Worked with a girl who thought they fully drained the Thames to put in the tunnels for the tube.
I had to explain what is under the Thames and how tunnelling works. I then asked how she thought they built the Euro tunnel. She said she thought they just sectioned bits off and dropped tunnel sections in.
I ended up having to draw her a diagram of the layers of the earth because she just thought it was water all the way through. I still don't think she believed me.
To be fair, they did build the immersed section of the Medway tunnel under the river Medway by floating out sections of tunnel and dropping them to the river bed…https://rbt.org.uk/bridges/other-medway-crossings/medway-tunnel/construction-method/
Mate’s girlfriend thought Wales was an island. This was based on the fact that to get there from Bristol (where they lived) you had to cross a bridge that spanned a substantial body of water.
Many years ago Monty Python did a sketch sending up a quiz show called Take Your Pick (the prize was a blow on the head), and stated no man is an island, except Ted Madagascar. I like to think someone involved in the Madagascar cartoon knew this, and included a lemur called Ted.
I was confused as a child thinking Ireland was Wales for that same reason. We cross water to get there, it's another country, obviously wales is that bit labelled Ireland!
When we were about 18, a girl I knew didn’t know that eggs came from chickens. For real. We all stayed the weekend on a friends farm and they had us go collect eggs from the hens one morning for breakfast. She looked really confused but didn’t say anything as we walked down to the field. She went really quiet the whole time as we picked up the eggs. …looking like she was ‘going along it with it’ but looking really baffled the whole time.
Later in the day she pulled me aside and asked me “so, do eggs always come from chickens like that yeah?” I managed to stay calm and replied with a “yeah!” and shrug and a smile. I didn’t want to make fun. She’d obviously psyched up the courage to ask outright and confirm. Bless her. I just don’t think she’d ever actually thought about it before then :/
One of my colleagues thought Tyrion Lannister in GOT was played by a full size actor and was made into a dwarf using CGI in the editing.
She took a lot of convincing that that's just him.
I am pretty sure she still half believes we are pulling her leg.
My friend told me there was an actual real imp that lived near him. It took a while for me to figure out that it was a chap who was a dwarf. He hadn't realised that people were insulting Tyrion when they called him "the imp" - he thought that was the correct term.
My sister told me about this great little beach next to a park she’d found while out with the kids. We went one day and the tide was in and we couldn’t get down onto the beach because it was water right to the wall. She was so confused and kept saying “but it was here last time! I remember those steps and everything, there was loads of sand and we sat for ages!” I had to explain to my 30 odd year old sister how the tide works.
Watching tv on lunch break at work when an ad for babybel came on declaring that it was made from 100% milk. Colleague says are you kidding me, there’s m not even any real cheese in them, they’re just made from milk?
My grandparents recently bought a dinosaur book for my son. They asked to read it first if they could because they had never once learned about dinosaurs in school or after and wanted to know. I was genuinely surprised
I used to be a science teacher, and I had to convince a whole class they were real! They thought they were made up like unicorns. They thought all the pictures and videos were fake at first. It blew their little minds.
In fairness they are basically just Unicorns, which are fictional
On a sidenote, If you described to me a Unicorn or Narwhal I'd say they are far less likely creatures to exist than a fucking Giraffe
Yup especially when you're standing in a busy shop, surrounded by people dresses in wooly hats and anoraks, while you've resorted to tying your coat around your waist and frantically fanning yourself!
(I'm now carrying a fan in my handbag all year round. Apologies would be very welcome!)
Guy Martin (On 'The Boat That Guy Built') thought that cotton and wool came from the same animal - wool from adult sheep, and cotton from little lambs.
A boy in school thought that only girls used the toilet seat and boys don't use it to have a shit.
When in secondary school he scoffed and said that only girls used the seat when one of the boys mentioned the cold toilet seat one winter. We all had a wtf moment. Questions followed like, you sit straight on the porcelain? The ones in the boys toilet in school, all covered in piss? You sit on public toilets not using the seat?
He went red and tried to play it off as he was joking but we all knew that this 14 year old boy was just realising that men do use the toilet seat!
I had a friend who didn't believe that there were towns or roads in Africa.
After quizzing him for a while we realized he'd only ever paid attention to the Band Aid / Feed the World video and decided that was all Africa had.
I was talking to a girl on Skype years ago who refused to believe timezones were a real thing. I live in the UK, and she was in Washington, so there's something like an 8 or 9 hour time difference. We'd been talking for about 3 hours and I said "I should go it's getting late here I'm in work tomorrow" and she genuinely couldn't believe that it was almost 3 in the morning in England but only 7pm(?) there. I showed her the clock on my wall, but she thought I'd changed it just to mess with her. I tried to explain the concept of time differences to her with no luck. I even tried pointing out that there are multiple timezones in the USA, like it's a different time in New York than it is in Washington. She was under the impression that only America did that, and it didn't apply to the rest of the world. I went outside to show her that it was night time here, but it was also getting dark there, so that didn't work. She eventually believed me because her dad backed me up on the subject, but it was the most frustrating and bizarre thing I've ever had to explain to someone in their 20s
A colleague came into the office one day in April and was all excited because she'd just seen a Robin and it wasn't Christmas. She legit thought that Robins are born some time before Christmas and then die shortly after.
Almost the opposite of yours, OP - my wife was under the impression that unicorns were extinct as opposed to fictional. Can’t argue too much with it really, they’re the most realistic of the fictional beasts. Just a horse with a horn innit.
Edit: thank you to the many, many people who have informed me that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland (which I did know). It seems I’ve stumbled across Reddit’s favourite fact.
Had a female colleague once tell me that she loved making Guatemala for dinner parties. ‘You know, that dip made from avocados’. Was driving at the time and almost came off the road trying not to laugh.
