O my Canada, O my Newfoundland!

[steepholm]

Isn't it disconcerting when you find, at an advanced age, that you've been ignorant of a really basic fact in a subject about which you're supposedly reasonably well informed? I like geography and history, and if North America isn't exactly my area of special knowledge I'd still have expected to have heard that Newfoundland was, within living memory, an independent country. But until I happened to read it today, I had no idea.

Was I alone?

[Poll #1855055]

Have you had any similar ignorance depth-charges go off recently?

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I probably knew this at some point, because I read and enjoyed John Gimlette's Theatre of Fish, and he must surely have mentioned it. It doesn't seem to have registered.

Until I took an MA in medieval French, I didn't know that the crusaders had succeeded in winning a foothold in their Holy Land. I'd assumed such a crazy ptoject was doomed to failure, that they went off, fought for a bit and came home. Clearly all my information on the subject came from the story of Robin Hood...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

... where we also read that Saladin introduced salad to western Europe.

That's the trouble with history: some of the obviously ridiculous things turn out to be true.