Depth charges of ignorance

[steepholm]

Around this time of year in 1989, not long after the Berlin Wall came down, I was walking down a road in Cambridge one evening with a friend from New York, when we saw a funny seven-branched candlestick thingy in the window.

Me: That's a pretty Christmas decoration.
She: That's not a Christmas decoration! It's for Honecker.
Me: For who?
She: For Honecker.
Me: Huh? You mean Erich Honecker, the recently-deposed East German leader?? Someone's putting candles in the window for him? But why would--
She: (sounding more Lower East Sidey than normal): I said Hanukkah, you fool!
Me (humbly): Oh. I see. [Pause] What's that then?

Of course, by my 27th year I ought to have known about Hanukkah. I'd passed my PhD viva just a few weeks earlier, and how can someone with a PhD not know about a major religious festival? But I didn't. All these years, that little nugget of ignorance had been waiting - waiting to be exposed by wind, rain, and the right combination of chance circumstances and make me look foolish.

But I'm not alone. A few years earlier I'd spent an hour trying to convince an otherwise well-informed woman that the tides were affected by the movement of the moon. It was a fact she'd just never happened to come across, and I must admit, the more I assured her that it was true the more shrill and unconvincing it sounded even to me. I don't think I persuaded her.

We all have them, I expect, these depth-charges of ignorance, ready to explode in our faces just when we're in the presence of someone we particularly want to impress.

Don't we? Are you seriously telling me that this kind of thing has never happened to you?

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

If I had a penny for every time I've said (trying to be heard over guffaws and hoots) "Gee, I didn't know that" I would be richer than Cheney.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

he more I assured her that it was true the more shrill and unconvincing it sounded even to me

I have this trouble when people try to explain electricity to me. The more I hear that these impulses travel down wires and turn into a picture on a screen, the less I believe it. I think there are little men inside the set painting the pictures. I also don't understand how aeroplanes don't fall out of the sky.

And I am furious that the spellcheck on my Firefox has just underlined aeroplane and demanded that I change it to airplane.... "Ignorant bastard!" I yell at the screen, behind which I hope the little man is suitably ashamed of himself.

I hadn't heard of Hannukah until a few years ago, but then I'm not interested in religion.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I didn't know what a WASP was until I was about 25. I had seen it a million times in American publications, and I sort of knew from context. But I couldn't parse the acronym.