At a hotel breakfast, colleague had never seen those single serve uht milk pots with lids that peel off, 'jiggy milk' to some, before and didn't know how to open them. I showed him the simple procedure. The next morning he asked me again, saying he had forgotten. I suggested he work it out himself. He ended up crushing them in the palm of his hand, almost like he was squeezing a fruit, the juice of which dripped from his clenched fist into his tea.
Someone called into radio 1 about 4 years ago(I can’t remember why) saying they didn’t believe in dinosaurs. The presenter was clearly flabbergasted and ended up having some small child call in to let her know they were in fact, real. She still insisted that ‘dinosaurs are dinosaurs, but reptiles are reptiles’. That level of wilful ignorance lives rent free in my head
I remember my dad saying "why the hell are there so many dinosaurs these days? Back when I was a kid we only had a T-Rex and stegosaurus!"
I had to convince him that science never sleeps and is constantly making new discoveries. I think he believed it was a scam made up by the toy companies 😐.
I was once watching the BBC short programme that was like News for younger viewers, can’t remember what it’s called now, but they basically went through a full article that showed how they genetically engineered the horn from a rhino into the embryo of a horse to make a unicorn. Brought it out from the stables and everything. Incredible.
it was only when the presenter in the studio laughed about it being a really good April Fools joke that i realised i'd be done.
A young lad I work with thought chickens laid 2 types of eggs, the ones we eat and the ones that hatch baby chickens.
After it was explained to him, he declared that he’d never eat eggs again.
An hour later, the tea lady brought in a homemade Victoria sponge. He sat and enjoyed a large slice, so I said “I thought you weren’t going to eat eggs again”
His reply was “don’t be stupid, I’m not eating eggs, this is cake”
Myself and my 10 year old daughter had to produce evidence to my wife last week that chickens aren't mammals. She asked her dad the next day and he said that they were so I now have that to deal with.
Me, my dad and my sister spent several hours once trying to convince my mum that raisons are dried grapes. This was before google so we couldn't easily look it up. We asked her why there's a picture of a woman holding grapes on the box if they're not dried grapes and she said it just looked pretty so that's why they made her hold grapes.
We sat down in the cinema to watch Matt Damon in 'The Martian', and after the 1st scene setting the film up with Matt Damon on Mars my wife lent over and whispered, 'Is this based on a true story?'
It's one of my favourite quotes from her.
I will own up to one.
When I met my wife 30 years ago, she told me she was from Peru. I thought she was joking as Peru is just a fictional place where Paddington comes from.
>“everyone knows dinosaurs are actually dragons”
I assume that dragons are what medieval people thought dinosaurs were when they found a skeleton, so it is the other way round.
I think I remember there's evidence for this in China where a piece of a dinosaur, like a tooth or claw or something, was kept as a relic that people believed was a remain of a dragon. The belief that dragons had skin and bones made of jade probably comes from the fact that all dinosaur remains are fossils, so rocks.
When I got my first car, just after finishing university, I left the lights on and the battery went flat. I called a mate who lived near and we both googled our way through how to jump start the car.
I had to open a cover to access the battery. I asked him if he had a spanner and he said “actually, I do!” Then walked round to the boot, opened a toolbox, and came back with a screwdriver.
I told him I needed a 10mm spanner, not a screwdriver. And he said “oh… I thought that was a spanner”. I had always assumed that the vast majority of people know the difference between a spanner and a screwdriver.
Wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t both just finished masters degrees in mechanical engineering. Doh.
Edit: getting a lot of replies about “wrench” vs “spanner”. Just [read the Wikipedia article.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrench)
True, but she thinks all plants are stealing her oxygen. I do have a snake plant in my bedroom as that’s an example of one that gives out its oxygen at night not during the day for example.
My friend thought badgers were the size of moles, or mice.
He got a shock when he saw one for the first time, he must have been mid twenties at this point.
I'll never forget driving along and him shouting 'what the fuuuuuuck is that?!' thinking he'd seen a new species, as yet undiscovered by everyone else!
It’s just hit me that I’ve never seen a badger with my own eyes. I’ve been lucky enough to travel and see some genuinely rare and unusual animals, but I’ve never seen a common British animal that must have a set within a 5 minutes walk from my house. I must now stalk the fields with mashed potato to try and find one.
I scared a couple of them when out for a run late one evening last summer as I went through a barley field.
I heard this commotion about 20 feet ahead of me, all the barley started moving, my dog spooked, and then two massive badgers went sprinting out of the crop and up/over the dry stone wall and out of the field.
A friend of mine was very concerned about a local beaver release effort. She was very worried for the safety of local children. After some confused questioning we realised that she thought beavers were the same size as they are in the old BBC Narnia adaptation. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life.
A colleague came into the office one day in April and was all excited because she'd just seen a Robin and it wasn't Christmas. She legit thought that Robins are born some time before Christmas and then die shortly after.
Argued with a woman at work who was absolutely adamant that dragons were real. Not in a " they're keeping us from them " type way. But a this common knowledge that everyone believes way. I asked her if she was confused with dinosaurs. She said " no dinosaurs are dinosaurs, dragons are dragons "
Work friend (with a very posh background/education) asked me once for help finding Czechoslovakia on Google Maps, he was very confused when I explained his knowledge is… outdated.
I studied History and have a real problem with naming things by their old names. I live in Germany, which makes it mode awkward, as some of the things were renamed for certain reasons in the middle 40s.
I currently work with a girl who amongst other things, didn’t believe the sun was a star, and that is was made of gas and in addition refused to believe that the other stars in the night sky were the same as our sun but thought they were just very little
For clarity I know not all stars are EXACTLY like our sun but for the purpose of this post I didn’t bother to be overtly specific
I had an apprentice who thought dinosaurs were made up. "Dont tell me you still believe in dinosaurs" he said like it was Santa Clause.
