foods she’d never heard of include: paella, star fruit, guacamole, clams, guinea fowl, foie gras and sea bass.. the list is endless. She is a very picky eater who can only cook basic meals and will only eat out at a fast food place or have a basic pub meal but I still expected her to at least know what things are and recognise them. On her last holiday she argued that she’d been served the wrong thing when her cod came without being battered and deep fried, she kept saying she hadn’t ordered the weird looking fish and it wasn’t cod 😂.

Other basic things she claimed she’d never been taught or learned are that insects have 6 legs, wine is made from grapes, what halal meat is, that the sun is a star, the difference between oceans and seas and she thought the North Pole was made up and just a fictional place Father Christmas was from.

I feel like we have at least one conversation every time we meet up with her looking at me blankly and not knowing what I’m talking about, last week she had never heard of asbestos. I don’t know how she gets through life but she said if something doesn’t interest her then she just forgets it or doesn’t listen, she will never google anything because she hasn’t got the patience to look it up, she usually phones me and asks me to give a very brief explanation. On our last phone call she wanted to know the difference between a best before date and a sell by date and if the bread 2 days past the best before date was safe to eat.

Apart from her shocking lack of basic knowledge she is intelligent and has no issues understanding what she’s told, she’s fantastic at maths but with other topics she just says if it doesn’t directly affect her then she’s not interested. Can anyone seriously blame me for finding it frustrating and asking how she didn’t know any of my examples?!

I’m a bit shocked about the crab sticks.

Sounds like the average quiz show contestant!

This is the one I wish everyone would get their head around tbh.

“How can you not know that?!” is a really stupid question, ironically.

she said if something doesn’t interest her then she just forgets it or doesn’t listen, she will never google anything because she hasn’t got the patience to look it up

There are so many people like this. They just lack the curious gene, nothing to do with their intelligence or education. Not interested in learning or finding out new things. SIL and her husband are like this, they don't read, don't go anywhere, don't do anything, have zero interest in what is happening in the world, would no sooner visit a museum than fly to the moon. I am constantly looking stuff up online if I hear something being talked about and I'm not sure what they're on about, I go to museums, listen to podcasts, just take an interest!

Was she homeschooled? WW2, dinosaurs, evolution were all on the national KS2 curriculum whilst she was going through school, so it’s pretty inconceivable that she doesn’t know anything about them. I’d suspect some sort of traumatic brain injury tbh: there are loads of things in your post that she will have come across just in the course of being alive without having to take an active interest or read or go to a museum, and nobody who isn’t impaired just “forgets” them.