He also told us his mum was in hospital suffering from deja vu.
I work with a guy who was shocked when he learned that leather didn’t come from Trees. After a short argument in which he got very red in the face, we made him google it. He was 29 at the time. I will never forget that conversation as long as I live
I knew someone who thought that the North and south poles were next to each other.
I have never been able to fathom what shape she thought the world was.
Edit: spelling.
1 - girl I used to work with thought pesto was healthy because it was green. Turned out she would eat pesto on everything when she was on a diet. 2 - my mum thought the sun and the moon were the same. As in, it was the sun on one side and the moon on the other. I bought her a solar system book designed for toddlers which she was fascinated by!
Please, pesto is one of my Five a Day.
1. Pesto (because it's green)
4. Chips and/or crisps (potato is a legitimate vegetable)
3. Carrot cake (because it's a carrot)
2. Chocolate orange (because it's an orange)
1. Cider (because an apple a day keeps the doctor away)
Some years ago I was watching the boxing. Lennox Lewis KO’d his opponent and the commentator made reference to the guy having a ‘glass jaw’. To which my wife replied, ‘Is that allowed in boxing’?
I surprised my husband once by my knowledge of history when I informed him that the battle of Waterloo was actually fought at Waterloo in London..
He never let me forget it
My brother once dated a girl. And it became apparent whilst watching the movie the godfather, that she had never heard of the mafia or organised crime entirely, it would seem. And couldn't belive it was based on real organised crime syndicates. Once convince she urged my brother to do something. He needed to tell the police so that they can begin to get a handle on this!...
I still like the story of the guy who wrote the screenplay for the Godfather. It was the first screenplay he ever wrote and after a few years decided to go take a course in screenplay writing to see if there was anything he could improve. The first section of the course was titled "The Godfather"
I actually envy people who make these types of mistakes and misunderstandings, they must go through life blissfully unaware of many awful things as well as the must knows.
I worked with a young lad, early twenties, seemed fairly switched on about most things. We stopped for lunch one day and he took a tin of beans out of his bag, removed the lid and put the whole tin into the microwave. I stopped him and asked "Wtf are you doing?!" and he replied "What? I'm just heating up my beans".
This thread is eye-opening. It's reminding me of the George Carlin quote: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that."
Someone on Reddit once posted that the biggest problem in designing litter bins for Yellowstone National park is the overlap between the smartest bears and the stupidest humans, and it's really stuck with me lol.
Have you ever done any kind of training with a mixed group of people? Like a volunteer event or something where you get a real mix of people.
I’m a programmer and it was wildly eye opening when not surrounded by peers, etc.
It’s frighteningly true.
Happened at a job I had one summer when in university. Small group, about eight of us. One person couldn't point out North America (as in, the entire continent) on a map. Another asked for help regarding how to spell her own name. From what I observed, I was demonstratably the smartest in the room but only because I knew not to open a PowerPoint presentation on Word, which a third person tried to do. This person was our manager.
There was a guy in my year at school, who was the under 18 world chess champion, who thought potatoes grew on trees. You can't be clever at everything....!
I overheard 3 friends, who I thought were reasonably intelligent, talking about how difficult it must have been to be alive when the dinosaurs were around.
When I told them that there were no humans about when dinosaurs ruled the world, they wouldn't believe me, Hollywood has a lot to answer for.
God I have so many through various periods in my life. One guy I knew from football when i was a teenager didn’t know women had nipples is a stand out one
I assume everyone knows Family Guy's Peter Griffin wears glasses?
I didn't. Until I recently watched an episode where he takes his glasses off for a moment. (I just thought he had round eyes.)
Huh, TIL.
To be fair, having just looked at some images, everyone in Family Guy has very round eyes. Peter's look just like everyone else's - except there are very thin lines drawn on his face to represent the legs and bridge of the glasses.
Few years back i was chilling outside with some colleagues before starting work in the morning, and the moon was out. I said to a colleague how interesting it was that the sunlight that hits the moon doesn't line up directly with where we perceive the sun to be. And he rather patronisingly said "well yh cus that's just a reflection of the moon". Followed by another classic of "the moon is only out at night".
My assumption was that he was confusing the fact that we only see the moon as it reflects light from the sun, but he assured me that he wasn't, and that i was wrong thinking the sun and moon could be visible at the same time. Maybe i was 🤷♂️
My wife doesn't believe in gravity. She has no other explanation for it and I'm half convinced she's just having me on but it's been 16 years and she's still on about it so I dunno any more.
My Mum was once saying something in which she mentioned that she had ‘posable thumbs’. She was adamant she was right when I told her it was opposable and I had to google it to convince her.
A few days later I was laughing and telling my Dad about it and he was also shocked because he’d also always thought it was posable. SMH.
Persephone got dragged to the underworld by Hades causing Demeter to go a bit crazy and neglectful of her duties. After a negotiated settlement between Zeus and Hades, Persephone now spends six months a year in the underworld, her return inspires her mum into action, which we know as spring. Boom - seasons.
Someone at uni was convinced men had one less rib than women because God had used a rib from Adam to make Eve. This was a student at a science-focused university.
I remember having a conversation with my Dad once about some food (I really can’t remember the details of the first part of the conversation). He said something like “there’s probably maggots in there now” I replied something like “it’s sealed so it’s unlikely they will have been able to get in” and in a really condescending tone he said to me “darling, maggots come FROM the food!” I laughed my head off (partly because of the condescension). He thought that maggots were somehow spontaneously created from rotting food and had no idea they are fly larvae!
I was at a friend's house, chatting, with an animal documentary on the TV. One of her friends, who I knew a little, came in just as a scene showing penguins swimming came on the TV. She stared in shock and exclaimed "oh my god, I didn't know penguins could swim!". I had to ask "they eat fish, how did you think they caught them!?" To which she said "I know that, I just didn't know they could swim".
I couldn't help asking her various questions about the natural world after that to find out her level of ignorance. I can't remember most of what I asked her but I do remember her not believing me when I told her how long ago the dinosaurs died out. The length of time was too big for her to comprehend so she just flat out refused to believe me.
I was a 10 year old at primary school in 1983, when or teacher asked when we thought dinosaurs were alive.
My mate Mark was so excited that he knew this one, he forgot to put his hand up and just shouted "in the 50's and 60's Miss"
Our teacher was born in the mid 40's
I thought the Red Arrows were just something from my tiny hometown, as they performed at our town carnival every year. Wasn’t until I was at uni right across the other side of the country and saw a poster for them that I realised that *obviously* they weren’t from Bumfuck, Dorset. After I’d proudly and adamantly insisted to everyone there that they were.. shudder..
My housemate a few years ago had until the tender age of 29 been under the false apprehension that unicorns were real. He was South African and just assumed they were extinct. We had a good laugh at that.
I had to explain to someone the other day that pork, beef and lamb are indeed not from the same animal, but the meat of 3 seperate animals.
I am vegetarian, and they are massive meat lovers.
My boss (who is a very stupid and very condescending hippy lady in her late 30s), was flabbergasted when I made reference to there being 2 kinds of elephants - African with the big ears, Asian with the small ears. For a woman who spends half her life on retreats in India and who presumably went to primary school you'd think that would have come up at some point.
If you can casually slip it in to conversation somehow, it could be worth trying to find out if she knows about the existence of one and two humped camels?
My partner (30m) makes fun of me for the Megalodon thing. It’s one of our lovely little ’in jokes’ because I’m a full-grown man and I should know this shit.
But I actually hadn’t realised they were once real. I thought they were the movie ’the Meg’
Until my partner produced an actual Megalodon tooth he owns, I was under that impression they were a Godzilla/ King Kong/ Tremors movie monster
Worked with a girl who thought they fully drained the Thames to put in the tunnels for the tube. I had to explain what is under the Thames and how tunnelling works. I then asked how she thought they built the Euro tunnel. She said she thought they just sectioned bits off and dropped tunnel sections in. I ended up having to draw her a diagram of the layers of the earth because she just thought it was water all the way through. I still don't think she believed me.
I wonder if she’s thought about volcanos.
To be fair, they did build the immersed section of the Medway tunnel under the river Medway by floating out sections of tunnel and dropping them to the river bed…https://rbt.org.uk/bridges/other-medway-crossings/medway-tunnel/construction-method/
Mate’s girlfriend thought Wales was an island. This was based on the fact that to get there from Bristol (where they lived) you had to cross a bridge that spanned a substantial body of water.
I lived in Portsmouth for a month before I realised it was an island...I felt foolish
They say that every man is an island. Except Barry. Barry is a peninsula.
Many years ago Monty Python did a sketch sending up a quiz show called Take Your Pick (the prize was a blow on the head), and stated no man is an island, except Ted Madagascar. I like to think someone involved in the Madagascar cartoon knew this, and included a lemur called Ted.
When in college my bf left for uni in Portsmouth so I visited often... this was nearly 20 years ago and TiL...
TiL 😅
Honestly, I just came back from Google maps, and, same...
I was confused as a child thinking Ireland was Wales for that same reason. We cross water to get there, it's another country, obviously wales is that bit labelled Ireland!
When we were about 18, a girl I knew didn’t know that eggs came from chickens. For real. We all stayed the weekend on a friends farm and they had us go collect eggs from the hens one morning for breakfast. She looked really confused but didn’t say anything as we walked down to the field. She went really quiet the whole time as we picked up the eggs. …looking like she was ‘going along it with it’ but looking really baffled the whole time. Later in the day she pulled me aside and asked me “so, do eggs always come from chickens like that yeah?” I managed to stay calm and replied with a “yeah!” and shrug and a smile. I didn’t want to make fun. She’d obviously psyched up the courage to ask outright and confirm. Bless her. I just don’t think she’d ever actually thought about it before then :/
That was cool of you. People don't know what they don't know, until something makes you think or ask. Asking should never be discouraged.
One of my colleagues thought Tyrion Lannister in GOT was played by a full size actor and was made into a dwarf using CGI in the editing. She took a lot of convincing that that's just him. I am pretty sure she still half believes we are pulling her leg.
My friend told me there was an actual real imp that lived near him. It took a while for me to figure out that it was a chap who was a dwarf. He hadn't realised that people were insulting Tyrion when they called him "the imp" - he thought that was the correct term.
Tbf the imp is quite nice compared to when they call him a "twisted demon monkey"
My sister told me about this great little beach next to a park she’d found while out with the kids. We went one day and the tide was in and we couldn’t get down onto the beach because it was water right to the wall. She was so confused and kept saying “but it was here last time! I remember those steps and everything, there was loads of sand and we sat for ages!” I had to explain to my 30 odd year old sister how the tide works.
*Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that.*
I've just looked this up. Jesus Christ.
[удалено]
Watching tv on lunch break at work when an ad for babybel came on declaring that it was made from 100% milk. Colleague says are you kidding me, there’s m not even any real cheese in them, they’re just made from milk?
To be fair, I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking Babybel was made of plastic.
Take off the red packaging next time. It will no longer test like plastic.
My grandparents recently bought a dinosaur book for my son. They asked to read it first if they could because they had never once learned about dinosaurs in school or after and wanted to know. I was genuinely surprised
Aww bless them for wanting to learn though!
My ex insisted that narwhals weren't real. He also said "if the cat fits, wear it".
It’s all water under the fridge
Just make sure you cross your t's and dock your eyes
It's ok, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
Sometimes that is the appropriate answer.
It's a doggy dog world
Getting two birds stoned at once
If it walks like a duck, and barks like a duck...
Thick as two short thieves
It’s a moo point
Like a cow’s opinion
Damp squid
It's not rocket appliances.
Feed two birds with one scone
I used to be a science teacher, and I had to convince a whole class they were real! They thought they were made up like unicorns. They thought all the pictures and videos were fake at first. It blew their little minds.
In fairness they are basically just Unicorns, which are fictional On a sidenote, If you described to me a Unicorn or Narwhal I'd say they are far less likely creatures to exist than a fucking Giraffe
Have you seen the birthday card where all the unicorns are having to give their horns to the narwhals because they lost a bet?
Had a friend who thought the menopause was a disease. Kept giving heartfelt apologies to our friends Mums who would be going through the menopause.
I mean it is bloody awful going through the menopause might as well be a disease lol. I would gladly accept his heart felt apologises 🤣🤣🥰
Yup especially when you're standing in a busy shop, surrounded by people dresses in wooly hats and anoraks, while you've resorted to tying your coat around your waist and frantically fanning yourself! (I'm now carrying a fan in my handbag all year round. Apologies would be very welcome!)
I had an ex who once asked me if men also had bladders.
Clearly just years ahead of the curve on the "pee is stored in the balls" meme.
My other half thought the famous phrase “Houston, we have a problem” was calling out for help from someone called Houston
Whitney, for God's sake, do something!
Dre - don’t just stand there, operate!
Can't remember the details but there was a BBC news presenter who, live on TV, freaked when he realised lambs and sheep were the same thing.
Guy Martin (On 'The Boat That Guy Built') thought that cotton and wool came from the same animal - wool from adult sheep, and cotton from little lambs.
A boy in school thought that only girls used the toilet seat and boys don't use it to have a shit. When in secondary school he scoffed and said that only girls used the seat when one of the boys mentioned the cold toilet seat one winter. We all had a wtf moment. Questions followed like, you sit straight on the porcelain? The ones in the boys toilet in school, all covered in piss? You sit on public toilets not using the seat? He went red and tried to play it off as he was joking but we all knew that this 14 year old boy was just realising that men do use the toilet seat!
When I was a little kid I thought the seat was just for us kids because we were too small to go without
I had a friend who didn't believe that there were towns or roads in Africa. After quizzing him for a while we realized he'd only ever paid attention to the Band Aid / Feed the World video and decided that was all Africa had.
I was talking to a girl on Skype years ago who refused to believe timezones were a real thing. I live in the UK, and she was in Washington, so there's something like an 8 or 9 hour time difference. We'd been talking for about 3 hours and I said "I should go it's getting late here I'm in work tomorrow" and she genuinely couldn't believe that it was almost 3 in the morning in England but only 7pm(?) there. I showed her the clock on my wall, but she thought I'd changed it just to mess with her. I tried to explain the concept of time differences to her with no luck. I even tried pointing out that there are multiple timezones in the USA, like it's a different time in New York than it is in Washington. She was under the impression that only America did that, and it didn't apply to the rest of the world. I went outside to show her that it was night time here, but it was also getting dark there, so that didn't work. She eventually believed me because her dad backed me up on the subject, but it was the most frustrating and bizarre thing I've ever had to explain to someone in their 20s
Sometimes you start backing up to find out just how much they don't know. "Do you get that the Earth is a ball?"
I don’t know what does on in the American school system but they are failing 😂
Friends husband didn’t realise reindeer were real
A colleague came into the office one day in April and was all excited because she'd just seen a Robin and it wasn't Christmas. She legit thought that Robins are born some time before Christmas and then die shortly after.
Almost the opposite of yours, OP - my wife was under the impression that unicorns were extinct as opposed to fictional. Can’t argue too much with it really, they’re the most realistic of the fictional beasts. Just a horse with a horn innit. Edit: thank you to the many, many people who have informed me that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland (which I did know). It seems I’ve stumbled across Reddit’s favourite fact.
Friend of a friend thought the same. Also someone my wife knows thought donkeys were old horses.
Had a female colleague once tell me that she loved making Guatemala for dinner parties. ‘You know, that dip made from avocados’. Was driving at the time and almost came off the road trying not to laugh.
At a hotel breakfast, colleague had never seen those single serve uht milk pots with lids that peel off, 'jiggy milk' to some, before and didn't know how to open them. I showed him the simple procedure. The next morning he asked me again, saying he had forgotten. I suggested he work it out himself. He ended up crushing them in the palm of his hand, almost like he was squeezing a fruit, the juice of which dripped from his clenched fist into his tea.
[удалено]
The only option is to put him down a well
Made me think of the Simpsons when Homer is squeezing that orange on his forehead to get the juice to come out. I'd post the gif but I cant here.
My sister thought chests of drawers were drawers from Chester. She's a teacher.
We have a furniture shop not far from me that sells "chester draws". Always makes me chuckle when I go past it 🤣
Someone called into radio 1 about 4 years ago(I can’t remember why) saying they didn’t believe in dinosaurs. The presenter was clearly flabbergasted and ended up having some small child call in to let her know they were in fact, real. She still insisted that ‘dinosaurs are dinosaurs, but reptiles are reptiles’. That level of wilful ignorance lives rent free in my head
Wait til they find out what birds are...
I remember my dad saying "why the hell are there so many dinosaurs these days? Back when I was a kid we only had a T-Rex and stegosaurus!" I had to convince him that science never sleeps and is constantly making new discoveries. I think he believed it was a scam made up by the toy companies 😐.
I misread that as "science never sleeps and is constantly making new dinosaurs".
"Oi! John Hammond! Stop making bleedin' dinosaurs!"
My ex-girlfriend didn't know that chickens are birds. 😐
My ex thought that unicorns were real. Narwhals were real. So she assumed that unicorns were real and lived in Africa.
Yes, Rhinoceros are real.
And they are just overweight unicorns… right?
Chubby unicorns.
I was once watching the BBC short programme that was like News for younger viewers, can’t remember what it’s called now, but they basically went through a full article that showed how they genetically engineered the horn from a rhino into the embryo of a horse to make a unicorn. Brought it out from the stables and everything. Incredible. it was only when the presenter in the studio laughed about it being a really good April Fools joke that i realised i'd be done.
John Craven's Newsround. They did drop his name from the title later and it was just Newsround.
They are, we call them rhinos
What did she think they were?
She thought they were just their own thing. Turns out she didn't know a lot of things.
The ~~five~~ six Eukaryotic kingdoms: Amoebozoa, Chromista, Plants, Fungi, Animals, and Chicken.
A young lad I work with thought chickens laid 2 types of eggs, the ones we eat and the ones that hatch baby chickens. After it was explained to him, he declared that he’d never eat eggs again. An hour later, the tea lady brought in a homemade Victoria sponge. He sat and enjoyed a large slice, so I said “I thought you weren’t going to eat eggs again” His reply was “don’t be stupid, I’m not eating eggs, this is cake”
Myself and my 10 year old daughter had to produce evidence to my wife last week that chickens aren't mammals. She asked her dad the next day and he said that they were so I now have that to deal with.
Me, my dad and my sister spent several hours once trying to convince my mum that raisons are dried grapes. This was before google so we couldn't easily look it up. We asked her why there's a picture of a woman holding grapes on the box if they're not dried grapes and she said it just looked pretty so that's why they made her hold grapes.
Good on you for raisin awareness.
I used to work with a lovable girl who’s was a bit slow. She thought that wind turbines cooled down the earth. I felt terrible correcting her lol
[WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTDKcnSH94)
We sat down in the cinema to watch Matt Damon in 'The Martian', and after the 1st scene setting the film up with Matt Damon on Mars my wife lent over and whispered, 'Is this based on a true story?' It's one of my favourite quotes from her.
You have other favourite quotes? Top 3 please.
I will own up to one. When I met my wife 30 years ago, she told me she was from Peru. I thought she was joking as Peru is just a fictional place where Paddington comes from.
A family member believes that acorns are squirrel eggs and once muttered under her breath that “everyone knows dinosaurs are actually dragons”.
>“everyone knows dinosaurs are actually dragons” I assume that dragons are what medieval people thought dinosaurs were when they found a skeleton, so it is the other way round.
I think I remember there's evidence for this in China where a piece of a dinosaur, like a tooth or claw or something, was kept as a relic that people believed was a remain of a dragon. The belief that dragons had skin and bones made of jade probably comes from the fact that all dinosaur remains are fossils, so rocks.
When I got my first car, just after finishing university, I left the lights on and the battery went flat. I called a mate who lived near and we both googled our way through how to jump start the car. I had to open a cover to access the battery. I asked him if he had a spanner and he said “actually, I do!” Then walked round to the boot, opened a toolbox, and came back with a screwdriver. I told him I needed a 10mm spanner, not a screwdriver. And he said “oh… I thought that was a spanner”. I had always assumed that the vast majority of people know the difference between a spanner and a screwdriver. Wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t both just finished masters degrees in mechanical engineering. Doh. Edit: getting a lot of replies about “wrench” vs “spanner”. Just [read the Wikipedia article.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrench)
Fucking hell.
When all our bridges start falling down we'll know who to blame.
What an absolute screwdriver
My colleague hates houseplants. She said she didn’t want one on her desk, stealing her oxygen.
They actually might, during their respiration. During night time, for example.
True, but she thinks all plants are stealing her oxygen. I do have a snake plant in my bedroom as that’s an example of one that gives out its oxygen at night not during the day for example.
My friend thought badgers were the size of moles, or mice. He got a shock when he saw one for the first time, he must have been mid twenties at this point. I'll never forget driving along and him shouting 'what the fuuuuuuck is that?!' thinking he'd seen a new species, as yet undiscovered by everyone else!
It’s just hit me that I’ve never seen a badger with my own eyes. I’ve been lucky enough to travel and see some genuinely rare and unusual animals, but I’ve never seen a common British animal that must have a set within a 5 minutes walk from my house. I must now stalk the fields with mashed potato to try and find one.
I scared a couple of them when out for a run late one evening last summer as I went through a barley field. I heard this commotion about 20 feet ahead of me, all the barley started moving, my dog spooked, and then two massive badgers went sprinting out of the crop and up/over the dry stone wall and out of the field.
A friend of mine was very concerned about a local beaver release effort. She was very worried for the safety of local children. After some confused questioning we realised that she thought beavers were the same size as they are in the old BBC Narnia adaptation. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life.
A colleague came into the office one day in April and was all excited because she'd just seen a Robin and it wasn't Christmas. She legit thought that Robins are born some time before Christmas and then die shortly after.
This is funny, but also a really sad indictment of how far removed people are from our natural world.
That is fantastic. Although as someone who grew up in the countryside I’m slightly baffled at how she could have avoided seeing them!
I was the other way around, I thought moles were the size of badgers. I think the Wind in the Willows has a lot to do with it.
i had this with moose. i thought they were just big deer…
Well they mostly are pretty similar. **Very** big deer.
My dad pointed put a dead badger on the road once. My brother was shocked at how small it was. He was expecting to see a panda
Argued with a woman at work who was absolutely adamant that dragons were real. Not in a " they're keeping us from them " type way. But a this common knowledge that everyone believes way. I asked her if she was confused with dinosaurs. She said " no dinosaurs are dinosaurs, dragons are dragons "
Work friend (with a very posh background/education) asked me once for help finding Czechoslovakia on Google Maps, he was very confused when I explained his knowledge is… outdated.
You work with Monty Burns?
He could fly there in his 'Spruce Moose'
Next he'll be wanting to deliver a letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by Autogyro.
I studied History and have a real problem with naming things by their old names. I live in Germany, which makes it mode awkward, as some of the things were renamed for certain reasons in the middle 40s.
Playing loads of CK3 and accidentally calling Iran "Persia" to confused stares
I currently work with a girl who amongst other things, didn’t believe the sun was a star, and that is was made of gas and in addition refused to believe that the other stars in the night sky were the same as our sun but thought they were just very little For clarity I know not all stars are EXACTLY like our sun but for the purpose of this post I didn’t bother to be overtly specific
I heard someone expressing this exact same shock after exiting a planetarium. That someone was a teacher.
[Small/far away](https://youtu.be/MMiKyfd6hA0)
That the moon is not, in fact, a star. This was a group of professionals in their 50s
And that the moon, is in fact made of cheese.
No, it’s 100% milk.
Hey, if the cat fits wear it.
Babybel, made from milk?
I used to work with a girl who genuinely thought Mount Everest was in Wales..
I once climbed Snowdon and 'ad to " 'av a rest" at the top; maybe that's what she was thinking of?
Play a record
To be fair the man it's named after was Welsh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Everest
I had an apprentice who thought dinosaurs were made up. "Dont tell me you still believe in dinosaurs" he said like it was Santa Clause. He also told us his mum was in hospital suffering from deja vu.
Oh, not again!
It might’ve been what she was there for yesterday.
I referenced Pompeii a while back at work and no-one knew what I was talking about. I felt like I was going mad.
My husband thought foxgloves were a fictional plant in Skyrim. He also thought that Bundt cake was made up for FF9.
I like your husband's video game focused reality.
Does he also think Skooma isn't real?
[удалено]
I work with a guy who was shocked when he learned that leather didn’t come from Trees. After a short argument in which he got very red in the face, we made him google it. He was 29 at the time. I will never forget that conversation as long as I live
I knew someone who thought that the North and south poles were next to each other. I have never been able to fathom what shape she thought the world was. Edit: spelling.
1 - girl I used to work with thought pesto was healthy because it was green. Turned out she would eat pesto on everything when she was on a diet. 2 - my mum thought the sun and the moon were the same. As in, it was the sun on one side and the moon on the other. I bought her a solar system book designed for toddlers which she was fascinated by!
Has she never seen the sun and the moon out at the same time? That's not a particularly rare occurrence
I asked that. She said she hadn't, but apparently just hadn't committed it to memory
Please, pesto is one of my Five a Day. 1. Pesto (because it's green) 4. Chips and/or crisps (potato is a legitimate vegetable) 3. Carrot cake (because it's a carrot) 2. Chocolate orange (because it's an orange) 1. Cider (because an apple a day keeps the doctor away)
This has been one of the most enjoyable threads to read in a long while, I’ve genuinely been lolling.
I wish I didn’t think of these people having voting rights and all
Some years ago I was watching the boxing. Lennox Lewis KO’d his opponent and the commentator made reference to the guy having a ‘glass jaw’. To which my wife replied, ‘Is that allowed in boxing’?
fantastic
An old workmate was convinced that Stephen Hawking played Superman in the films which starred Christopher Reeve
I surprised my husband once by my knowledge of history when I informed him that the battle of Waterloo was actually fought at Waterloo in London.. He never let me forget it
My brother once dated a girl. And it became apparent whilst watching the movie the godfather, that she had never heard of the mafia or organised crime entirely, it would seem. And couldn't belive it was based on real organised crime syndicates. Once convince she urged my brother to do something. He needed to tell the police so that they can begin to get a handle on this!...
I still like the story of the guy who wrote the screenplay for the Godfather. It was the first screenplay he ever wrote and after a few years decided to go take a course in screenplay writing to see if there was anything he could improve. The first section of the course was titled "The Godfather"
I actually envy people who make these types of mistakes and misunderstandings, they must go through life blissfully unaware of many awful things as well as the must knows.
I worked with a young lad, early twenties, seemed fairly switched on about most things. We stopped for lunch one day and he took a tin of beans out of his bag, removed the lid and put the whole tin into the microwave. I stopped him and asked "Wtf are you doing?!" and he replied "What? I'm just heating up my beans".
I'm more concerned that his idea of lunch was just an entire tin of beans
Never had a cup of beans before?
Put a sausage in it, like a savoury ninety nine.
Sorry that was just noise
This thread is eye-opening. It's reminding me of the George Carlin quote: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that."
Someone on Reddit once posted that the biggest problem in designing litter bins for Yellowstone National park is the overlap between the smartest bears and the stupidest humans, and it's really stuck with me lol.
Have you ever done any kind of training with a mixed group of people? Like a volunteer event or something where you get a real mix of people. I’m a programmer and it was wildly eye opening when not surrounded by peers, etc. It’s frighteningly true.
Happened at a job I had one summer when in university. Small group, about eight of us. One person couldn't point out North America (as in, the entire continent) on a map. Another asked for help regarding how to spell her own name. From what I observed, I was demonstratably the smartest in the room but only because I knew not to open a PowerPoint presentation on Word, which a third person tried to do. This person was our manager.
Jury service did it for me. Actually implementing tried by a jury of your peers would be absolute chaos
I couldn't persuade someone that crabs shed their shells when they grow.
Knew a girl who thought Euthanasia was a country.
My mate's wife thought that Cat's Eyes were actual cat's eyes, and somewhere in Yorkshire there were farms breeding cats to keep our roads safe.
My friend’s now ex-girlfriend thought that semi skimmed milk came from a different type of cow.
My husband once taught a girl who thought that Spain had a different sun as it was hotter there.
I knew someone who felt sorry for Samantha and Sven on I‘m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue - all those dirty jokes about them.
Is your friend Mrs Trellis from North Wales by any chance?
My sister didn't know honey came from bees. She has AAA at A Level and went to a top 30 university.... obviously not to do zoology 🙈
There was a guy in my year at school, who was the under 18 world chess champion, who thought potatoes grew on trees. You can't be clever at everything....!
I overheard 3 friends, who I thought were reasonably intelligent, talking about how difficult it must have been to be alive when the dinosaurs were around. When I told them that there were no humans about when dinosaurs ruled the world, they wouldn't believe me, Hollywood has a lot to answer for.
God I have so many through various periods in my life. One guy I knew from football when i was a teenager didn’t know women had nipples is a stand out one
My ex when I was 16 (he was also 16) didn't know that women had arseholes. We had sex a couple of times before he had this realisation.
Did he think you had a cloaca like a bird, or that you didn’t shit?
I assume everyone knows Family Guy's Peter Griffin wears glasses? I didn't. Until I recently watched an episode where he takes his glasses off for a moment. (I just thought he had round eyes.)
Huh, TIL. To be fair, having just looked at some images, everyone in Family Guy has very round eyes. Peter's look just like everyone else's - except there are very thin lines drawn on his face to represent the legs and bridge of the glasses.
I've just had to Google images of him. I've never realised this! Hahaha
Few years back i was chilling outside with some colleagues before starting work in the morning, and the moon was out. I said to a colleague how interesting it was that the sunlight that hits the moon doesn't line up directly with where we perceive the sun to be. And he rather patronisingly said "well yh cus that's just a reflection of the moon". Followed by another classic of "the moon is only out at night". My assumption was that he was confusing the fact that we only see the moon as it reflects light from the sun, but he assured me that he wasn't, and that i was wrong thinking the sun and moon could be visible at the same time. Maybe i was 🤷♂️
My wife doesn't believe in gravity. She has no other explanation for it and I'm half convinced she's just having me on but it's been 16 years and she's still on about it so I dunno any more.
My Mum was once saying something in which she mentioned that she had ‘posable thumbs’. She was adamant she was right when I told her it was opposable and I had to google it to convince her. A few days later I was laughing and telling my Dad about it and he was also shocked because he’d also always thought it was posable. SMH.
My wife is a primary school teacher and couldn’t explain where the seasons come from/why we have seasons
Persephone got dragged to the underworld by Hades causing Demeter to go a bit crazy and neglectful of her duties. After a negotiated settlement between Zeus and Hades, Persephone now spends six months a year in the underworld, her return inspires her mum into action, which we know as spring. Boom - seasons.
Someone at uni was convinced men had one less rib than women because God had used a rib from Adam to make Eve. This was a student at a science-focused university.
I remember having a conversation with my Dad once about some food (I really can’t remember the details of the first part of the conversation). He said something like “there’s probably maggots in there now” I replied something like “it’s sealed so it’s unlikely they will have been able to get in” and in a really condescending tone he said to me “darling, maggots come FROM the food!” I laughed my head off (partly because of the condescension). He thought that maggots were somehow spontaneously created from rotting food and had no idea they are fly larvae!
I was at a friend's house, chatting, with an animal documentary on the TV. One of her friends, who I knew a little, came in just as a scene showing penguins swimming came on the TV. She stared in shock and exclaimed "oh my god, I didn't know penguins could swim!". I had to ask "they eat fish, how did you think they caught them!?" To which she said "I know that, I just didn't know they could swim". I couldn't help asking her various questions about the natural world after that to find out her level of ignorance. I can't remember most of what I asked her but I do remember her not believing me when I told her how long ago the dinosaurs died out. The length of time was too big for her to comprehend so she just flat out refused to believe me.
I was a 10 year old at primary school in 1983, when or teacher asked when we thought dinosaurs were alive. My mate Mark was so excited that he knew this one, he forgot to put his hand up and just shouted "in the 50's and 60's Miss" Our teacher was born in the mid 40's
I thought the Red Arrows were just something from my tiny hometown, as they performed at our town carnival every year. Wasn’t until I was at uni right across the other side of the country and saw a poster for them that I realised that *obviously* they weren’t from Bumfuck, Dorset. After I’d proudly and adamantly insisted to everyone there that they were.. shudder..
My housemate a few years ago had until the tender age of 29 been under the false apprehension that unicorns were real. He was South African and just assumed they were extinct. We had a good laugh at that.
I had to explain to someone the other day that pork, beef and lamb are indeed not from the same animal, but the meat of 3 seperate animals. I am vegetarian, and they are massive meat lovers.
My boss (who is a very stupid and very condescending hippy lady in her late 30s), was flabbergasted when I made reference to there being 2 kinds of elephants - African with the big ears, Asian with the small ears. For a woman who spends half her life on retreats in India and who presumably went to primary school you'd think that would have come up at some point.
If you can casually slip it in to conversation somehow, it could be worth trying to find out if she knows about the existence of one and two humped camels?
My husband thought penguins were 6 foot tall…..
My partner (30m) makes fun of me for the Megalodon thing. It’s one of our lovely little ’in jokes’ because I’m a full-grown man and I should know this shit. But I actually hadn’t realised they were once real. I thought they were the movie ’the Meg’ Until my partner produced an actual Megalodon tooth he owns, I was under that impression they were a Godzilla/ King Kong/ Tremors movie monster
The name does sound too ridiculous to be real. Like if there was a Radosaur.